September 12-13, 2014 — Laura Allred Hurtado

Miller Eccles Study Group Texas is excited to welcome our September 2014 speaker — Laura Allred Hurtado, Global Art Acquisitions Curator for the LDS Church.  Laura is one of the leading lights in the contemporary LDS art community and her presentation promises to be both fascinating and informative.  You won’t want to miss it.

DATES AND LOCATIONS:

Friday, September 12, 7 pm (McKinney)
(at the office of Dale Drake)
110 E. Davis Street
McKinney, Texas 75070

Saturday, September 13, 7 pm (Arlington)
3804 Indian Springs Trail
Arlington, Texas 76016

THE TOPIC:

The Mundane and the Sublime: A Discussion on Mormon Art
Laura will discuss her recently curated exhibition at the LDS Church History Museum Practicing Charity: Everyday Daughters of God. She will also discuss the exhibition Mondo Mormon which was a part of the Utah Biennial at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, and her joint research with Jacob Olmstead regarding the iconography of the Salt Lake temple. In addition, she will explore the problems and challenges associated with depicting the divine, the often tumultuous relationship between the demands of didactic illustrations and artistic expressions. She will also discuss several new acquisitions recently made by the Church History department.

THE SPEAKER:

Laura Allred Hurtado currently works as the Global Acquisitions Art Curator for the LDS Church History Museum, a position that allows her to gather oral histories of significant Mormon artists and collect art that reflects the Mormon experience. Most recently, she published an article in the book Utah’s 15: The State’s Most Influential Artists on the artist Anna Campbell Bliss, presented research on the Turkish artist Canan Şenol at the College Art Association and curated three exhibitions which opened in February and March respectively: Practicing Charity: Everyday Daughters of God at the Church History Museum, Land+Place+Performance at the Granary Art Center and Partial and Plural: Tracing the Intergenerational Self at the Rio Grande Gallery. She has previously worked at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Brigham Young University Museum of Art, and as the acting curator of education at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art.