Amanda Beardsley

AMANDA K. BEARDSLEY {[email protected]} is the Cayleff and Sakai Faculty Scholar at San Diego State University and received her PhD in art history from Binghamton University. Her research and publications have ranged from sound studies and feminism in Mormon culture to science and technology studies, gender, and faith. She is the co-editor of Latter-day Saint Art: A Critical Reader (Oxford University Press, 2024) and the art editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought.

A City Unheard

Articles/Essays – Volume 59, No. 3

Golden yellow paper cubes extending beyond the two-dimensional surface of Susana Isabel Silva’s Partitura modular (2025) create an architecture of shapes resembling a bird’s-eye view of a village or urban center, lingering as a score for a city unheard. Punched holes in the angular surfaces amplify physical contrasts between surface and depth with the illusion of shading. A longer sequence of dots and dashes vertically cuts the composition in half, overwriting the smooth flatness of surface, offering a cryptic linear schism. The work names its terminology provocatively: partitura—a score where notation is as much about absence as presence in a modular topology of silence rendered through paper, cut edges, and the residue of algorithmic notation.

From Protest Poster to Meme: The Visual Language of Queer Dissent at BYU

Articles/Essays – Volume 59, No. 1

The protests of 2019 and 2020 at Brigham Young University (BYU) stand out as a notable period of rupture within an otherwise doctrinally strict and culturally conventional institution. Often pulling up to three hundred student participants, these protests marked a watershed moment for LGBTQ+ discourse at the conservative flagship of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.