Leslie O. Peterson

Leslie O. Peterson {[email protected]} came to art not by design, but by serendipity. In 2011 she enrolled in a community art class with a son-in-law who had recently suffered a stroke. Though she meant the course as a form of therapy for him, she was captured in an instant and has been a painter of prolific output ever since. Peterson is best known for her charming, whimsical series of portraits titled “The Forgotten Wives of Joseph Smith.” Peterson decided to paint Smith’s wives after reading an essay about them on LDS.org. She says that working on the portraits was her way of celebrating their reappearance in Mormon awareness and bringing them to life in Church history after a long absence. In the piece that appears here, Peterson pays homage to the first issue of Dialogue and its original cover.