The Center for Latter-day Saint Arts, in partnership with the Graduate Theological Union (GTU), will present a landmark gathering of scholars and artists in the Bay Area this fall. Held on GTU’s historic Berkeley campus, the event highlights the institution’s growing Latter-day Saint/Mormon Studies program and underscores the ways in which Latter-day Saint cultural criticism is gaining serious traction in academic and art circles nationwide.
“Critical Tensions: Latter-day Saint Art, Devotion, and Design” is a symposium featuring five contributing authors to Latter-day Saint Art: A Critical Reader. Published by Oxford University Press and produced by the Center, the book has been widely praised by critics and scholars. It received the 2024 Association of Mormon Letters Award for Criticism and has quickly become a touchstone for the serious study of Latter-day Saint visual and performing arts. This will be the largest in-person gathering of its contributors since the book’s release.
This will be a hybrid event.
In person: Register here
Online: Register here
Panelists will present their research and engage in public discussion on topics ranging from visual art and architecture to film, feminism, and folk art:
Mason Kamana Allred: Holy Bodies: Mormon Cinema Between Faith and Fear
Glen Nelson: The Failure of Modernism in Utah
Amanda K. Beardsley: Latter-day Saint Feminism and Art
Jennifer Reeder: Creating Something Extraordinary: Nineteenth-Century Latter-day Saint Women and Their Folk Art
Josh Probert: The Competing Impulses of Aspiration and Restraint in LDS Temple Aesthetics
The symposium will take place Friday, October 10, from 1–4 PM in the Dinner Board Room at the Graduate Theological Union (2400 Ridge Road Berkeley, CA 94709).
Immediately following, guests are invited to the California debut of Instrumentos de silencio (Instruments of Silence), an exhibition by Gonzalo Silva and Susana Silva – brother-and-sister Latter-day Saint artists from Argentina. The show, which first opened to a packed reception at Sargent’s Daughters gallery in New York City earlier this year, explores the connections between music, memory, and technology through multimedia works. The body of work was commissioned by the Center as part of the Ariel Bybee Endowment visual art prize, which was awarded to the Silvas in 2023.