Micah Christensen

MICAH CHRISTENSEN received his Masters in Fine Arts from Sotheby’s Institute (London) and PhD in the History of Art from University College London. For more than fifteen years he has worked with institutions, including the National Gallery, Musée d’Orsay, Museo Nacional del Prado, and Metropolitan Museum, to study how artists were trained from the seventeenth to twenty first centuries. He lectures throughout the US and Europe, including for Cambridge University and at the British Library. He is the Co-Founder of the Zion Art Society and host of the podcast Mormon Visual Culture.

What is an LDS Artist? | Glen Nelson, Joseph Paul Vorst

Articles/Essays – Volume 51, No. 4

“Joseph Paul Vorst was arguably the most culturally significant Latter-day Saint painter of his time.”So, starts the Church History Museum’s video for the exhibition on the life and works of Joseph Paul Vorst (1897–1947). The video and the exhibition is a joint collaboration between the museum’s curator, Laura Allred Hurtado, and the independent writer Glen Nelson, who authored a catalogue detailing the life and known works of the German-American artist. Both exhibition and catalogue seek to rehabilitate the reputation of an artist that has largely been overlooked. Vorst’s life is beautifully evoked and contextualized on every page by Nelson, who raises questions about conventional definitions of what it means to be a Mormon artist.