Megan Knobloch Geilman’s Pietà and the Search for Gynealogies

Heather Belnap, Professor of Art History & Curatorial Studies, BYU

Art & Belief Symposium presentation, BYU Museum of Art, September 24, 2021

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Behold a woman, who cradles in her arms a slain lamb, symbolic of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. This is not any ordinary woman, of course—the halo indicates as much—but a figure who can be viewed as both Mary, Mother of God, and our Heavenly Mother. Titled Pietà, it is a work capacious enough to be viewed as both, and the artist has indicated that she envisioned both Mothers here. I have taken the liberty of subtitling it Mother of God/God the Mother for this presentation to broaden the reading as that of the Divine Feminine. The figure is not the youthful Madonna favored in most depictions, but rather, a mature woman; her face and body marked by the honors of age and exuding an aura of wisdom and capability. Encompassed by a muted but stately blue and bathed in an ethereal light emanating from behind, she turns her face heavenward, her head tilted sharply and neck taut with the strain of the gesture. Her gaze is an overabundant one, holding grief, pain, and supplication, but also faith, hope, and godly comprehension of what has come and what will come to pass. On her lap lies a dead lamb, an age-old symbol of Jesus Christ, its coat indelibly stained with its blood—which is also found on her fingers—she is his mother, after all, and oblivious to such matters. Around the lamb’s neck hangs a rope noose, attached to a span of it that lies pooled near her left foot: this would be used to lead the animal to the slaughter. The bodies of mother and the symbolic Son are oriented on a diagonal that draws the eye to the upper left-hand corner of the image from which another light illuminates the figures below. This light from above is emblematic of the third protagonist of this scene, the implied presence of the Heavenly Father.

Geilman indicates that the main scripture that inspired this tableau is Isaiah 53: 4-7, which reads:

Surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.

Hence, the lamb represented here not only refers to Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, but to all of us who suffer and who die. He—and we—are being held and mourned and comforted by this holy woman, perhaps, even, our Heavenly Mother.

Megan Knobloch Geilman’s magisterial tableau, shot in August 2020 and completed in January 2021, is somewhat of a departure from those in her highly acclaimed 2019 exhibition, Works in Translation. Artworks from this show, including her Queen of the South and Jane, are filled with many objects invested with symbolic meaning, that, to quote scholar Rosalynde Welch, “multiply and overflow the mise en scène. Each photograph is an invitation to read, to decipher, and, inevitably, to interpret.” Geilman’s Pietà (or Mother of God/God the Mother) shifts away from this profusion of object to ensure the focus on the transcendent scene before the viewer. The power of this artwork resides in the immediacy of its visual impact. After one’s initial impression, various rhetorical strategies used to convey meaning and yield expressive content—formal elements, objects, and the like—become evident. But it is in its gestalt that it creates that the power of this image lies. This tableau is asking something somewhat new from her viewers: to be struck by the visual and emotive power of her subject, the mother’s lamentation of her Son and her communion with His Father. Yet, this artwork is also a continuation of the artist’s quest to put women at the center of Latter-day Saint artistic inquiry and to establish “gynealogies,” which can be defined as a genealogy that privileges the lineage of women.

Megan Knobloch Geilman’s Pietà tableau is clearly indebted to Christian masterpieces from the Western tradition—an artistic lineage heavily influenced by its male practitioners. The artist has explicitly cited two masterpieces as sources of inspiration: Michelangelo Buonaratti’s Pietà (1498-99), widely considered as the supreme representation of this scene, and Antonio Canova’s 1805 Tomb of Maria Christina (the latter was suggested by Samantha Zauscher, the work’s photographer). I would add to it the influence of the iconography found in other canonical artworks. The upward gaze of the maternal figure in Geilman’s project bears resemblance to the high priestess communicating with the divine in seventeenth-century Italian painter’s Domenichino’s Cumaean Sibyl. The otherworldly light filtering in from above that bathes the mother and child suggests a transformation from mortal to immortal and is reminiscent of Jacques-Louis David’s painting of French Revolutionary martyr Jean-Paul Marat. The use of the sacrificial lamb in Geilman’s Mother of God/God the Mother to signify the crucifixion of Jesus, as found in Spanish artist Francisco de Zubarán’s moving painting Agnus Dei (1640), is a time-honored symbol in Christian texts.

