By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
(Note: this is the final article in a four-part series about the people, art, and architecture of my “Third Place,” the Utah Catholic parish church my wife and I have attended for three decades.)
Just like almost every other Catholic church in the world, my own St. Thomas More parish in Cottonwood Heights, Utah, has both statues and stained glass. Although such features are commonplace, I’ve always thought St. Thomas More’s are different and unique too.
Now I know why.
When they built the Church in the early 1990s, chief architect Michael Stransky and pastor Fr. Terry Moore hired several local artists to accentuate it. For statues, they turned to Ursula Brodauf. For stained glass, they hired Anna Campbell Bliss.
Both were inspired decisions.
Ursula Brodauf (1926-2011) was born in southeastern Germany near the Czech border. Her home region, the Erzgebirge, is renowned for its woodcarvers, toymakers, folk art, and folklore.
While still just a teen, Brodauf apprenticed under a master woodworker named Emil Helbig. Helbig established the area’s oldest still-operating carving workshop in 1933, and his products remain popular even today.
After World War II ended, Brodauf studied art in Berlin, designed stage sets for a film company, and then emigrated to the United States. She settled in Salt Lake City, where she worked for a time as a ZCMI store window designer.
Over the next half century, however, she evolved into “One of the 100 Most Honored Artists of Utah” according to the Springville Museum of Art.
The St. Thomas More website explains that Brodauf created the Stations of the Cross that line the walls throughout the Church. She also sculpted the papier-mâché/fiberglass statues of the Holy Spirit, Mary (“Our Lady of the Annunciation”), and Jesus (“The Risen Christ”) that hang on the left and right sides of the front wall.
These suspended statues are huge, perhaps 8 feet tall, and are quite colorful too. While appropriately reverent, I’ve always thought they were rather animated and almost folkloric too. They look like extra-large versions of the delightful woodcarvings that a Utah artist steeped in German myth and fable might create.
Gazing from the Brodauf Mary statue on the left side of the Church, to the Brodauf Jesus on the right, one is also gets a rapturous vision of colored light streaming through a wall of 150 stained glass boxes. Another beloved Utah artist, Anna Campbell Bliss, designed them.
Before coming to Utah in the 1960s, Bliss (1925–2015) earned a degree in Art History from Wellesley, and then a Master’s in Architecture from Harvard. She arrived in Salt Lake City and joined the Cathedral of the Madeleine parish after her husband became chair of the University of Utah Department of Architecture.
Trying to find her footing in the Utah art community, Bliss sought out local inspiration. She enrolled in screen printing and computer programming courses at the U.
She also studied movement and dance with Salt Lake City’s famed Repertory Dance Theatre (RDT). (This particular fact delights me, because my daughter grew up under the windows Bliss designed and now dances with RDT.)
Her efforts to integrate worked.
In a 2012 article, The Salt Lake Tribune called Bliss “one of Utah’s cutting-edge artists — passionately experimenting in color and spatial relationships, while probing the intersections of painting, math, language, dance and music.”
When Bliss died in 2015, the same newspaper proclaimed that “color and light” were the “prolific artist’s trademarks.” Indeed they were, and that’s probably why architect Stansky and pastor Moore chose her to design the St. Thomas More windows.
Her stained glass art is divinely unconventional. Rather than depicting a saint or a Bible story, the Bliss windows rise as a 40 foot wall featuring several dozen colored square panels arranged in geometric symmetry.
Bliss often cited the windows—which she called “Light of Grace”—as one of her finest works.
According to the Church website, “The colored glass is custom made from sand and minerals — all from Utah. They represent the story of creation. What first appears as chaos is actually the ordering of creation. The darker glass is nearer the earth, and as your eyes are drawn heavenward the glass is brighter and lighter.”
All this is true, but I also just think they are lovely.
Those who planned this special church building (the team led by Moore and Stransky) and the artists they asked to add finishing touches (Tessman, Hadlock, Brodauf, and Bliss, among others) created a masterpiece.
The United States American Institute of Architects (AIA) agrees, and gave St. Thomas More Church the 1995 award for religious building design in honor of its “brilliantly manipulated” natural light and unique “alliance” with the surrounding Wasatch Mountains.
Even today, the Utah architects from Stransky’s firm feature St. Thomas More on their website, noting, “In addition to its distinctive shape which rises in harmony with the mountains to the East, the church’s most distinctive feature may be the white concrete light shelves placed above each window on the South facade. These light shelves…perfectly balance the ambient condition setting the stage for worship services in glare-free, natural daylight while the parishioners enjoy God’s handiwork outside its windows.”
It’s no wonder my wife and I, and so many others, fell in love with this heavenly third place.
Here’s a look back for this series (with links):
August 5, 2024: Third Place: People, Art, Architecture (the church becomes a “third place” for my family and me, thanks to people, art, and architecture.)
August 12, 2024: My Third Place: A Landmark Project for the Catholic Church (the story of the unique building design and the visionary priest and architect who imagined it.)
August 19, 2024: My Third Place: The Woodcarver and the Blacksmith (how the church’s stunning woodwork and granite anchor altar came to be, thanks to the deft and powerful touches of two local artisans.)
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
