One Woman Show, by Christine Coulson, is a 2023 satirical novel written in the form of art-cards for unseen paintings at a fictional museum, about a girl born into a Gilded Age family. It was put out by a major label press, heavily reviewed (even internationally) and widely praised for its “originality.”
Except that it’s not: The Ambrose J. and Vivian T. Seagrave Museum of 20th Century American Art, by Matthew Kirkpatrick, is a 2019 satirical novel written in the form of art-cards for unseen paintings at a fictional museum, about a girl born into a Gilded Age family. It was put out by a small independent press (available here, and which could surely use your support more), and, you know, came out first.
At best, Coulson and Kirkpatrick are kindred spirits working on the same wave-length while utterly unaware of each other (though even then, Coulson failed to perform due diligence in determining whether this novel-concept had been done before and give proper credit); at worse, this is straight-up conceptual plagiarism. And, full disclosure, I attended the University of Utah English graduate program with both Kirkpatrick and his wife Susan McCarty (whom I knew the better of the two–and whose excellent debut Anatomies also deserves a read). Hence, I am obviously biased as to where my sympathies lie here.
But! Paul and Mormon both urge us to be charitable! Indeed, one could argue that even if Coulson or her publisher were aware of Kirkpatrick’s novel, it’s still not plagiarism, cause the actual art-cards each of them writes are totally different from each other. That’s a fair argument!
Anyways! Shifting gears entirely and apropos of nothing, I would now like to introduce today’s text, wherein I write a bunch of satirical art-cards for fictional paintings at a Church museum, which I think we can all agree is a wholly original, novel, never-before-done idea with no prior precedence! And if by the rarest chance you are able to cite any prior work that uses this exact same concept, please note that such is a complete coincidence, unworthy of mention or citation, because the actual art cards themselves are quite distinct. I mean, I mentioned already that these are set at a Church museum, right? Not a secular one? Completely different thing! No possible comparison!
Anyways. Without further adieu, here’s Art-Cards at the Church History Museum Portrait Gallery:
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Today Thou Shalt Be With Me In Paradise (2020) Oil on Canvas
J. Edwards Philmore, Jr. (1959-2021) Springville, UT
In a clever bit of misdirection, this painting initially appears to be yet another standard portrait of Christ on the cross in a Renaissance-revival style, zoomed into the agony of his face as his eyes roll up heavenward, his hair long and scraggly, tears streaming down the crevices of his face into his sandy-blonde beard.
You have to be paying close attention to notice that 1) he is not wearing that trademark crown of thorns, and 2) though his hands are just out of frame, his wrists are clearly tied, not nailed, to the cross. It is only after you notice these details that your eyes are drawn to the slightly-out-of-focus, enshadowed side-profile on the right-most side of the frame. In contrast to the main crucifixion victim who takes up the majority of the painting, this man’s much darker complexion is painted in a more subdued, impressionistic manner; nevertheless, his head is still clearly wearing the crown of thorns.
That is, we are actually gazing upon the first robber crucified on Calvary, with Christ being crucified next to him. The perspective of you the viewer, then, is from that of the other robber.
It is left as an exercise to the viewer as to whether you are the robber that railed at Christ on the cross, or the one who said “Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom.” Or whether it even matters, if you are not both at the same time.
Philmore himself painted this piece during the COVID-19 lockdowns, incidentally, before succumbing to complications from COVID himself less than a year later.
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The Last Vision (1994) Watercolor on Canvas
Katrina B. Pratt-Benson (1967-1994?) San Bernadino, CA
This watercolor is intended to be a POV-shot of Joseph Smith being shot out of Liberty Jail, as though the viewer were standing directly below him at ground level during the precise moment he was defenestrated from the second-story window, his back to the ground, his unseen face towards the sky. Though the Prophet died closer to dusk, the painting portrays his death as occurring at high noon, with his body silhouetted by the blazing bright sun directly above him–or perhaps like he is already ascending to the Light–or falling from it. Critical opinion remains split over whether his right arm is deliberately forming a square in a Masonic sign, or if that is simply his arm being flung outward, in media res, by the sheer force of the gunshots.
In either case, no one has been able to ask the artist for clarification, since the mercurial Katrina B. Pratt-Benson disappeared on a walk-about vision quest into the Mojave Desert the same year that this painting was completed for the Sesquicentennial of the martyrdom. Though eventually declared dead, her body was never found by authorities.
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Elijah Abel, 1879 (2013) Oil on Canvas
Isaiah L. Degraffendreidt (1984-present) Cincinnati, OH
The thousand yard stare, the defeated slouch in the chair, the deep lines on his face, the untied cravat dangling absently from his shirt collar, are all intended to invoke the day when Elijah Abel has arrived home after being denied Temple endowments and the right to be be sealed to his dead wife by President John Taylor. Here in this devastated moment, there be no promise of 1978, nor that racist folk doctrines would be formally repudiated by the Q15 in 2012 or ’13 or thereabouts, nor that any such revelation on the priesthood could be anything but cold comfort for someone who died a full century before the artist was even born. Here there be only sadness, eternal and everlasting.
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Portrait of Angel Moroni (2018) Digital-media, AI generated
AICAN (2014-present) Piscataway, NJ
In an attempt to one-up the Obvious Collective’s computer generated “Portrait of Edward Bellamy” in 2018, researchers at Rutgers University in New Jersey asked their own AI-art generator AICAN (Artificial Intelligence Creative Adversarial Network) to produce an entirely new portrait of “someone who has never existed.” The algorithm’s choice of a Mormon religious figure caused a brief stir when it first debuted; Church apologists declared that the algorithm had been tainted by the clear anti-Mormon bias of the researchers—not to mention of the broader culture at large that the algorithm “scraped” from.
