MOA Blog

Artwork of the Week: May 4

Readings from Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, and Judges

Dixon loved and respected the indigenous people who often appeared in his paintings. He was inspired by their physical resilience as well as by the spiritual knowledge he believed that they drew from their relationship with the land. At times, they invited him to witness some of their sacred ceremonies, and he believed his role as an artist put him in a unique position to explore these sacred rites. Dixon allowed his imagination to edit and augment the things he saw when visiting with the Hopi and Navajo peoples and acknowledged that others might not see this world as he was presenting it.

Some amazing MOA employees are graduating!

This painting’s enigmatic title is a perfect fit for its intriguing subject, where an unknown woman dressed in black sits with her hands in her lap, her eyes seemingly focused on nothing. What is she waiting for? Perhaps she waits for a family member or friend to pay her a visit. Given the woman’s attire and the painting’s somber tone, whether knowingly or not, she also seems to be waiting for death. We will likely never know what Rose Hartwell intended this painting to mean, so we too are left waiting to know this woman’s story.

Painted while Moser was studying art in Paris, this painting lacks the bold color and loose brushwork that came to dominate the artist’s style when he returned to Utah. In Paris, he was surrounded not only by academic tradition, but by modern art’s many new aesthetic possibilities. Judging from his mature style, he was observing much during this time, even though his own output remained relatively conservative. This painting, and others of the time, show the influence of the Barbizon School of landscape painting, an influential nineteenth-century movement that emphasized painting outdoors.

'Mimi Chen Ting' Retrospective Debuts at BYU Museum of Art

Thalmann evokes the notion of communion in a series of prints of worshippers within dramatic cathedral interiors. His strong lines and contrast of deep pools of shadow with bold spaces of radiant light conveys the reverence and anticipatory sublime of a worship experience. The cathedral, with its Gothic-style archways, and hooded bowed forms moving silently, exude a timeless quality of devotion, where man—insignificant compared to the vast reaches of the cathedral space—is brought to feel the immensity of the divine.

A special Easter message and readings from Exodus

Rose Hartwell’s painting of a pawn shop might bring to mind thrifting, vintage objects, and searching for that special something. Yet pawn shops also attest to acts of financial desperation. This depiction of a pawn shop corner window includes valuables like a traditional Chinese cash coin, cowrie and spiral seashells, a Grecian-style vase, and gold and silver jewelry intermingled with open pocket watches.