Keywords

Book of Mormon, Gender, Minerva Teichert, Arnold Friberg

Abstract

To date, the two most important—Certainly the most influential—visual illustrators of the Book of Mormon have been Arnold Friberg and Minerva Teichert. The distance between the ways they render the text into art is real and telling. As Paul Gutjahr notes, "Friberg's most dominant figures are unfailingly men, and almost all of them could have stepped out of the pages of a superhero comic book. By contrast, Teichert "stands out among Mormon artists because of her firm commitment to bringing forward the female elements of the book, carefully evoking the story's feminine side." Although Teichert and Friberg created their paintings almost simultaneously in the 1950s, Friberg’s found their way into an official Latter-day Saint edition of the Book of Mormon in 1963, cementing their popularity and influence, while Teichert’s paintings would largely languish in obscurity until the 1990s. Since the beginning of the new millennium, however, the ubiquity of Teichert’s paintings has begun to surpass the earlier ubiquity of Friberg's.