Mormon Artists Group

Mormon Artists Group is pleased to announce the publication of

I VISIT THE SPIRIT WORLD
WITH MY MOTHER

By Brent Wilson

Around 1885, a young mother living in Logan, Utah, Lerona Abigail Martin Wilson, described the experience of leaving the earth and visiting the spirit world, guided by her mother who had died three months earlier:

“…There was a rushing, as of wind, and a rustling as of autumn leaves that filled me with a kind of timid fear. Just then the room lighted with a soft white light, and I wondered how the moon could be so bright, as the room seemed lighter than midday. At this point, I saw mother enter the door, looking as natural as life. She came directly to my bedside and greeted me….”

“…I told her I was glad she had come while I was awake. This time she had come, she said, to take me with her.”

So begins the narrative of an extraordinary journey through space to a world of spirits. Lerona describes in her autobiography the community of the spirit world, its buildings, people, landscape, and activities.

People flying off into space to heaven? Descriptions of daily life in the afterlife? What is a modern reader to do with such a fantastic tale?

THE TEXT

As unlikely as it seems to us today, Lerona Wilson’s life was punctuated by such otherworldly events. Her reputation as a visionary and healer was well known in Northern Utah and by church publications at the turn of the century. In an article published in the February 1916 Relief Society Magazine, for example, Lerona tells of another vision in which her deceased family appeared to her and encouraged her to do their temple work.

The Wilson family has been aware of Lerona’s visions since they were collected in 1919 as Life Sketches and Experiences of Lerona A. Wilson. (I Visit the Spirit World with My Mother is but one of the chapters of the autobiography.) But even within the Wilson family, the text is subject to debate. For years, it has been both a family treasure and a source of discomfort. Is it to be accepted at face value, that is, are the accounts revelations? Although copies of the story have circulated within the family, the book has never been published

The first thing a viewer notices about the images below (a two-page spread from I Visit the Spirit World…) are the bright, orange Xs that cross out the text. For the artist, Brent Wilson who is Lerona’s great-grandson and has known of the visions from the age of six or seven, the Xs represent the personal ways he and his family have responded to Lerona’s visions. After she was commanded by an angel to write an account of her visions and prophecies, which the heavenly messenger promised her would become as widely read as John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, her husband was reluctant to have them published, and the generations that followed him were likewise conflicted. They loved the visions and valued them, but at the same time they stopped short of letting them go out into the world.

For the artist, the Xs are a response to the legacy of his family’s self-censorship and a general tendency to reject the possibility that personal revelation may have church-wide or worldwide relevance. Ironically, attempts to censor only increase curiosity to the censored thing; the Xs draw attention to the text.

Wilson adds:

“We Mormons believe in both a pre-mortal and a post-mortal spirit world. How could one not be fascinated by a detailed account of a visit to the place where we go when we die? But especially I was attracted to Lerona’s vivid descriptions of her visions. I was attracted to their visual qualities. At the same time that I was fascinated with how her visions reinforced Mormon beliefs. Lerona had two gifts: one was to have spiritual manifestations and the other was her amazing ability to write about them.

“I’ve just remembered that one of the most powerful things that attracted me to the “I Visit…” vision. It was the greyhound dog that accompanied my deceased great-great grandmother when she came to take Lerona to the Spirit World. In Christian symbolism the dog is a traveling companion for the dead—and the dog is also associated with symbolisms for mother and the resurrection. I am still amazed that this mythic dimension appears in the vision. I say to myself, ‘Lerona could not have known of this kind of mythic symbolism.’ It connects her vision to something deep, to something that extends beyond customary Mormon beliefs. Over the years, in my journals, I have drawn hundreds of images of the grandmothers and the dog flying through space.

“I might add that I see Lerona’s visions as a fulfillment of Joel 2: 28, ‘And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.’”

AN ARTIST BOOK

Brent Wilson has employed the heirloom text and explored it as an artist book by taking the 22-page narrative and adding imagery that illuminates and comments on the vision. Using a visual language quoting from 20th century Surrealists (whose dates correspond roughly to Lerona’s) the artist has created an artist book of unusual power and sophistication in the tradition of French livres d’artistes.

THE ARTIST

Brent Wilson is one of America’s leading art educators. He has authored or co-authored six influential books, six dozen research publications, book chapters and chapters in conference proceedings, and over a hundred research and evaluative reports to agencies and organizations.

During his thirty years at Penn State he developed the first National Assessment of Educational Progress in Art, drafted The National Endowment for the Arts’ Toward Civili-zation: A Report to the President and Congress (1987) regarding arts education in the US, and evaluated professional development programs for the Getty Education Institute for the Arts, which culminated in the publication of The Quiet Evolution: Changing the Face of Arts Education (1997).

Aside from his scholarship, Brent Wilson is a visual artist of distinction. He works have been displayed recently in one-person shows in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and at the Pearl Street Gallery in New York City. The New York exhibition put on display a collection of his journals and artist books, Brent Wilson: Journals & Journeys.

Wilson describes his process as follows:

“In the mid-1970s I began to carry sketchbooks which I filled with plans for bronzes, ceramic works, and paintings. These envisioned works seldom escaped my sketchbooks. I was too busy teaching, researching, and publishing things such as books and articles about how kids learn to draw by borrowing others’ images.

“In 1978 when I started to write notes around my sketches, perhaps it was an unconscious modeling of Leonardo’s sketchbooks. “The idea of making artist books was a natural next step and my journals began to fill with plans for books, mostly unrealized. About a dozen years ago, images of my great-grandmother’s astonishing visions of deceased ancestors and the spirit worlds they occupy began to dominate the journals. These images have now become folios based on Lerona’s life.”

THE VOLUME

I Visit the Spirit World with My Mother contains 22 pages in two-page folio spreads 12.5″ x 18″ plus the title page, copyright, and signed/numbered colophon pages. These are unbound sheets presented in a handmade clamshell case covered in blue Asahi silk from Japan with an inset image on the front cover. The paper for the volume is handmade Lhakpa from Nepal. It is an extraordinary paper grown and produced at the highest elevation that supports life on the planet. A sample of the book is enclosed with this prospectus. The pages are Epson inkjet printed on Lhakpa.

I Visit the Spirit World with My Mother is limited to 50 copies for sale plus five artists’ proofs. Of the 50, half of the copies are already reserved. We are pleased to announce that this volume has entered the collection of the Museum of Modern Art / Franklin Furnace / Artist Book Collection, New York.

I Visit the Spirit World with My Mother - $150