If feminist art cuts through female stereotypes, opens new spaces for women, and illuminates the need for gender equality, Leslie Olpin Peterson is a feminist artist. The LDS watercolorist who painted portraits of Joseph Smith’s 34 “Forgotten Wives,” had all her “Wives” on exhibit at the University of Utah’s Olpin Center during 2015’s Salt Lake Sunstone Symposium. In this and similar exhibitions inside Utah, Peterson not only gave the Wives a proper introduction to modern Mormon society but to local press and the national media as well. In a short time, her work generated a national and international dialogue within a discursive space that had once been silent.
When resuscitating Joseph’s wives, Peterson purposely made them look better than their vintage photographs—to honor them, she says. Her translation of unsmiling black-and-white pictures into vibrant, stylized portraits was a compelling way to introduce these 19th-century plural wives to the post-modern world. Just as advertisers assemble dazzling colors in exciting combinations to draw the eye to new products, Peterson used a whimsical style and luminous hues to highlight a group of women who played important but rarely remembered roles in the establishment of Zion. Inspired by the Church’s public acknowledgement of Joseph’s wives in an article recently posted on lds.org, Peterson’s illustrations are one woman’s response to the current hierarchy’s shift to more honest Mormon history. They are also an attempt to inject a woman’s perspective into that move and foster discussions that cannot currently take place within the confines of Mormon orthodoxy. Peterson is not merely painting; she is testing the boundaries and politics of Mormon authoritative discourse.
Like Amedeo Modigliani’s stylized portraits, Peterson’s “Wives” share uniform traits such as elongated necks and striking facial expressions. These common features give the collection coherence without impinging on each woman’s individuality. Unlike Modigliani, who used deep, sometimes muddy autumnal tones, Peterson used shades of spring that evoke Easter, which is fitting since her subjects are (at least virtually) resurrected. The Wives’ watercolor faces are unaffected and congenial compared to the staid portraits and formal photographs of Mormonism’s male-dominated iconography. Brigham Young’s imperious, sepia-toned pose contrasts tellingly with Peterson’s Helen Mar Kimball at 14, in melancholy pigtails as she contemplates the surrender of her youth to a man 23 years older.
By upending the Church’s establishment style, Peterson’s illustrations reflect the unpremeditated, slightly chaotic feminine energy that has “gone missing” from our androcentric church. Masculine energy is rule-bound, logical, structured, conservative, controlled, and controlling. Feminine energy is free-flowing, flexible, expansive, liberal, boundless and unbound. Peterson has restored some of that feminine energy, allowing the two energies to synchronize—making a moment of masculine-feminine harmony.
This avant-garde dynamic is not unusual for feminist artists. They often adopt unorthodox methods, modalities, and elements to release their subjects from the sticky filaments of patriarchal hegemony. Peterson does this by including elements of mischief and contrariness in her work. Each wife’s name appears in her portrait, crawling like a caterpillar up her left-facing shoulder. And Peterson’s “Forgotten Wives” poster, which assembles all 34 wives on one large sheet and resembles a general authority chart, is a cheeky proposition that institutional power is not for men only. In short, Peterson’s message is more than just the sum of the portraits of the wives themselves; rather, it changes how one sees women, how one senses the authority of their presence in Church history—and by extension—how we see our own authority.
Though Joseph Smith’s concept of priesthood included an equilibrium of Kings and Queens, priests and priestesses, Victorian-Era Saints struggled to absorb and sustain such radical notions of gender. Though the postmodern world is more amenable to Smith’s priest-priestess equivalence, LDS feminists and Church leaders are still wrangling over how these duties should weigh out in the contemporary Church organization. But Peterson hasn’t waited for a resolution to the dispute. Despite her lack of an official priesthood office, her portraits are a force. She has become one of many maverick priestesses moving Mormon women toward equality. Mediating between “the Wives” and “the World,” she has performed a kind of priestly ordinance that opens the Church to an expanded female presence. By bringing Smith’s “Forgotten Wives” into visual remembrance and using communication arteries beyond the Church’s correlated system, she has infused Mormonism with feminine energy. Whether the Church hierarchy approves or not is immaterial. When the energy is effective, approval and correlation don’t matter.
Despite its outlier tactics, Peterson’s art creates a lively collaboration with the official Church. Even as the Council of the Twelve releases its correlated message to Latter-day Saints through an all-male, trickle-down structure centered in the Church Office Building, Peterson launches her playful, personal message horizontally through the Internet’s freeform web. Her message emanates from her art blog; her Etsy store; her Facebook feed; articles on lds.net; a Fox 13 News report; a YouTube documentary short called “Celebrating the Forgotten Wives of Joseph Smith” that won the 2015 Salt Lake Film Society/VideoWest Award; and the online versions of the Salt Lake Tribune, Ogden Standard Examiner, Huffington Post, and New York Times. And yet—despite these distinctly different delivery systems—the Brethren and Peterson are in a point-counterpoint interface, neither voice undermining the other. Church leaders sang the first chorus by coming clean about Smith’s multiple marriages in the article on lds.org titled, “Plural Marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo.” Later, Peterson painted her portraits and gained media attention. Today, Peterson’s multicolored images invigorate the dialogue about Smith’s wives, making it not only more personal but also more female.
When the “Forgotten Wives” were on exhibit at the 2015 Sunstone Symposium, women exclaimed in delight when they found the portrait of a Smith Wife who was a link in their own lineage. Scripture describes this moment of recognition as turning “the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers” (Malachi 4: 6). Evoking humanity’s connection over eras and generations, this verse portrays humanity as coherent and connected. Of course, the missing element in “fathers and children” is mothers—an element Peterson has done her part to include through her visual and amiable confrontation with a preeminent generation of Mormon women.