More importantly, this artwork is representative of an important movement within the Latter-day Saint art tradition. Women artists of the faith are earnestly sought out their matrilineal lines of inheritance and worked to establish of relationships with other “Sister-Saint” artists. In the last few years, dozens, even hundreds, of Latter-day Saint women artists have found in the realm of art a productive and meaningful place to explore their personal conception of and relationship toward the Divine Feminine, and more specifically, Heavenly Mother. Geilman’s latest project asserts the existence of the spiritual and professional bonds that have long connected Latter-day Saint women artists. Pietà: Mother of God/God the Mother is about women’s relationships, women’s labor, and women’s centrality to God’s plan.

Pietà: Mother of God/God the Mother also points to Latter-day Saint women artists’ desire to know and foster an artistic genealogy of their own. Artist Lee Udall Bennion, whose life and work have served as a beacon to subsequent generations of artists in the LDS church, is the model-actor for the holy mother in tableau. The artist knew that she wanted to challenge Michelangelo’s assertion that Mary was “eternally young,” and felt that Lee, whom she had the privilege to work with on a video piece sponsored by the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts titled, Belief in Zion (with LDS women artist collaborators Page Turner and Samantha Zauscher), was the ideal model. Geilman believed that “with her ancient soul and towering wisdom, [Bennion] would give off distinct Heavenly Mother vibes, adding another dimension to this Pietà.” The artist was also tutored by the older Latter-day Saint woman artist in the ways that the value of reciprocity and an ethics of care should undergird our way of approaching the land and its living creatures. Indeed, Geilman’s decision to include a slaughtered sheep in the tableau generated important questions related to ecofeminism. The artist also indicates that she was pleased to learn that Bennion was the first artist in the faith tradition to paint a Madonna with a halo, an approach typically eschewed in our faith’s art tradition, and that she was unwittingly in her footsteps.

Typically, the work of Megan Knobloch Geilman centers on women in both conception and execution. Most of the artworks featured in her Works of Translation exhibition are meditations on women from the Bible and women from LDS church history. As Rosalynde Welch notes in her catalogue essay for that show:

Geilman’s method, intricate tableaux vivant rigorously staged, lit, and photographed, draws on several important Latter-day Saint aesthetic traditions. The images, formal still-life compositions of lavish costumes and props, reflect the rich Mormon history of didactic pageantry, itself a crucial mode of translation between 20th century Mormonism and wider American culture. Their stately composition and decorative flourishes recall the Latter-day Saint painter Minerva Teichert’s indispensable oil paintings of scripture and religious history. The photographed scenes, especially Geilman’s Self Portrait in Collaboration with Page Turner are rich in the traditional handicrafts of Mormon folk art, especially the textile arts including works of dressmaking, tatting, and quilting, some of which Geilman has handmade.

One of the reasons I’ve elected to single out this artwork by Geilman is that it exemplifies that broader trend in the Latter-day Saint art world to recover and reinstate women not only as subjects but especially as makers. Sadly, this “search and rescue mission” in the LDS visual art scene lags in comparison to other areas of the humanities and the arts—particularly in fields of history and literature, where the faith tradition have more firmly established heritages. Over the course of the last decade, even last five years, this recuperative and restorative enterprise has picked up steam. I see this phenomenon as closely related to what might be called “the Mormon moment” for women, marked by 2012 non-institutional initiatives such as Ordain Women and Wear Pants to Church, and with publications such as Neylain McBaine’s Women at Church: Magnifying LDS Women’s Local Impact (2014), Rachel Hunt Steenblik and Hannah Wheelwright’s Mormon Feminism: Essential Writings reader (2017), Jenny Reeder and Kate Holbrook’s church-sponsored At the Pulpit: 185 Years of LDS Women’s Discourses (2017), and LDS women’s histories written by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (2017) and Colleen McDannell (2018).

