Mormon Artist will stay as it is for now, but if/when we resurrect it, we’ll consider changing the name. (I’ll admit that the lack of a short, simple adjective to replace “Mormon” is kind of hard, with “LDS” out of the running as well, but we’ll cross that bridge later. Hopefully the forthcoming instructions will have some good solutions.)

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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.

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Whew.

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And so it ends. (My involvement, anyway.) As you’ll see in the editors’ notes, Katherine Morris is now editor-in-chief and publisher of the magazine, effective immediately. Over the next couple weeks I’ll be migrating the website to her server and handing over the other keys of the kingdom, and she’ll be getting the first few episodes of the new podcast out soon. And it’ll be good.

Three years. Whew.

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It’s been a good three years — in our seventeen issues (including #16 and our contest issue), we’ll have featured over 130 Latter-day Saint artists. We published some important special issues (New York City, international, and science fiction and fantasy), and I hope we accomplished our goal of showing that there’s a lot more going on in the Latter-day Saint arts world than many of us realized.

Why it’s ending

While I’ve loved doing Mormon Artist, it’s time for me to move on to other projects.

And no, this isn’t because we ran out of content. The field is just as white as ever, and there are still scads of people to interview — more than we could ever hope to feature. Even though we’re laying Mormon Artist to rest, it’s my hope that others will join sites like Linescratchers and The Cricket and Seagull in filling the niche. (A few of my editors will be starting a new venture covering LDS arts, by the way. I’ll have more details on that when they’re ready to launch.)

Some of you may be wondering why I’m shutting the whole thing down instead of just getting someone else to run the magazine. Even if it were easy to find someone to helm a non-profit gig like this, I’d much rather see fresh approaches — new variations on the theme, if you will. The way we’ve done things with Mormon Artist isn’t the only way to cover the Mormon arts world.

What’s going to happen next

Sometime in June, we’ll publish Issue 16 (this time all our interviewees are female, by the way — mostly since in Issue 15 they were all male). And then the curtain will fall.

I’ll keep the website up for the foreseeable future, of course, and comments will stay open, but we won’t be creating any new content under the Mormon Artist banner.

I do want to say thanks to everyone who has been involved with Mormon Artist over the last three years — readers, volunteers, interviewees, all y’all. It’s been wonderful. The magazine has been a huge part of my life, not to mention its role in helping me meet my future wife, and I’ll always look back on these days with fondness. But there are exciting new things ahead, too. Onward ho.

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