WHEN I ORIGINALLY SAT DOWN with the artist Angela Ellsworth and our Senior Editor, Spencer Windes, I expected a normal interview. What neither Angela nor Spencer realized was how much they had in common. Both of them, it turns out, have backgrounds and childhoods deeply rooted in Mormon culture. Both have prominent Mormon ancestors, prophets of the church. Both are queer.
Before I could ask more than a single question, they were talking deeply about their past, the common experiences they shared, and what it meant for them in their lives today. I ended up as an observer as two people shared their similar stories. That’s what this is – a discussion of two people who came out the other side and how their experience has led them to where they are today.
Tell me about your background.
AE: Born in California, formative years in Salt Lake City, Utah. Raised Mormon forever.
SW: Me too. Was your family active in the church?
AE: Very. Very. My father was a bishop twice.
Bishop?
It’s like you have a father and a mother who were working all the time and then they’re working in the church all the time. My dad wasn’t around a whole lot because he was blessing people and then running a company and stuff like that.
SW: A congregation might be hundreds of people and you’re like their pastor. They spend a lot of time blessing people.
AE: Yeah, anointing, special oils and things like that. And my great, great grandfather was (Mormon prophet) Lorenzo Snow.
SW: Wow! My great uncle, whom I’m named after, was the prophet, Spencer W. Kimball.
AE: Whoa, high five on that. Mine had nine wives. It’s such a patriarchal culture, and then suddenly you’ve got this woman, Eliza Snow, who happened to be my great, great aunt, who wrote hymns for the hymn book. It’s like, wow, there’s a woman doing something. She was married to Joseph Smith. Then once he passed away, all the wives, including my great, great aunt, well, Brigham Young took them on. That’s why he had so many wives.
Does that mean that your lineage is that of a prophet?
AE: Well, it’s interesting. If I ever rejoin the Mormon Church, rock star. But I wasn’t a very good Mormon girl for many reasons. I was in a public high school (in Salt Lake City), which was predominantly Mormon, then transferred to a private school, Roland Hall. Things opened up a little bit more to me because there really wasn’t anyone Mormon there.
SW: You started having contact with gentiles.
AE: Exactly. I was kind of a party girl. I skied, I raced, I was having a good time. My parents eventually said, You smell like cigarettes and coffee and who knows what else that you’re hungover with; you’re not going to come to church anymore because you’re just embarrassing.
At the end of high school, my family moved to Chicago and I went away to college. I went to Hampshire College, which could not be more opposite from my experience. Oh, my God. I mean, the opposite. I was so intrigued by this other world. I was exposed to things. My mom was a feminist, but never would have admitted it.
Once I went to college, I just blocked out my entire formative years. I’d say I was born in California and lived in Chicago. I ran away as far as possible, went back East, lived in Europe. I eventually left Europe when I realized I’d lived in Italy for six years, but I would never be Italian. They didn’t know The Brady Bunch, they didn’t know those weird formative things.
Then I think it was in 2005, I started talking about sister wives, this notion of sister wives and being queer. It was a little bit of a joke, but in reality, it was the thing that allowed me to shake hands with my history. It allowed me, being a queer woman, being non-heteronormative, not being a one-man woman, very much like my history.
But the Mormon church is famously anti-gay.
SW: Ironically, the entire reason that marriage in America became a legal institution as opposed to more of a cultural institution was because the Mormons were polygamists and people were so freaked out about it, they passed laws codifying marriage and the rules around marriage, only because of the Mormons.
Then Mormons turn around and do exactly the same thing that was done to them to another population. I find that incredibly hard. If you learned the lessons from the Mormon history of persecution and of being targeted by the government, what you should learn is that the government should stay the hell out of people’s personal relationships and their marriages.
AE: I know. That was during the time that they started encouraging kids that were gay in the Mormon church to come out and be open with it, that they’d be accepted. And really, there’s no acceptance. It’s like you come out and then you can’t act out on your desires, you can’t be who you really are. You can still be Mormon if you don’t fuck anyone the same sex. So it’s hate. It’s just self-hate. I find it scary.
SW: You have been working on a project about Mormon Seer bonnets since the early ‘90s. These are pioneer bonnets covered in thousands of steel, pearl-tipped corsage pins.
AE: Yes. My great, great grandfather was a Mormon prophet and had nine wives. So I made a bonnet for each one of those wives, naming them and acknowledging who they are, because sister wives tend to be invisible. The founder of the Mormon Church, Joseph Smith was known to have around 35 wives, but now they have discovered that he may have had 45 or more. There are also other prophets, so that will continue.
I also make pearl corsage pins that are traditionally used for rites of passage, they’re used for weddings, they’re used for quinceañeras. So, they’re important. That one pin is critical to the whole piece. And yes, they’re beautiful, you’re drawn to them, and then they’re also really dangerous.
