Please join us Friday evening, November 2nd, at 6 pm for the opening of LET THERE BE LIGHT, an exhibition of new oil paintings by Blaire Ostler. The “Let There Be Light” collection is inspired by a poem written by the artist, “The Priestess,” that was featured in DOVE SONG: HEAVENLY MOTHER IN MORMON POETRY. In the beginning was the Word, and She was God. She breathed, “Let there be light”, and shattered absence with conception. All was born. She looked upon the earth, teeming with a network of life. And it was good. LET THERE BE LIGHT is a series of abstract representations of “shattering absence with conception” in Mormon cosmology using vibrant hues and strong contrasting tones. The works here represent the various forms of light: scientific, religious, intellectual, poetic, philosophical, and esthetic. The narrative of how light is found, understood, used, and projected is open to innumerable interpretations, but light is at the core or our existence. It is light that gives us life. It is light that we seek. In all things, let there be light. Friday's opening reception is free and open to the public, and will coincide with Downtown Provo's Art Stroll.

Join us Friday, October 5th, at 6 pm for the opening reception of WOMEN WITH DEEP ROOTS, a collaborative show of the past and present from artists Caitlin Connolly and Sarah Winegar. The show includes works ranging from 2013, when the artists paths hadn’t yet crossed, to the present, when the artists formed a creative friendship that led to the discovery of similarities woven into the themes and concepts of their work. Friday evening's reception is free and open to the general public. It coincides with Downtown Provo's Art Stroll.

Please join us Friday, June 1st, at 6 pm for the opening of GROWING DIVINE, a collaborative exhibition of contemporary textile art featuring the work of three artists: Kusum Pandey, a Hindu textile artist and leader of a village women's co-op Azhair Hussain Khan, a Muslim embroidery master Jethro Gillespie, a Mormon textile artist and painter The show is co-curated by McArthur Krishna, a Mormon author and activist whose vision and tireless work have made this incredible and unique collaboration possible. "HOWDY or NAMASTE or SALAAM ALAIKUM Living in rural India is never dull. There are the unfamiliar sounds that jar your being like the call of a peacock or a jackal howling at night. There are the smells— we will leave those to your imagination. There are the sights of weddings dancing in the street, sequined sari-clad women perched on the back of motorcycles, naked holy men walking the roads. There is the constant pang of missing home. There are the frequent challenges like no electricity and a snake in the shoe cupboard and rats in the toilet and a culture that is often incomprehensible. There is the constant demand for patience and personal growth. It is not comfortable. There is, also, the deep resounding belief that if my Heavenly Parents wanted me on this path, there must be abundance here. So I looked around to find my own personal abundance. And it IS here, in many many ways. (I am looking out the door now to the golden green of tropical afternoon sunshine and it makes me take deep breathes of gratitude. Abundance.) But one of my most favorite ways is the abundance of creation possibility. In India, I can create in ways that are simply not possible in America. I create furniture, spaces, businesses, books, clothes… and now, textile art. I was looking for a way to play to my Indian friends’ strengths. Mr. Hussain, a master embroidery artist, is exacting about form. He drives me crazy. I want things to roll and sway and rollick— and he demands precision and decision and tidiness. And our projects are possible and beautiful because of his demands. Kusum, a woman with magic hands, will tackle anything. She leads a village women’s co-op in creating handicraft projects that help provide a livelihood (and a sisterhood) for all of them. Kusum will take an idea and twist and turn and from her hands comes something new and better than I had imagined. We laugh together often… mostly at ourselves. I share almost nothing with these people. But we share this: we create. -McArthur Krishna

Please join us Friday, April 6th, at 6 pm for the opening of JOSEPH PAUL VORST LITHOGRAPHS. This exhibition is guest curated by Glen Nelson, co-executive director of the Mormon Arts Center and author of the monograph Joseph Paul Vorst, published by the Mormon Artists Group. After Vorst's immigration to America, he produce more than three dozen lithographic prints, all dating from the 1930s and 40s. The show will bring together his complete extant American lithographs for the first time in a gallery exhibition. Two years after his death, the LDS Church in St. Louis exhibited many of these works as part of a memorial show. This is the first since that time that these beautiful images have been gathered and exhibited. Glen has written a 92-page digital catalog for the show, including a new essay of scholarship, an interview between Nelson and gallery owner Brad Kramer, and full-page reproductions and observations on each of the 37 works. The April 6th opening reception is free and open to the public, and will coincide with downtown Provo's Art Stroll.

