Glen Nelson

GLEN NELSON {[email protected]} is the author of Joseph Paul Vorst, Mormons at the Met, and twenty other books—some of these as a ghostwriter. Three of them have been New York Times bestsellers. He has curated solo gallery exhibitions of Annie Poon, Casey Jex Smith, and the American lithographs of Joseph Paul Vorst (all for Writ & Vision Gallery, Provo, Utah) and written catalogs for each of them. He is the librettist of three operas by Murray Boren and a number of other works in collaboration with composers, including new commissioned projects with Ethan Wickman and Lansing McLoskey that will premiere in 2019 and 2020, respectively. He founded Mormon Artists Group in 1999. He hosts the podcast “Mormon Arts Center’s Studio Podcast,” and he is co-executive director of the Mormon Arts Center. EGIDE NZOJIBWAMI is an engineer and has his o

Out of Angola

Articles/Essays – Volume 51, No. 3

The artwork of Hildebrando de Melo rises from Angola itself—from the valleys near Huambo where he was born, through the urban streets of Luanda where he lives with his wife and children, amid the dynamism of one of the world’s most expensive cities, between the sounds of Portuguese and tribal Bantu languages, in the art and artifacts created by centuries of Africans, from the history of his ancestral tribal kingdom of Bailundo, with the political fallout in a country emerging from decades of brutality and war nearly incomprehensible to a foreigner and the convoluted legacies of racism, slavery, colonialism, liberation, interventionist politics, poverty, riches, and injustice, with the artist’s own history, his religious probing, the nation’s budding contemporary art scene, the artist’s global travels—and his attempts to reconcile and personify all of it.

Speaking for Herself | Ashley Mae Hoiland, One Hundred Birds Taught Me to Fly: The Art of Seeking God

Articles/Essays – Volume 49, No. 4

One Hundred Birds Taught Me to Fly: The Art of Seeking God is a collection of short missives—poems, essays, and autobiographical sketches— grouped loosely and thematically into thirteen sections and an epilogue. Ashley Mae Hoiland…

Coney Island Hymn: Shore

Articles/Essays – Volume 25, No. 2

They clap their hands together
and shout out
and sing the same song

Mormon Artists Group: Adventures in Art Making

Articles/Essays – Volume 39, No. 3

It is an elaborate experiment really, this Mormon Artists Group that I founded in 1999, seven years ago. In my interviews with the press, I have been saying that the number of LDS writers, painters,…