Are scholars and museums ignoring Mormon artists?

Try

searching for \"Mormon\" on the Web site of New York's Museum of Modern

Art, and MOMA will ask if you meant \"mormons.\" But don't get your hopes

up — refining your search returns just one page, a profile of Dorothea

Lange, who photographed Mormon subjects for Life in the mid-1950s.

Searching the sites of other major U.S. museums shows MOMA is not an

isolated offender. The National Gallery of Art has hosted musicians who

previously performed with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and the Orchestra

at Temple Square. A quilts exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art

Museum mentioned the Mormon Trail, and the collection includes Thomas

Moran's painting Mist in Kanab Canyon, Utah, while New York's Metropolitan Museum site yields only one hit: Charles William Carter's print Mormon Emigrant Train, Echo Canyon.

The conspicuous absence of Mormon art in U.S. museums begs the

question: Are art institutions maliciously turning a blind eye on LDS

artists, or have LDS artists and cultural institutions done a poor job

of marketing themselves to the wider public? And whichever is the case,

are there good reasons why non-Mormons should take Mormon art seriously?

\"I suspect most people don't even know there is such a thing as

Mormon art,\" says Dr. Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, adjunct professor of

religious art and cultural history at Georgetown University's Prince

Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding.

Apostolos-Cappadona, whose publications include Encyclopedia of Women in Religious Art and Dictionary of Christian Art,

says she has rarely encountered Mormon art or artists as specific