Ten Years of Mormon Artist

My wife was reading a book yesterday and noticed that the photo in the back was one we’d taken for Mormon Artist. Cue my sudden realization that the ten-year anniversary of the inception of the magazine came and went on June 19 without my noticing. (To be clear, if ten-year anniversaries mean anything, the release of the first issue on September 1, 2008 would be far more deserving. But we’ll just celebrate it today, comfortably sandwiched between both dates.)

I miss Mormon Artist. I made mistakes — the multiple hiatuses, optimizing interview production like mad in the second era (flaying off much of the magazine’s character in the process), ignoring the site’s dire need for a redesign, to name just a few — but I’m proud of what we did. 185 interviews, ten articles, and seventeen podcast episodes. It was hard, but it was wonderful, too, and I hope it helped people in some small way.

While grad school is keeping me from resurrecting the magazine right now, I do hope to do something more (and a little different) with Mormon Artist in a few years. I don’t know exactly what that means, though I have some ideas.

In the meantime, thank you to everyone who was involved — the artists of all kinds who let us interview them; the volunteers who helped with interviews, editing, photography, management, and more; and all the readers. God bless you all.