Join us Friday, November 3rd, at 6 pm for a reception opening HOLY HAND GRENADES, an exhibition of photographs by David Carter. From the Mormon mom with a grenade for a head to the four-armed “Adams and Eves,” David has been using photography to explore the intersections, paradoxes, and possibilities of Mormon culture for many years. Writ & Vision will exhibit the work David has produced for the Fall 2017 issue of Sunstone—an independent Mormon magazine—his photographs juxtaposed with the articles they illustrate. “David has a genius for producing images that are both instantly readable and endlessly interpretable.” —Stephen Carter, Sunstone editor

Please join us this Friday, October 6th, at 6 pm as we open "love letters," an exhibition of new paintings by Fidalis David Kanoanikie Buehler. A renowned and respected artist whose work has shown in galleries throughout the US and Pacific islands, Buehler's work draws heavily on his Pasifika and Kiribati heritage. Comprised largely of sea- and island-scapes "love letters" explores ancient themes of geography and place, orientation and navigation, shape and recognition. The exhibit will run through the end of October, and Friday's opening reception is free and open to the public.

Join us Friday, August 4th, at 6 p.m. for the opening reception of AFTER OUR LIKENESS, an exhibition of new paintings, drawings, and sculptures by J. Kirk Richards. The show will consist of two groups of work. One group depicts a heavenly mother and father creating Eve and Adam after their own likeness. The second group is a continuation of the CRISTO series—abstracted depictions of Jesus Christ. The exhibition will run through September.

Raised sometimes in the South Pacific, sometimes stateside, by a white American father and a Kiribati mother, Fidalis Buehler began his studies at the University of Hawaii not in fine art but in business. On the strength of drawings in the margins of his assignments, he was persuaded to switch majors, career trajectories, and identities. The split, divided—but also multiple—Identity is one of many themes played out in his work (drawing in the margins might also be). Other identity splits condensed in his paintings include white/non-white, American/Pasifika, Mormon/Kiribati, human/animal, and Insider/Outsider along with any number of more situational divisions like Good Guy/Bad Guy, helper/danger, magic/religion, mask/face. Not even his identities as an artist are settled. Is he an American Impressionist, combining the tonalism of Twachtman with the perspectival flattening and color theory of Milton Avery and Grandma Moses; or a Pasifika artist, merging the narrative potency of Kiribati storytelling with the “faux-naïve” or “primitivist” styles commonly associated with indigenous and autoditactic art? Mormonism only deepens the tensions between so many of these binaries. Is this Mormon art? At first glance it does not read particularly Mormon or even religious (though it is obsessed with the spiritual, if only in an untamed sense many Mormons would likely find disquieting). This question dovetails with the split contained in Buehler’s biracial status. This is art by a person of color—exploring the meanings and memories of racial ambiguity, mixed heritage, and changing statuses of personhood (“conversion”)—that will resonate most fully with communities of color. It is not white man’s art except perhaps through acts of cultural colonialism implicit not just in western fine art but in America’s relationship with the South Pacific and the Mormon expansionism it capacitated. In any case, whether one takes this as a cultural indictment or a mere description of genre, it seems clear that to the degree that this is art for a community of color, it is manifestly not Mormon art. And yet there are unquestionably Mormon signatures at work here, though in this case they are un-domesticated through his mother’s narratives, words, and memories. The sacred protectiveness of clothing, the transmission of saving power, the potential holiness of space, even redemption and atonement—these themes run deeply and broadly, yet are refracted through the Kiribati cultural practices and storytelling that charge his maternal line. Even the title—I Give You Powers—condenses this tension between incommensurable spiritualities and spiritual identities. Had it read “I Give You Power” the subtext would be undeniably LDS, straight out of the Book of Mormon. Mormon priesthood is unitary and unified. Pluralization—Powers—implies something less contained and controlled, less American, less white, and less Mormon. A final note on Buehler’s (non) status as a “Mormon artist,” this regarding his position in the community of Mormon artists. Brian Eno once famously commented that although the initial run of The Velvet Underground’s first album only sold a few thousand copies, everyone who bought it started a band. Fidalis might not be the best known artist in the Mormon universe. But he is the artist the other artists collect. And maybe everyone who buys one of his paintings will start a band.