It is also connected to the maturation of a generation of Latter-day Saint women who have reaped the benefits of the first and second generation of women scholars and believers who did important cultural work. This “Mormon moment” includes a new movement of sorts among LDS women artists, who are using their artistic talent and professional training to explore beliefs, learn histories, and establish practices that are more woman-centered. Key elements of this turn involve creating networks and cultivating communities of fellow members of the faith. 

Significantly, the representation of holy women is a key component of this cultural development. The remarkable upsurge of Heavenly Mother imagery generated visual artists is arguably the most significant development in the Latter-day Saint contemporary art scene. While there are certainly some men artists participating in this phenomenon, it is primarily women practitioners who are engaging with the Divine Feminine. Fueled by a hunger for greater light and knowledge of Heavenly Mother and a deeply held desire to forge a relationship with her, the art of Caitlin Connolly, Ann Gregerson, Eliza Crofts, Carol Lippard, Kwani Povi Windor, and Charlotte Scholl Schurtz  speak to key issues with which LDS women are grappling, including questions related to their identity and nature, their roles and responsibilities, their earthly and eternal purpose and promise, and their heritage and birthright.  As Geilman points out:  “That’s one of the powers of art—[it offers] a safe place to consider perspectives that are not your own, and then you can digest them at whatever pace you need.”

The 2021 Certain Women’s exhibition theme, “Reflections on a Mother in Heaven,” powerfully demonstrates how Latter-day Saint women artists are ruminating upon and paying homage to the Divine Feminine. This invitational has become a (if not the) key site of community and consecration for women who identify as Latter-day Saints and who see their work as emerging out of their shared commitment to following the Gospel of Jesus Christ and engaging with the doctrine, history, and culture of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  The world of art offers an important space for contemporary Latter-day Saints to come to know their heavenly ancestry and honor their worldly artistic inheritance. 

 Since its founding, our women have always made art. Nineteenth-century foremothers such as Bathsheba Smith, who sketched church leaders in Nauvoo, and Mary Teasdel, who spent years training in Paris so that she could create art that attested to the “harmony, beauty, and eternal fitness” of God’s plan, demonstrated the centrality of their faith to their artistic practice. Twentieth-century artist Mabel Frazer cared for nothing, according to her sister’s biography, but God and art; her contemporary, Minerva Teichert, devoted dozens of canvases to telling the story of her people. The lineage of Latter-day Saint women artists is long and illustrious. When I tell my students theirs is a rich heritage, they express surprise and confess to only being able to name often one or two LDS women artists, past or present. Many of the women art students I’ve worked with at Brigham Young University over the last 20 years believe that they are without mentors to provide a model for navigating life as an artist-Saint. This perceived lack of matrilineality must be addressed. Ours is an abundant family tree, but there is much work to do in filling in its branches. While there are many LDS women making art, they are often doing so in isolation who yearn for supportive communities. LDS art historians and museum curators and archivists need to work more assiduously to raise awareness of this tradition and preserve it through written, visual, and digital records.

While Megan Knobloch Geilman and her Pietà serve as a case study of this new generation of Latter-day Saint women artists who are orienting their work toward women as subjects and viewers, it does not typify the field of LDS art. This tableau, and the body of work from which it springs, has many complexities—theologically, historically, aesthetically—that my remarks today have only begun to intimate. It possesses a maturity of vision and sophistication of expression that is, I daresay, unrivalled to date in the field of Latter-day Saint representations of Heavenly Mother. That it reverences our sacred and earthly gynealogies makes it that much more compelling as an object of study and emulation.