However, images of Heavenly Mother are expanding and may eventually present a challenge to this primacy. If “religion is a projection of human ideals,” as scholar Taylor Petrey has argued, then much of Mormon art depicting God tells a story of the primacy of white masculinity. Professional and amateur artists on social media platforms have shared thousands of images of Heavenly Mother in just a few years. In 2019, authors McArthur Krishna and Bethany Brady Spalding published A Girl’s Guide to Heavenly Mother, which included dozens of images of Heavenly Mother by Mormon artists around the world. In 2014, the art contest A Mother Here called for submissions of art and poetry on the subject of Heavenly Mother. Before then, images of Heavenly Mother were almost nonexistent. Although lacking official approval, Mormon artists have created numerous images of Heavenly Mother since 2012. The sudden increase in art about the divine feminine is far more varied and diverse in its conception of deity. If images of Heavenly Father and Jesus within Mormon art are a relatively recent and stable development, images of Heavenly Mother are cutting-edge and creative. At its highest levels, the LDS Church has adopted this relatively stagnant and narrow depiction of God. This version of Jesus-tall, white, and bearded-is one well-known to modern viewers and widely identifiable within European art traditions. In May 2020, the Church announced that meetinghouse foyers ought to display only paintings of Jesus Christ and offered a list of twenty-two approved paintings for this purpose, all of which featured Jesus Christ in this style. Laura Paulsen Howe, art curator for the Church History Museum, describes the Church’s embrace of images of Jesus as “a big cultural shift.” When they did appear, Church-approved images of Christ and Heavenly Father skewed heavily toward depicting white, European-looking men in an illustrative style. It was not until the mid-twentieth century that Mormon artists shifted toward portraying God, and even then did so in fairly limited ways. For the first century of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, members generally did not condone artistic renderings of deity, including those of Christ.
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