Artists

This issue features the work of Margaret W. Morrison, a native of Salt Lake City, graduate of the University of Utah, and currently an instructor in the art extension program at the University of Texas at Austin. Morrison says of her work: “Dealing with the human figure as imagery is a complicated matter. The observer is preconditioned to react in a certain way towards that imagery: Does this piece tell a story? Are these people that I recognize? Is this a specific moment in time? What are they thinking about? What are they saying? “I think most viewers experience a piece, make a quick ‘closure’ decision, and move on, almost as if thumbing through a book and then slamming the cover closed . . . finding nothing there to pull the viewer in to a level deeper than mere visual recognition. “I intend in my work to keep that book from slamming closed, offering more than story or portraiture. I try to involve the viewer in several levels of psychological discovery and hope that my imagery pulls at dreams, memories, and feelings you can’t quite put your finger on- a sense of timelessness, a balance between detachment and preciousness.”

Lee Dillon is a talented ceramic artist who, in his own words, “loves the process of creating artwork more than the finished product.” He finds con￾tinual excitement and challenge working in ceramics and has taught in sec￾ondary schools, colleges, and public art centers in the Salt Lake City area since receiving an M.F.A. degree in ceramic design from Brigham Young University in 1978. Lee is represented in a number of private and public collections in

LeConte Stewart was born 15 April 1891 in Glenwood, Utah. After school￾ing at Ricks Academy in Rexburg, Idaho, he studied art in Salt Lake City in 1912, and with the Art Students League in Woodstock, New York, and New York City in 1913-14. While on a mission in Hawaii in 1917-19, he was assigned to paint murals and decorative detail for the temple in Laie. He married Zipporah Layton while in Hawaii, and taught school and proselyted as well. In 1920-22, he painted murals in the Cardston Alberta temple, and returned to settle in Kaysville, Utah, in 1923. He was head of the Ogden High School art department from 1923-38, and from 1938-56 was chairman of the University of Utah Art Department. Stewart taught in elementary schools, high schools, and at the University of Utah, and after retiring in 1956 continued to teach, both with the Univer￾sity and privately in Davis County. His on-site landscape painting classes con￾tinued through the mid-1980s, and he worked actively in painting and draw￾ing the landscapes of rural northern Utah to the age of ninety-five. Stewart’s failing health has recently forced him to retire from painting, and at present he resides in a health care center in Clearfield, Utah.

This issue features the work of Allen Craig Bishop, a painter, printmaker, and art instructor who completed his studies at the University of Denver School of Art and now lives with his wife Alene and their three children in Granite, Utah. He is currently pursuing his career with a Visual Arts Fellowship awarded by the Utah Arts Council. Bishop comments: “In drawing, printmaking, and painting, I use formats and sizes ranging from 2″x2” lithographs to an 8’x240′ mural. I am inter￾ested in the interactions of geometry, shape, and color, which offer intriguing possibilities for investigating varied but universal structures. Virtually all visual phenomena have an elemental relationship to geometry, shape, and color. “Primarily non-objective, my work has taken inspiration from such varied sources as chess, astronomy, creation, and scripture. Recently, however, Fve introduced elements of time, change, and choice by using shaped canvases in rearrangeable, multi-part configurations. This allows the viewer to more fully participate in the process of visual communication, and the “universal struc￾tures” of shape and color function on a more elastic and democratic level. “To name my work, I rearrange syllables and invent words much as I create and organize visual forms. My titles usually have no direct, literal mean￾ing; I only occasionally intend similarity to real words. “It would be hard to imagine life without discovery and creation. I hope someday to become as Bezaleel, ‘filled . . . with the spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understanding, and in knowledge and in all manner of workmanship’ (Ex. 31:3). If my work helps to ‘please the eye, . . . gladden the heart . . . and to enliven the soul’ (D&C 59: 18-19), then I have participated in God’s plan.”

DENNIS SMITH is an artist living in Highland, Utah, with his wife, Veloy and their six children. He is president of North Mountain, an artists’ co-op for visual artists, architects, and others in related fields. Dennis has numerous sculptures represented in public and private collections; his paintings from the last two years are reproduced here for the first time.

Judith McConkie, a native of Provo, Utah, set out to be an artist while an undergraduate at Brigham Young University. In her sophomore year she married James W. McConkie, then a freshman at BYU, and left art for “a more stable” career—teaching English (and some art) in Utah’s public schools. During fourteen years of marriage, she has shed rigid role expectations—at first she didn’t want to share the housework—while still identifying herself as a “traditional” wife and mother of three. When James finished law school and entered his “stable” career (on a Congressional staff, in private practice, and through unsuccessful bids for Congress and for Utah’s attorney general) she flourished, studying printmak￾ing under Eugene Frederick at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C., and later, after a stint at the University of Utah, under Wulf Barsch at BYU, where she teaches while completing an MFA in printmaking. Her prints and illustrations have appeared inDialogue, Sunstone and other publications and have been shown in theDeseret News annual show, the Utah ’81 art show and the Virginia Art League quarterly exhibit.

Maida Withers is an American dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker. Withers is the founder and artistic director of Maida Withers Dance Construction Company of Washington, D.C. She is a professor at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, at the George Washington University, Washington, D.C

IN THE WINTER OF 1979 stereotypes of Mormon women were being given an inordinate amount of media attention because of Sonia Johnson’s excom￾munication and the Church’s opposition to ERA. It was depressing enough to grow up with Patty Perfect, that ever-cheerful, well-organized, bread￾baking embodiment of Mormon Sisterhood. She and I were old adversaries. Now she was being joined by Patty Programmed, the oppressed non-thinking ultra-orthodox tool of sexist church leaders. It was too much. I felt a fierce desire to show the world Mormon women as I know them: liberal, conser￾vative, eccentric, conforming, irreverant, pious, domineering, submissive, confident, fearful, happy, depressed: sometimes all of the above in one per￾son. Our differences may be masked by our shared convictions, but they certainly exist. Beneath our Mormon facades we differ and agree in a multi￾tude of ways. So I took my camera and tape recorder and stalked friends, relatives and sisters. To establish each woman’s context, I photographed her doing some￾thing she loved in a setting where she felt most herself. This helped her to be relaxed and natural in front of the camera. It also pictorially linked her with the activity she loves most. Each sister was interviewed with a series of questions designed to elicit her feelings about herself. The resulting quotes were not intended to explain the pictures, but to complement them; to give more depth to the context. “In Context” is a work in progress, unfinished. Like a mosaic, each woman’s individual truth links with that of her sisters. The One True Mormon Woman exists, but not as one. She is many, and she is unique.

Kevin G. Barnhurst was Chair of Communication in the Digital Era at the University of Leeds and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His books include Seeing the Newspaper, The Form of News: A History, and Media Queered: Visibility and Its Discontents.