In a post on his personal blog last week, Ben Crowder has announced that Mormon Artist will be shut down after the next issue, #16. Mormon Artist began just three years ago as an online magazine covering the arts by and for Mormons. Crowder says that the publication’s goal was to show that “there’s a lot more going on in the Latter-day Saint arts world than many of us realized.”
Continue reading “Mormon Artist shutting down after next issue”
You probably know Ben Crowder as the Editor-in-Chief of Mormon Artist magazine. But Ben is the kind of guy who always has several projects going on at one time, and I thought that one of them that he is actively working on right now — the Mormon Texts Project — would be of interest to AMV’s readers.
Could you briefly describe the Mormon Texts Project for our readers who may not have heard of it?
The goal of the Mormon Texts Project is to make out-of-copyright Mormon books available for free online, specifically in plain text through Project Gutenberg. (We chose Project Gutenberg because it’s been around for a long time and has a lot of reach.)
You are actively looking for volunteers to help with MTP. Do volunteers need to have major tech skills to help? What do they need to do/know/have?
Only basic tech skills are needed — the majority of the work our volunteers do consists of comparing a page of text to the corresponding page image, fixing formatting problems according to our MTP guidelines. An eye for detail helps, of course. Volunteers can do this on pretty much any kind of computer. (In the past we’ve emailed out the page images and page text, but we’re in the middle of switching to a web app.) Continue reading “Ben Crowder on the Mormon Texts Project”
Mormon Artist is a new on-line magazine that is imressive in its ambitions, and even more impressive in the fact that it seems to be meeting those ambitions. This is a publication to watch. After having just released the third issue, I interviewed Mormon Artist editor and founder Ben Crowder. The magazine can be found at http://mormonartist.net/ . Although the web layout is nice, I even more highly recommend the PDF version of the magazine for its wonderful aesthetic quality. — Mahonri Stewart
Q. 1- First off, tell our readers about Mormon Artist. What is it? What are you trying to accomplish with it? What is its genesis?Mormon Artist is an online magazine about the Latter-day Saint arts world. Its core is interviews with the artists themselves, since that’s what I find most interesting, but we’re gradually expanding to include more types of content as well. I have three goals for the magazine: first, to show how much is actually happening in Mormon arts (much of which is unknown to most members); second, to encourage more and better work; and third, to help new artists get started by getting their names out there.
I suppose the birth of the magazine was at the end of June — and I’ll get to that in a moment — but its genesis started much earlier. I’d spent the previous year writing and directing plays with New Play Project, and I think it’s safe to say that if it weren’t for NPP, there would be no Mormon Artist. Working on Mormon theatre not only gave me firsthand knowledge of the workings of a volunteer-run organization (which is what Mormon Artist swiftly became) but also got me giddy about the undercurrent I was sensing — that times were changing and that Mormon arts were really starting to come into their own Continue reading “Mormon Artist Magazine: Interview With Ben Crowder”
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