BYU MOA’s ‘Come, Follow Me’ series allows viewers to understand artworks in a new way

Every Sunday, the BYU Museum of Art’s Instagram page posts a picture of a piece of artwork followed by a question relating to that week’s “Come, Follow Me” lesson.

“Come, Follow Me” is an initiative put out by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 2019. The initiative was created to push a home-centered, church-supported gospel learning style.

Riley Lewis is the current head of marketing at the MOA and oversees social media and web production. The “Come, Follow Me” series was one of the first initiatives he started when he started working for the MOA.

Lewis has found that social media and the internet have allowed people worldwide to view pieces of artwork in a way they couldn’t if they saw them in person. Translating tools and zoom features allow viewers to see an artwork’s finer details, helping art become more accessible to all.

“Digital tools are a way of expanding the scope in a different way,” Lewis said. “It’s not the same as the museum experience, but it can also be valuable and inspiring.”

With social media allowing for more accessibility, Lewis thought that implementing a “Come, Follow Me” series would be helpful to families and those following the curriculum by giving them one more piece of material to reflect on in their studies.

“I think art is a powerful tool for teaching, for self-reflection,” Lewis said.

The series doesn’t solely portray works of art by Latter-day Saint artists, but creates an interfaith narrative by displaying artworks by artists of all faiths that may not explicitly portray what the scriptures that week talks about.

Maddie Blonquist is the religious curator of art at the MOA, and is a part of the “Come, Follow Me” team. She helps oversee what art pieces are being selected, along with some of the student fellows.

“Hopefully we are giving people another artist’s interpretation that can offer insight and can further connection to developing testimony and personal faith in Jesus Christ,” Blonquist said.

Student fellows are also involved in curating the pieces that are posted each week. Blonquist currently oversees two student fellows: Caroline Johnson and Abigail Beus.

Johnson is a master’s student and has been with the MOA for three years, while this is undergraduate student Beus’ first year working at the MOA.

The use of artworks by artists who are not LDS and don’t explicitly convey LDS beliefs can help strengthen members’ faith by seeing the similarities between their faith and others’ beliefs.

“I think regardless if it’s an inherently LDS work or if it’s from a different faith tradition, there’s still so many powerful conversations that can happen,” Johnson said.

The student fellows help out the “Come, Follow Me” team by finding artworks to post weekly and writing about them. The post isn’t written by the same person each week, allowing for the series not to seem repetitive.

“Every week you get a little bit of a different angle, depending on the subject, depending on the artwork that’s been chosen and depending on who’s writing it,” Lewis said. “I think that blend of different voices contributing really makes it much stronger and hopefully much more inspiring for the people who read it.”

Each time an artwork is posted, it is followed by a question prompt pertaining to the week’s scriptures.

The caption and writing accompanying the artwork allow for a deeper look and understanding of the piece, focusing on different things, such as a piece’s history or composition.

Accompanying the artwork with context and the weekly scripture can allow for deeper understanding and acts as another learning tool.

“It’s not necessarily just illustration of the text itself, but its kind of how you can look at the image and use that as a learning tool, as well as the words you’re reading in the ‘Come, Follow Me,’” Johnson said.

Beus described how adding context to an artwork that already evokes emotion on its own can help create and strengthen an intellectually-based spirituality.

The “Come, Follow Me” series is the most reliable social media series on the MOA’s social media, especially their Facebook, producing the most traction and engagement. Beus’ grandma even used them in her seminary lessons before knowing Beus was involved in the project.

“It was just this moment of, ‘Oh, I knew it. I knew this was important somewhere,’” Beus said.

The MOA “Come, Follow Me” series exposes viewers to different artists and art forms while allowing them to interact with the pieces in a way they wouldn’t be able to in a regular museum setting.

“It just allows us to sort of expose people to those artists that they haven’t seen before, but who are doing something really compelling that absolutely aligns with their understanding of Christ and how we kind of consider ourselves as disciples,” Blonquist said.