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Exploring Minerva Teicherts Journals: Notes on The Book of

Mormon Paintings
moa.byu.edu/exploring-minerva-teicherts-journals-notes-on-the-book-of-mormon-paintings/

Visiting Minerva Teicherts Journals: Notes on The Book of Mormon Story

Guest post by Alisse Frandsen, MOA Marketing Intern
Among quickly scrawled grocery lists, long division practice and some biology notes about osmosis, Minerva
Teichert made a plan. In 1949, she had commissioned herself to paint the story of the Book of Mormona project
that would take her two years and result in 42 murals. In what appears to be a childs discarded school notebook,
she organized that massive project. I had the special experience of exploring Minerva Teicherts journals and
notebooks in Special Collections at the HBLL for this article.
At Special Collections, notebooks upon notebooks of Minerva Teicherts work are available for research. There is a
loose-leaf table of contents tucked into the front of the notebook. Each painting is numbered and the order has
changed a couple of timesthe places she crossed out words and numbers, made notes, made more notes and
moved the order around again are clearly visible. For example, she settled on Lamanite Converts (displayed as
Christian Converts in the current exhibition) for number 23, where she wrote:
the Christian Lamanites bury their weapons deep in the earth to stand as a witness to the last day that they
never again take up their weapons against their brethren. How would you like to be one of those to discover these
weapons; swords, scimitars, battle-axes and javelins buried deep in the sands of Peru somewhere? Wouldnt that be
a thrill? Sand is a marvelous preservative.
Through her personal interpretation of the story, Teicherts own imagination is on display and we can get an idea of
what inspired the painting. Reading along, we can wonder what it might be like to find ancient weapons buried in
Peru and how those converts must have felt putting them there. Her descriptions make it clear that she is doing
more than providing a visual to wordsshe is telling a story about real people with whom she truly feels connected.
Teichert wrote a synopsis in this notebook for each of the 42 paintings in her Book of Mormon collection. Each is a
personal testimony and reiteration of her reason for committing to the project in the first place: because I believe it.
What a treasure to be able to go through that journey with her, more than 60 years later.

Special thanks to Special Collections at the Harold B. Lee Library.

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