I think they talk about the conflict or the sort of discomfort with something that may be appealing or is then also questionable in terms of whether it’s appealing or uncomfortable. Because the bonnets, we can’t put them on our head, but people respond to them. And I do too. If one could put it on, it would not feel good.
These bonnets really stand in for women. Because of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, I’m now acknowledging women within the healthcare justice field and reproductive justice field that are alive today.
How did the idea come to you?
AE: Things that we grow up with, religion, whether it’s traumatic or not traumatic, we tend to remember these things. They just get stuck in your craw. So we always had bonnets in our house because we were supposed to do these reenactments and do parades, wearing prairie dresses and the hats and things. They were really a common thing within a Mormon household.
It’s like Duchamp’s readymades, taking a common thing and giving it new meaning.
AE: I needed to take that object and do something with it, and I wanted to do something with it that changed it and spoke to something that was not a heroic idea, not a sort of colonizing action, and allow it to be something that suggested something new.
You are also a founder of The Museum of Walking, an artist-led educational resource center committed to the advancement of walking as an art practice.
AE: The Museum of Walking engages bodies, it engages people. We do walks every month. When we started, I was sort of like, what if I set up a walk and no one comes? What if no one comes to the walk? But people came, lots of people started coming. You know, one walk was over 400 people.
We do silent walks and I think people were intrigued by this notion of walking in silence, not as a meditation, not as a religious practice, not necessarily even a pilgrimage, but just being quiet and allowing ourselves to hear nature, to be under the full moon and hear the critters and hear the birds.
It’s analog. It’s… no technology is needed. We don’t even need lights when it’s a full moon. It’s just, it’s easeful, it’s so simple.
Walking is very different than running. It’s not about a goal. It’s not about a race. It’s just about being in the world.
There are artists that make work from their walks. Probably the most famous, Richard Long, an English artist who would walk solo, solitary, never with anyone else, and he would take pictures, but he would, for instance, walk a line in the landscape and he would walk one way… back, forth, back, forth, until it pushed down the earth and the grass to make a line. He’s drawing on the planet, he’s drawing on earth. There’s many artists that are also, for political reasons, for pilgrimages, doing reenactments of walks that are related to uprisings.
SW: The Navajo Long Walk, the Trail of Tears. Selma.
AE: For me, my interest is, where do the art and the political come together? There are artists that are referencing those walks and maybe reenacting them or redoing them, but usually with a conceptual underpinning.
It can go back all the way to Socrates, the Peripatetics, walking and thinking. It’s totally connected. I come from visual art, but then I was doing all this work on the body, because that’s also the core of pretty much everything I’ve done. I realized if I just did performance, I didn’t have to spend so much time painting a figure. I just use it. I was talking about bodies that were oozing out of clothing and feeling uncomfortable, and they were all images of me. I just started using my own body, which is like, oh, that’s access right there. I still am interdisciplinary and do all these different things, but the body, walking, movement, engaging, it’s community. Think about some of the first ways we thought about art. It’s from nature, from outside. One of my Museum of Walking taglines is, beauty begins outside the museum. It’s about sometimes just shutting the fuck up to pay attention.
It’s almost like meditation, the repetition of walking.
AE: The repetition, it’s simple and it’s engaging, and it will never be the same. Walking the same Arroyo over and over again is always different.
Repetitive motions, there’s a holiness in that, right?
AE: Right. There’s a sacrament, and there’s little things you do over and over again.
SW: Pioneer mythology plays a big part in your art. How should the descendants of colonists live in this landscape. Can we ever truly be a part of it? What debt do we owe to the indigenous people of this land?
AE: I think as an artist; because we have the privilege of reimagining history and representing something from another angle. I’ve done some performances with all these sister wives and we’ve always talked about how we’re itinerant. We’re not staking claim on anything. I mean, I tricked out beautiful hand carts with white leather.
This notion of moving, not claiming land, that’s really huge. It’s about escaping from that patriarchal culture and being on the move and not trying to stake claim to anything. I think the thing that we can do is that we can listen. We can listen. That’s why Museum of Walking does a lot of silent walks.
SW: You had a talk scheduled at BYU that was canceled?
AE: They said, well, there’s just a climate on campus. Well, what’s the climate? This is homophobia. Right in my face. When you feel things like that, it feels like something slow and strange is happening. Then it’s oh, that’s what that is. Yeah. It was really… It was very weird. I told her, I’m really sorry for your students. I’m sorry. Whatever the climate is. I’m sorry that they’re not getting to hear a talk by an international artist.
SW: The church, which owns BYU, is cracking down on the non-orthodox.
AE: With all the women’s health care justice issues, my newer bonnets are sort of transforming into more of an army. They’re not white and pretty, they’re black and pewter and white and they’re harder edged and some of the ruffles are going away. They are all named after women who are living and have been advocates for reproductive justice. My great-grandmother, who was from the Snow lineage, died of a knitting needle abortion.
What are you working on now?
AE: These women. Acknowledging women who are somewhat invisible. I don’t know if it will ever end.
