Artists

VIVI ANN ROSE was born in Moab, where she still lives when not traveling extensively. She studied at the University of Utah, Brigham Young University, and Utah State University. Her photographs have been exhibited widely in the western states and in Florida, she has won numerous awards, and her work has been featured in several pub￾lications. She is represented by the Gregory Gallery, Newport Beach, California; and Coda Gallery, Palm Desert, California.

ELAINE S. HARDING was born in Chicago and now lives in Salt Lake City, where she received her B.F.A. from the University of Utah. She has exhibited her work in Utah, Nevada, Montana, and Califor￾nia. She is an associate instructor at the University of Utah and is currendy the art editor for Dialogue. Her work is in the Utah State Fine Arts Collection and numerous corporate and private corporations. Phillips Gallery and Pierpont Gallery, both in Salt Lake City, and the Dooly Gallery in Park City represent her work.

Barbara Madsen recently taught as a visiting instructor of print￾making at Brigham Young University and in 1989 at Southern Utah State College. She is currently working on her art and doing collabo￾rative printing. She received a bachelor of fine arts from Brigham Young University and a master of fine arts from Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. Her work has been exhibited throughout the nation in competitive exhibitions including College of Notre Dame of Mary￾land, New Jersey Center for the Visual Arts, North Dakota Print and Drawing Annual, and in Kanagawa, Japan, at the fifteenth Interna￾tional Exhibition of Prints. Numerous awards include several juror’s purchase awards from the Utah Arts Council, Exhibition 48 purchase award from Southern Utah State College, and from Art Link, Fort Wayne, Indiana. Madsen’s work reflects a profound need to find peace and truth among the stark and often grim circumstances of life. She says, “We live in a world of opposites. We stare at brutality, blindness, turmoil, and sirens; yet we seek a world of resolution, wholeness, and peace. We are confronted with shadow, deceit, screaming, and loneliness; yet we hope for light, tranquility, honesty, and clarity. There is a division of reality in our minds; beyond desolation, conflict, and greed, there exists a verdant world of hope, of passageways, and luminous truth.”

The San Bias Islands on the north (Atlantic) coast of Panama are the homeland of the Cuna Indians, creators of the molas featured in this issue. While many of the Cuna groups inhabiting about forty of the several hundred islands in the chain have been very reclusive*, the San Bias groups have interacted with the outside world at least since the time of Balboa. Their relationship with outsiders, however, has been cordial but somewhat distant. Until very recent times, interracial marriages or births were generally grounds for banishment or death, so the Cuna are virtually pure Indian, one of the purest in the western hemisphere. Their cultural values of cooperation, honesty, chastity, and benevolence and some of their oral history and written stories bear striking parallels to the Church and its teachings. In the last forty years, the Church has attracted many members on the islands. Mola , a native art form, literally means “clothing”; but the word has come to mean a multilayered rectangle worked in applique and reverse applique. A good mola has many cutout areas; tiny, almost invisible stitches; and few, if any, large areas without stitching. Even a skilled mola maker may need several weeks to complete a project. Traditionally, molas have been used as the front or back of women’s blouses. The techniques of applique and reverse applique used to make mola blouses have developed and flowered over the last 150 years. Earliest known molas were adaptations of traditional face and body painting. Some of these early designs are still popular today. More common, however, are pic￾torial molas, taken from nature, everyday activities, books, posters, newspapers, or in our case, Church periodicals and missionary lesson kits.