The Mormon Arts Center in collaboration with the Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah, is sponsoring a Conference on Teaching Mormon Arts. It is a day for discussion for artists, teachers, scholars, and administrators, with particular attention to literature, music, theater and film, visual arts, and dance. The focus is on teaching in colleges and universities but the same principles apply to teaching at any level. The conference will be held at the Fort Douglas Officers Club, 150 Fort Douglas Boulevard, Salt Lake City, January 20, 2018, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. There will be no charge for conference attendance. Lunch will be provided for registrants. Go to the Mormon Arts Center website to register.
For part of the day, the conference will break out into individual sessions by artistic discipline to discuss approaches. For these break-out sessions, we would like examples of syllabi, reading lists, and so forth to serve as a basis of discussion. Participants are encouraged to indicate in their registration if they are willing to prepare such an example. We will need the materials by January 1, 2018 so they can be duplicated for distribution to the group.
The aim of the discussions will be to identify issues and needs. What are the problems and questions that arise in teaching Mormon Arts? What materials are needed to make teaching practical? After these individual discussions, we will come together to compare notes.
At the end, the conference will address the practical obstacles to teaching Mormon Arts and how we might best collaborate to surmount these barriers. We will also reflect on the larger issues associated with teaching about art that emerges from a religious culture.