Femininity and geometry are hardly new aesthetic themes in Caitlin Connolly’s artistic body of work. The triangle as both a symbol of and key visual component in depictions of women, girls, and the feminine draws on everyday iconographies (think stick figures and bathroom signs), pop culture (Weezer’s pink triangles), and feminist epic art (Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party). In Connolly’s work triangles can be bodies and limbs, spatial arrangements, dresses and fabric patterns, facial structures. However formally deployed in composition, though, they invariably encode what is a central thematic preoccupation in her art: feminine expression and feminine identity. Triangle Self rings with autobiographical intimacies. The work unmistakably tells us something about Connolly’s own navigation of the tensions, joys, pains, contradictions, and passions of contemporary feminine experience. Yet, the use of triangles—of a form so elemental and iconic—drives the visual compositions from the particular and individual out into the generic and universal. Here is depicted a woman; here is also depicted Woman. And despite the fact she is nowhere mentioned by name in the show, Eve’s presence looms grand. Eve is the feminine archetype, simultaneously a concrete, specific woman and Everywoman. Girl With Space to Fall depicts a woman blown over, whose feet are nevertheless firmly planted in a projection of calm control. She has room to fall, is prepared and resigned. Her fall will not be the end of the world. It is doubtful that Connolly consciously referenced the Fall from Edenic grace here. Still, it is impossible not to see here the influence of Mormonism’s particular (and peculiar) rendering of Eve’s transgression: an eyes-wide-open, careful choice to embrace knowledge, to step into a fall from grace and accept the consequences, good and bad, to make the world rather than end it. Eve is heroic because she blesses the human family by accepting and embracing imperfection. Girl With Space does not depict Eve’s choice. But it cannot help but memorialize it. The most overt rendering of Eve (though here she is also nameless, underscoring her generic universality) is in The Creation of Woman. The art book visually tells the story of woman’s creation from man’s rib in a way that channels not only the central visual theme of the show (the triangle) but also a crucial theme in Mormonism’s creation story. The triangle is as much the created woman’s body as it is her dress, with no visual cue for distinguishing the two. One is tempted to observe the superficial conflation of women’s identity with women’s attire, but in this case that misses the point entirely. Geometric symbols are a crucial part of how Mormons ritually memorialize creation, yet the deeper point here is that our account of creation includes the provision of clothing. Just as one body is the extension of the other, so are the sewn clothes an extension of the created bodies. Creation is complete when woman and her partner leave the presence of their Heavenly Parents with clothing that marks them as children of the divine.

Writ & Vision is pleased to announce the opening of a major group art exhibit. The show coincides with the open house of the newly completed Provo City Center LDS temple, and opens this Friday, January 15th, at 6:00 pm. The show will feature temple-themed original art from more than a dozen Mormon artists, including: J. Kirk Richards Caitlin Maxfield Connolly Wulf Barsch Susan Krueger-Barber Casey Jex Smith Faith Kershisnik Laura Erekson Atkinson Valerie Atkisson de Moura David Chapman Lindsay Elizabeth Skousen Lindsay Abigale Palmer Ike Bushman Justin Wheatley Steve and Tonya Vistaunet Maddison Colvin Smith Todd Stilson This impressive exhibit will run from January 15th to March 19th, and is free and open to the public. Please join us Friday for the opening, meet some of the artists, and enjoy some light refreshments.

Justin Wheatley Writ & Vision is pleased to announce the opening of a new art show, featuring the work of Utah native Justin Wheatley. Come to the gallery this Friday, August 14th, from 6 to 9 pm for the exhibition opening. Meet the artist and explore his unique and vivid land- and city-scapes. Wheatley's work creatively explores a range of subjects, from suburban architecture to the aesthetic extremes of both cities and the desert. Come enjoy an enriching, if challenging, evening with one of Utah's most interesting young artists. The opening is free and open to the public, and light refreshments will be served.

Writ & Vision is proud to announce the opening of a new art exhibition Mother's Day Weekend in Downtown Provo. Entitled 'Maternal Lines,' this group show will feature Mormon women artists exploring the range of understandings, meanings, representation, and experiences of Motherhood. The show will hang from its opening May 8th at 6 pm through June 9th, and will feature work from the following artists: Valerie Atkisson de Moura Susan Krueger-Barber Jacqui Larsen Cassandra Christensen Barney Kelly Johnson Brooks Kate Harrington Mooth Emily Fox King Jennifer Barton Emily Christensen McPhie Katie Campbell Rojas Please join us next Friday evening to see this remarkable art and to meet these remarkable artists. The exhibition opening is free and open to the public, and light refreshments will be served