Artists

ROCIO VASQUEZ CISNEROS is a Mexican-American, Utah-Based artist. She works primarily in video and photography, but also works in oil paint and various other mediums. Much of her photo and video work is a means to merge religious symbols and imagery with the voices of real people who deal with issues of racism and immigration every day. Her work is narrative, and includes self portraiture, much of her work is also performance based. @rocio.cisne

LAURA EREKSON was born in Oakland, California, and presently lives in Salt Lake City. Her printmaking and sculpture background influences her current body of work. Using found objects and plants, Laura’s paintings are rich in texture, leaving behind details and fragments of the objects themselves. She received a BFA from Brigham Young University and a MAT from George Mason University. Laura’s work has been exhibited across the nation including the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.

SARAH WINEGAR lives in Salt Lake City with her husband and three kids. She carves and paints in the margins of the day, her work exploring the pushes and pulls of caretaking, partnership, and seeking out the divine.

CHARLOTTE SCHOLL SHURTZ {[email protected]} is a queer Mormon woman, author, and poet. She graduated from Brigham Young University in 2019 with a degree in English and a minor in professional writing and rhetoric. She is a cofounder of the Seeking Heavenly Mother Project, a digital repository of creative works celebrating the feminine divine.

I grew up in the woods of New Canaan, Connecticut. I’m the middle child of family of eleven and I have a twin! My biggest artistic influence was my mother Barbara who would take me out of elementary school to explore the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I graduated from Highland Park High School and went on to earn a BFA in drawing and painting from the School of Visual Arts in New York. I have created 40 short animations in addition to painting, prints, sculpture and music. I also illustrate children’s books with Covenant Communications including my series of Come Follow Me coloring books. These include Color Your Way through the Doctrine and Covenants, Old Testament, New Testament, and the Book of Mormon.

LISA DELONG is an artist and designer who received her PhD from The Prince’s School of Traditional Arts in 2007. As part of her work for the school’s internationally acclaimed Outreach Programme, she has taught in Abu Dhabi, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and many other locations. Her work specializes in the principles of geometric design in Islamic and Western traditions. Her first book Curves: Flowers, Foliates and Flourishes in the Formal Decorative Arts was published in Novem￾ber 2013 and reviewed in the New York Times. In 2016, she presented a TEDx talk on geometry and education at Brigham Young University. Her private commissions have included patterns for a range of fine china, interior design consultation, and detailing for a bespoke Rolls Royce. Her paintings are exhibited internationally and are in several prominent collections.

Joel Kirk Richards is a contemporary artist whose work engages with themes of antiquity, religion, spirituality, equality, and love. His work asks questions about modern application and implementation of religion as it relates to historical narratives and mythologies. The work often prioritizes the poetry of religious text over dogma or historical accuracy. Stylistically it often bridges or walks a tightrope between classical and abstract expression.

Kirk lives and works at his studios in Woodland Hills, Redmond, and Provo, Utah, and in Bondsville, Massachusetts. He and his wife Amy Tolk Richards have four children. https://www.jkirkrichards.com/

FRANK MCENTIRE (1946–), of Houston and Wichita Falls, Texas, resides in Salt Lake City, Utah. His sculptural, assemblage, and installation works are expressive of cultural, environmental, and political issues of our time. He was an art critic for The Salt Lake Tribune and Salt Lake Magazine and has published numerous essays for magazines and exhibition catalogs. McEntire’s leadership as the former executive director of the Utah Arts Council and his service on boards, panels, and task forces, has enhanced the careers of many artists and the overall cultural life of Utah.

RON RICHMOND received M.F.A. and B.F.A. degrees from Brigham Young University. He has worked as a professional artist for 20 years. He was born in Denver, Colorado and currently lives in a small town in central Utah. Artist Statement: The actual layer of paint on canvas or board is the surface, which fact can never be ignored. The mere marks, lines, brushstrokes that make up the surface are also symbols. They may, if only purely abstract and formal in presentation, still symbolize to the eye, mind, or heart ideas and mean￾ings only realized by our subconscious yearnings for archetypes. Archetypes begin as personal and reveal themselves to the collective—the individual to the common. If those marks begin to represent something recognizable, regardless of subject, they still symbolize the object, never actually becoming it. A paradox lies in the fact that no matter how exact an object is represented, it is still an illusionistic symbol of something else. A good work should encompass surface and symbol, the cognitive and the spiritual, freedom and restraint.

KALANI TONGA is an artist, activist, and writer who spends her energy keep￾ing her adorable but adventurous five runts alive. She has been featured in A Book of Mormons: Latter-day Saints on a Modern-Day Zion and the blog FeministMormonHousewives.org.