![]() ![]() The collective body of art about Heavenly Mother inherently retains an interest in gender but also brings to the fore race, body type, symbols and types of power, responsibilities, and other intersections of identity. While many images demonstrate an emphasis on ideas of her maternity, a large portion instead explores her power and authority. The collective body of recent LDS art about Heavenly Mother reflects speculative and sometimes uncorrelated theology about her roles and responsibilities in the universe. This paper examines sixteen pieces of artwork produced since 2014 by male and female artists around the world who have taken up the challenge to represent a divine female. Petrey’s wish for a “multiplicity of interpretations without a claim to completeness or supremacy” is a work already begun. A broad desire for the divine feminine has prompted individual artists to see her in countless diverse ways. If, as Petrey argues, the threat of a theology of Heavenly Mother stems from “collaps the difference of women into a singular representation,” art has already begun to offer a very different response. The search for the divine feminine in Mormon art has resulted in more diversity in conceptions of Mormon deity than have ever existed before. The concern is that by focusing so heavily on gender, “Mormon feminist liberation and empowerment of Heavenly Mother has often shackled her with a new set of discursive constraints” of heteronormativity and reductive femininity. It is important to consider this expansion of the images of female deity in light of another concern Petrey has articulated: that the doctrine of Heavenly Mother may be used to further solidify a highly gendered, heteronormative divinity that can be weaponized against people who are transgender, queer, single, or otherwise nonconforming to a male/female pairing. However, images of Heavenly Mother are expanding and may eventually present a challenge to this primacy. If “religion is a projection of human ideals,” as scholar Taylor Petrey has argued, then much of Mormon art depicting God tells a story of the primacy of white masculinity. ![]() Professional and amateur artists on social media platforms have shared thousands of images of Heavenly Mother in just a few years. In 2019, authors McArthur Krishna and Bethany Brady Spalding published A Girl’s Guide to Heavenly Mother, which included dozens of images of Heavenly Mother by Mormon artists around the world. In 2014, the art contest A Mother Here called for submissions of art and poetry on the subject of Heavenly Mother. Before then, images of Heavenly Mother were almost nonexistent. Although lacking official approval, Mormon artists have created numerous images of Heavenly Mother since 2012. The sudden increase in art about the divine feminine is far more varied and diverse in its conception of deity. If images of Heavenly Father and Jesus within Mormon art are a relatively recent and stable development, images of Heavenly Mother are cutting-edge and creative. At its highest levels, the LDS Church has adopted this relatively stagnant and narrow depiction of God. This version of Jesus-tall, white, and bearded-is one well-known to modern viewers and widely identifiable within European art traditions. In May 2020, the Church announced that meetinghouse foyers ought to display only paintings of Jesus Christ and offered a list of twenty-two approved paintings for this purpose, all of which featured Jesus Christ in this style. Laura Paulsen Howe, art curator for the Church History Museum, describes the Church’s embrace of images of Jesus as “a big cultural shift.” When they did appear, Church-approved images of Christ and Heavenly Father skewed heavily toward depicting white, European-looking men in an illustrative style. ![]() It was not until the mid-twentieth century that Mormon artists shifted toward portraying God, and even then did so in fairly limited ways. For the first century of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, members generally did not condone artistic renderings of deity, including those of Christ. ![]()
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