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Rexburg Temple Windows Reflect Rural Roots
By Laurie Williams Sowby

LEHI, Utah — Tom Holdman has created art glass for some high-profile LDS temples, including Palmyra, Nauvoo, Manhattan, Winter Quarters, and Sao Paulo, but his work for the Rexburg Temple in rural Idaho is no less in the local significance he strives to place in each design.

For the Church’s newest temple, which rises from a hill surrounded by wheat fields in a farming community in southeastern Idaho, Holdman and seven other artists at his studios drafted on paper and fabricated in glass individual designs portraying a staff of wheat.

Glass artist Tom Holdman checks a window for the Draper Temple in front of a panel that simulates daylight. Holdman Studios created more than 700 windows for the Rexburg Temple.

After the designs were submitted to the temple committee, the one by Josh Lewis, a Lone Peak High School senior who was working for Holdman and saving for his mission, was chosen as the motif. Holdman then went on to design more than 700 windows using the chosen theme. The wheat motif — a symbol of the area’s agricultural economy — also appears in fabrics, carpet, woodwork, and decorative painting in the temple.

High school student Josh Lewis designed the stained glass motif that was used throughout the temple. © 2007 Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.

Josh, who recently returned from the Germany Hamburg Mission as the finishing touches were being put on the temple, has yet to see the windows for himself, except in photos that friends have sent him. Holdman, by contrast, has made at least 10 trips to Rexburg to oversee installation of the windows.

Josh recalls that night four years ago as the design deadline drew near: "I’d had a lot of homework that day and I was fasting, because I knew I had to get everything done. It was about 2 a.m. I said a prayer, and the idea just flowed to me to use lines connecting and disappearing. I’d never worked with that before."

Josh Lewis puts finishing touches on a window for the Rexburg Temple. His design of the staff of wheat, submitted while he was a senior in high school, was chosen while he was serving a mission in Germany. (Photo courtesy Holdman Studios.)

"The best part," he says, "was that I was eight months into my mission before I found out my design had been chosen." When he returned home to Highland last month, he again went to work at Holdman Studios, located at Thanksgiving Point. As does Holdman, Josh feels blessed to be able to be a part of a temple’s building process.

The artist and a staffer piece together a stained glass representation of Mount Timpanogos, near Holdman's Utah home.

Employees at the studio are also busy creating art glass windows for two more temples under construction — in Draper, Utah, and Twin Falls, Idaho. Holdman points out the potato blossom — Idaho’s state flower — that will grace windows in the Twin Falls Temple.

Here is the stained glass motif as it looks in the Rexburg Idaho Temple. © 2007 Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.

The local touch has been important to the artist, who begins a project by researching the local history, culture and surroundings of the temple where his work will be placed. He then incorporates those elements, along with natural materials from the area, into his designs.

For example, his stained-glass windows in the Palmyra Temple — his first project for the LDS Church — feature trees and leaves that blend in with the trees beyond and evoke the Sacred Grove. For the Winter Quarters Temple, he designed round pieces etched with prairie flowers on the borders and painted with figures and scenes depicting the pioneer trek. (He's also responsible for the large panel portraying the baptism of Jesus in the Nauvoo Temple's baptistry, as well as the art-glass dome above the Celestial Room there.)

For the Sao Paulo Temple, he chose to depict a pivotal scene in the continent's history — that of the Savior’s appearance to the Nephites, as chronicled in Third Nephi of the Book of Mormon. His work also appears in the remodeled Hawaii and Mesa temples.

For the San Antonio Temple, he depicted wildflowers of the area and incorporated stones found in a cave near the construction site. He has used some of the same leftover stones for the Rexburg Temple’s windows. "You see them as you walk into the Celestial Room," he explains. "They’re part of the design element of the windows."

Holdman says he really appreciates the architectural design of the new Rexburg Temple, where "every room has an outside window, and that lets in a lot of natural light."

Another artist, Leon Parson, Rexburg native and a member of the art faculty at BYU-Idaho, created murals for two rooms in the temple using local wildlife and familiar landscapes, including the river bottoms and the towering Tetons. He painted eight panels, each 10 feet high and 27 feet long.

In addition to local flavor added by artists, a Church new release says, "Of particular note in the interior is the stonework of Idaho Travertine. Local stonemasons describe their contributions as ‘a labor of heart and soul,’ an opportunity to use their well-honed skills in their own, local temple."

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