Review
Title: C. C. A. Christensen: A Mormon Visionary
Authors: Jennifer Champoux
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Year Published: 2026
Pages: 138
Binding: Paper
Genre: Religious non-fiction
ISBN: 978-0252089213
Price: 17.95
Reviewed by Conor Hilton for the Association for Mormon Letters
Jennifer Champoux opens a new understanding of the foundations of Mormon art with C. C. A. Christensen: A Mormon Visionary, a volume in the Introductions to Mormon Thought series from the University of Illinois Press. Champoux’s book is enriched by her knowledge of the artistic context and traditions that informed Christensen’s painting, knowledge that she draws on to offer insightful and compelling interpretations of those works of art.
The book is brought to life with the inclusion of full-color reproductions of many of C. C. A. Christensen’s paintings–a necessity for fully grasping what Champoux details is happening thematically, contextually, and artistically in the paintings. While Christensen’s paintings will likely be new to most readers (they were largely new to me), Champoux persuasively makes the case that Christensen’s style and approach laid the foundations for Mormon visual art.
One of the ways this occurred was with landscapes, a popular subject in American art, and one that Christensen approached with the double meanings that were common in European and American art of the time (and in the traditions he drew on). Specifically, Champoux writes that “The wilderness is dangerous but full of possibility, and shot through with religious significance. It is the site of original sin and of eventual redemption” (24). She details more about the different ways of visualizing the wilderness that are at work in Christensen, blending imagery from the American West, Scandinavia, and contemporary ideas about Jerusalem and its surrounding environs.
This combination of places and traditions is at work throughout Christensen’s paintings, particularly later in his life. As Champoux writes, “There is sometimes a tension apparent in Christensen’s work between involvement in both these larger and smaller communities–a cultural tension that continues today for members of the global Church” (95). Champoux traces the ways that Christensen is navigating his evolving relationship to different facets of his identity and experience in his art. This experience mirrors an evolution in the Church as an institution during Christensen’s lifetime and serves to helpfully offer hope that current people experiencing such tensions between their various communities may productively harmonize them.
I wonder if this desire, and the resulting tension, derives in part from another element that Christensen contributes to Latter-day Saint art–a representation of embodied, material, divine beings. Champoux writes of Christensen depicting a scene from the Book of Mormon where Nephi has a vision and sees an angel, “With this embodied angel, Christensen was able to visualize Latter-day Saint beliefs about the material, living, immanent nature of the divine” (74). For Champoux, Christensen’s painting reflects particular Latter-day Saint beliefs about materiality and divinity. Implicit in the arc of Christensen’s paintings is the possibility that this very belief about the importance of material, embodied beings and, as Champoux describes elsewhere, relationality between people, is the tensions between the different pieces of Christensen’s own particular experience as a human in mortality that come more to the forefront in his later work.
For individuals interested in the history and development of Mormon and Latter-day Saint visual art, Jennifer Champoux’s C. C. A. Christensen: A Mormon Visionary is deeply illuminating. May the book continue to help us as a people think about how we represent our beliefs and tradition and empower others to pay attention to Mormon artists who have been neglected in our scholarly, critical, and cultural memory.