Have you ever felt that Mormon art was “stuck in a rut?” Have you ever thought that you’re seeing the same 20 paintings in every church building? Do you know the name of even one LDS artist?
Garrick Infanger, director and curator of “The Krakens,” a digital art gallery, set out two years ago to broaden perspectives of LDS art and give LDS artists more exposure.
“I love art and I love to support Mormon artists,” Infanger told Deseret News regarding his motivation for creating the site. “But I didn’t know that many of them. And so I knew that they were out there, and I wanted to find them, and help other people be aware of them.”
Infanger isn’t a professional art critic, he’s actually a management consultant who happened to marry an artist who graduated in illustration from BYU. He has been going to art museums around the world ever since.
After networking, searching online and connecting through social media, Infanger found there was no shortage of LDS artists. In fact, there were hundreds. He was surprised by the number, because he hadn’t seen much coverage of these people from official church sources.
“I just realized there was all this art out there, that there are all these artists. I mean there’s a woman at the University of Georgia, and she is an amazing painter," Infanger said. "And she’s been a professor of art for 30 years. She’s represented by a gallery in Manhattan, but I had never heard of her. She’s never been in any Ensign or anything like that, but she’s just out there, doing her thing.”
In Infanger’s search for LDS artists, sometimes he would find artists all the way across the globe, and other times sometimes they were hiding in plain sight right in his own backyard. He once discovered a painter who lived less than a mile away from a friend who helped him start the blog. As he became acquainted with different cultures around the world, Infanger found that some of the artwork created by LDS artists was not what he was used to seeing in LDS media.
Infanger recognized that he had a choice to make in regard to his website.
“We talked about do we want to focus on Mormon art or Mormon artists, because those are two different things, and we wanted to focus on Mormon artists. And many of them, I’d say more than half, don’t do anything even related to religious art," Infanger said. "I think sometimes when we think about Mormon art we just think about those paintings that hang in the church, but there’s all these artists out there doing things that you wouldn’t think of as ‘Mormon’ so to speak.”
Focusing on Mormon artists, not Mormon art, resulted in a blog that is sprinkled with all kinds of different art. Some of the artists do produce Mormon artwork, so paintings of prophets or temples are not absent from the blog, but there is a multitude of other subjects represented. One artist drew the faces of the band Kiss on dollar bills, another is a sign painter, other works of art are completely abstract.
But even though many of the artists don’t depict LDS scenes in their art, Infanger said he has found that many of the artists still rely on their faith.
“So many of them have these wonderful testimonies of the gospel and use it in their work,” Infanger said. “Even some who do very secular pieces talk about how they seek inspiration, even daily, for the work that they do. So their spiritual approach to their art is very important to them.”
When Infanger interviewed Annie Blake, an artist featured on the blog, she said, “We all speak different spiritual languages, and if I’ve learned anything from the scriptures it’s that God communicates with us in our own language. So the more artistic voices we see expressing truth, the more people can be taught through art. I’m glad the definition of Mormon art is broadening to include more styles and experiences.”
The different styles Blake references are apparent in the blog, as it features a wide variety of art forms, from fine art and painting to collage, carpentry and even fabric weaving.
“I think as we’ve profiled them,” Infanger said. “We wanted a pretty broad spectrum, not just professional artists … like one guy we profiled does custom luxury fountain pens. I think the cheapest ones are like $10,000. We profiled a fashion designer, a prop stylist, one was a mom who does these really impressive drawings on her kids lunch bags every day.”
Infanger said there was no qualifier that the person be professional, recognized or published. That was his job, as the director, to sift through the mountains of artists to find the gold.
Curating “The Krakens” has been a “labor of love,” Infanger said, but now it will be coming to a close. The site will remain up, but no additional interviews or artists will be added, because Infanger no longer has the time for all of the work.
“It was incredibly time-consuming, I worked on it for just about two years, it took hundreds and hundreds of hours of coordinating with the artists, editing the posts, crafting the blog, editing the images, so that it would all go together," he said. "And there were many artists that I didn’t get to interview that I wanted to, and I have hundreds more on my list that I could have looked at, but it was time to pull it together.”
In his final post on Krackens, Infanger shared his hope for his site's patrons: “Art has an indescribable way of connecting us with the spiritual plane. May we each find our innate worth and come one step closer to the people we want to be.”