McEntire was born Sept. 30, 1946, in Wichita Falls, Texas. When he was 9, his family moved to Houston. Reared a Baptist, he later joined the Lutheran Church during junior high school. He loved to draw, and after high school he attended Lon Morris College, where he studied theater arts and painted scenery for the school before graduating with an associate's degree.

At the same time, McEntire began studying nontraditional, unorthodox religions. "I guess today we'd call them new age or occult kinds of things. But that was in the mid-'60s."

After a year of studying at the University of Texas, he dropped out and moved to Los Angeles to become part of the Hare Krishna movement. "I think that was in '68 or '69." He was sent to Boulder, Colo., to open a temple site but began having "inner conflicts about Jesus and Krishna."

Back in Los Angeles, McEntire met a pair of LDS missionaries, but it was only after he hitchhiked back to Houston that he took the missionary discussions and joined the church.

While serving as an LDS missionary in Washington state (1971-73), he came into contact with the religious practices of the Northwest Coast Indians and became entranced with their art and use of objects in their rituals.

"Obviously," said Jim Edwards, curator of exhibitions at the Salt Lake Art Center, "Frank's work has to do with his interests in spiritual matters and with religion. From Buddhist to Hare Krishna to LDS to all kinds of religious symbology, his background is very diverse. I know very few artists who explore the area he explores."

McEntire completed his studies for his bachelor's degree in theater and cinematic arts at Brigham Young University and in 1976 received his master's degree in the same emphasis. (It was also at BYU that McEntire met his future wife, Marjorie Hinckley. "Frank always had dedicated studio space at home," she said. "When we lived in Springville 30 years ago, he had his easel and materials set up.")

While in Springville, McEntire had an epiphany: "I could marry my 3-D theatrical passions with my studio work." The first manifestation of this union was a show at the Springville Museum of Art in the '80s. Titled "Divining," the tableaus McEntire created were inspired by the Mormon magic world-view in the early church and all his previous, ubiquitous religious studies.

In order to create his art, McEntire has procured some rather unusual stuff over the years — angels, cages, traps, crucifixes, sticks, stones, small figures of Christ, feathers and pop-icon figurines, miniature temples, Hindu gods, scriptures, prayer and hymn books, the Virgin Mary, the angel Moroni and Buddha.