Review
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Title: Latter-day Saint Art: A Critical Reader
Editors: Amanda K. Beardsley and Mason Kamana Allred
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Genre: Academic, essay collection
Year Published: 2024
Number of Pages: 644
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 9780197632505
Price: $49.99
Reviewed by Conor Hilton for the Association of Mormon Letters
Latter-day Saint Art: A Critical Reader is a landmark achievement. The hefty volume, edited by Amanda K. Beardsley and Mason Kamana Allred, and featuring the work of over twenty contributors, demonstrates the richness of the Latter-day Saint art tradition and the wealth of potential in examining it. The book’s essays cover a wide range of historical periods, geographic areas, and visual art mediums. Many of the essays are focused on specific movements or time periods, while a couple offer more general theories of aesthetics rooted in the Latter-day Saint art in question.
The book’s academic insights are worthy of praise on their own, but the book also offers rich, full-color reproductions of much of the art that is discussed. The book is thoughtfully laid out, with high-quality printing, letting you appreciate the art as much as possible from a photograph. Reading through the volume made me even more devastated to miss the Work & Wonder exhibition at the Church History Museum (which concluded in March 2025).
As is almost always the case with academic essay collections, I found myself drawn more to some essays than others. Though the quality of work throughout the collection was quite high, I look forward to revisiting some of the essays I found particularly insightful, as well as some that didn’t speak as much to me in my current interests and personal context.
The book as a whole offers a rich engagement with Latter-day Saint art throughout the history of the religious movement, and begins to touch on the increasingly global nature of it. I hope to see countless people take the ideas and topics explored here and complicate, enrich, and challenge them. If Latter-day Saint Art: A Critical Reader is a success, it will spark an outpouring of scholarship on Latter-day Saint art, alongside a deepened cultural engagement with our art, broadly understood.
May Latter-day Saint Art: A Critical Reader be widely read and be only the first of many such volumes covering all sorts of Mormon art forms—literature, even more on film, and various folk art practices. The volume is packed with insights and observations worth considering about the ways art functions in temples or temples function as art themselves, about what documentary film suggests about Mormon identity, about the complicated legacy of the Art and Belief movement, about the continually identity-seeking nature of LDS art, and so much more. Allred and Beardsley have brought us a beautiful book to hold and read, filled with scholarship worthy of our time and energies.