The ensuing controversy swiftly fizzled out, for the same reasons as “Portrait of Edward Bellamy,” namely: the vague image it produced of a nondescript man in white, as though copied from a washed out old photograph, “was neither very original nor very interesting.” We hang a print of the image here solely as a historical curiosity, one bereft of any sort of artistic merit, AI-genearted or otherwise.
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As to the Strength of Men (1989) Oil on Canvas
Eldon K. Amondson (1936-2017) Rigby, ID
In response to Ezra Taft Benson’s 1988 call to “flood the earth with the Book of Mormon,” Eldon K. Amondson was one of a slew of artists who took that admonition to heart by painting scenes from the Book of Mormon directly. Amondson, however, was primarily a landscape artist by training and disposition, not a portraitist, so this presented a unique artistic challenge for him.
His solution was to lean into the skid, so to speak, and continue to paint landscapes, only with Book of Mormon scenes occurring far off in the distance. Arguably his most successful of these experiments is the above, wherein we behold the final 59 Jaredites in Ether 15 fighting to the death. They are indeed “mighty as to the strength of men,” as the scriptural record states; but given how they are massively dwarfed by the surrounding mountains (presumably modeled on the Grand Tetons), it is also clear how little their strength actually matters. Nature is not only utterly indifferent to their self-inflicted genocide, but, given how beautifully the wild flowers bloom in the foreground, Nature is implicitly better off without them—or us.
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Heavenly Mother (2014) Empty wood frame over primed drywall
Eliana Hernandez Rosario (1981-present) Mesa, AZ
Perhaps the most controversial feature in our present exhibit, Hernandez Rosario‘s “Heavenly Mother” is literally just a plain, wooden picture frame (the kind you could buy at Target) hung over the empty white drywall of the museum itself. Is this Marcel Duchamp-inspired piece a commentary on how Heavenly Mother has been utterly erased from our LDS discourse? Or, that if Church leaders cannot be bothered to put any effort into explicating Her, then the artist can’t reasonably be expected to put any effort into painting Her? Or perhaps (more generously), is the artist indicating that despite Her near total absence from our doctrine, that Heavenly Mother is paradoxically all the more present in her feminine void, yea verily, even in the very walls around us?
Every time Hernandez Rosario has been asked about it, she has played coy and pretended not to understand English, despite the fact her family immigrated from Mexico City to Arizona when she was only 3, she was educated in Chicago, and has regularly spoken sans translator at both Sunstone Symposiums and BYU education week.
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Christ Cleanses the Temple (1986) Oil on Canvas
Rufus T. Hayes (1953-present) South Jordan, UT
The Savior’s cleansing of the Temple, as recorded in the Four Gospels, is here updated to the modern corporate boardroom. Dressed in the red robes of the Second Coming and wielding a cat-o-nine-tails, a furious Christ single-handedly flips the extra-long conference table with superhuman strength, all while white old men in business suits flee in terror before Him. Reports that this scene is actually set in the upper rooms of the Salt Lake Temple have been angrily and repeatedly denied by the artist, including when asked by actual Apostles who have questioned him as to its uncanny resemblance.
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May the Force BBBBBB With You (2005) Inkjet on printer paper
Peter J. Barney (1987-present) Provo, UT
This utterly amateurish artifact from the Gordon B. Hinckley era—wherein the First Presidency’s heads are crudely photoshopped onto the three Force ghosts at the end of Return of the Jedi—is sadly the most popular picture in our gallery. Even the title, an awkward allusion to Hinckley’s “Six B’s” talk from 2000, is cringey and embarrassing. It was only entered into our 2005 art contest by a BYU freshman as a joke, and we only let the broader student body vote online for the winner because we did not yet fully comprehend just how trollingly stupid the internet would be.
Now we’re stuck with it, cause you freaks won’t stop coming to see it, and we frankly still need the ticket sales. Don’t think we’re not resentful of our star attraction, however. At a certain point, it doesn’t matter that you all are only talking selfies with it ironically, you’re still talking selfies with it. You should all be ashamed of yourselves. What a total waste of your mortal probation on this earth. The “artist” now works as an insurance adjuster in Albuquerque, by the way. He’s married with kids. He long ago moved on, so should you.
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Book of Mormon #12 & 35 (2012) Mixed Papier-mâché Collage Sculpture
Francois Goddard (1990-present) New York, NY
Large-scale mixed Papier-mâché sculpture composed of discarded Book of Mormon playbills from Broadway, intermixed with actual pages from proselyting copies of the Book of Mormon printed by the LDS Church in over 90 languages, all molded together in model of Moroni burying the plates from the old Arnold Frieburg painting. This piece was the senior BFA thesis project of Francois Goddard, a New School-trained art student and French-Senegalese convert.
Although the sculpture was only tepidly received at the time of its debut, a tiny yet passionate fringe cult has arisen around it in the years since, claiming that a Kabbalah-like numerical system can be deciphered from its seemingly random arrangement, describing events pertinent to these Latter days. If the world can find out these numbers, so let it be. Amen.
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Willie Martin Handcart Company (1955) Oil on unprimed canvas
Paul J.P. Krasner (1912-1956) Cody, WY
68 scattered points of light dot an all-black canvas, representing all 68 souls who perished out on the Great Plains of Wyoming in that ill-fated expedition. They have since entered the rest of their Lord and ours.