Twelve Worlds, One Frontier: Transfigurist Artwork Series

Twelve hand-drawn posters imagine where the Restoration’s pioneering spirit goes next. Here is how they came to be.

The series began with a simple question. Every generation of Saints has faced a frontier. The pioneers crossed plains and raised cities in the desert. What does that same consecrated imagination look like when the frontier is Mars, or Europa, or the long voyage between stars? We wanted images that took the question seriously: playful, but not ironic. Faithful, but not safe.

The brief

In February we sent our illustrator, Yegor Shustov, a short list of “new worlds” and a shorter list of slogans. The worlds included an asteroid mining station, a levitating cloud city, an underwater settlement, an icy outpost orbiting a gas giant, a space habitat, a generation starship. The slogans put phrases Latter-day Saints know by heart into the cadence of vintage tourist advertisements and recruitment posters, then pointed them outward: This Is the Place. Kolob Beckons. Join the Relief Society Terraform Corps. Your Tithing Built This Station.

Each slogan is an inside reference first and a poster line second. This Is the Place is Brigham Young at the mouth of Emigration Canyon. Come to Zion is the refrain of the gathering hymn, and Youth of Zion the opening line of “True to the Faith.” Kolob Beckons borrows the Book of Abraham’s star nearest the throne of God. Think Celestial is President Nelson’s counsel from the October 2023 general conference. Let Us Go Down echoes the creation account as it is told in the temple, and Visit Lovely Irreantum names the “many waters” at the end of Lehi’s wilderness journey. The Perpetual Exploration Fund nods to the Perpetual Emigrating Fund, the Nauvoo Galactic Legion to the Nauvoo Legion, the RS Terraform Corps to the Relief Society, and The Cosmos Is Our Campus to a certain university motto. Your Tithing Built This Station is a joke every ward building committee has made. A visitor who knows none of this sees a handsome retro-futurist print. A Latter-day Saint sees a wink, and then an invitation.

We asked for a strenuous, earnest, optimistic mood, the kind you find in mid-century space art before cynicism set in. We also made one decision at the outset that shaped everything after it. The art for sale would be made entirely by people. We used AI to brainstorm ideas, and that was useful. But when someone hangs one of these prints on a wall, we wanted them to know that a human being chose every line.

Yegor had already given the new website its two animated homepage themes, Western and Alpine, and he had spent the previous autumn helping us solve the hard technical problems behind them. He proposed six additional worlds of his own, including a canyon library city and a retro-futurist Atlantis. Both ended up in the series. We settled on a square master format for each illustration so that every piece could be cropped for portrait and landscape posters, website themes, puzzles, and apparel without rebuilding the composition.

Getting the worlds right

The sketches arrived in March, and the back-and-forth that followed is where the series found its character.

We pushed hard on plausibility, sometimes to Yegor’s amusement. Domed cities on Mars are a lovely trope, but radiation makes them impractical, so the Martian colony went underground with greenhouses and skylights on the surface. An O’Neill cylinder needs its landmasses evenly distributed or it wobbles, so the space habitat was redrawn from scratch with three land sections interleaved with three windows, and a temple on a terraced hillside. Europa is the size of our moon, so the icy outpost gained a flat horizon to convey how small a human settlement would be against it. A generation starship was rebuilt around a spear-shaped hull, and Yegor modeled it in Blender before committing it to vector so the perspective would hold up.

We pushed on meaning too. The This Is the Place scene is Brigham Young’s gesture over the Salt Lake Valley, so it needed settlers behind the prophet, far enough back that he stands apart. The Relief Society is a women’s organization, so the figures on the Martian cliffs had to read clearly as women. For the canyon library we tried The Galaxy Is Our Campus, then Seek Out of the Best Books, before landing on The Cosmos Is Our Campus and adding a field of stars behind the cliffs to make the slogan literal.

Yegor pushed back in turn, and he was usually right. When we suggested a sky gradient for the canyon library to convey more atmosphere, he produced three options; we then chose his original, because the black sky was a more interesting third color against the red rock and blue waterfalls. When we wondered whether the space habitat was too strange for people, he argued it might become the most striking piece in the set. It did.

The twelve

Each poster began as a concept from the Association and was drawn by Yegor. In order of completion:

1. This Is the Place. A prophet lifts his arm over a verdant alien valley as a freshly landed colony gleams among the cliffs.
2. Come to Zion. A living habitat wheels above a young blue world, meadows and villages curving overhead, a temple on a terraced hillside below.
3. Perpetual Exploration. Jewel-lit domes huddle beneath an icy cliff while a ringed gas giant fills the sky. Support the Perpetual Exploration Fund.
4. Kolob Beckons. A rotating generation starship, gardens visible through its hull, approaches a luminous world.
5. The Cosmos Is Our Campus. A canyon library glows under alien stars, a wink at a beloved university slogan.
6. Join the RS Terraform Corps. Sisters raise habitable domes among the red cliffs of Mars at dawn.
7. Your Tithing Built This Station. An asteroid outpost becomes a glowing monument to collective consecration.
8. Let Us Go Down… To Sub-Atlantis. A luminous city takes shape beneath the waves, with a phrase many Saints know by heart.
9. Think Celestial. Buoyant cloud cities float in the thick atmosphere of Venus.
10. Visit Lovely Irreantum. A vintage travel poster for a city of canals and gardens named for the “many waters” of Lehi’s journey.
11. Youth of Zion. Two missionary companions answer the call beneath an unfamiliar sky, available in young men and young women scenes. The galaxy needs you.
12. Join the Nauvoo Galactic Legion. Recruits in uniform before a hall carved with the sun, moon, and stars of the Nauvoo Temple.

The first poster, This Is the Place, was printed in time to hang at our April conference. The last two were added to the store in early September, a little over a year after Yegor first asked whether we had any new projects for him.

How to bring one home

Every illustration is available as a regular poster in matte or luster, on canvas, framed, with hangers, or printed on metal, as well as on jigsaw puzzles, shirts, hoodies, and sweatshirts. Each listing lets you choose portrait or landscape orientation and decide whether the Association’s name and logo appear. Every piece is also offered with no slogan at all, for those who love the art and would rather skip the insider Mormon vocabulary.

Members can apply eligible store proceeds toward their dues, and every purchase supports the Association’s work.

These images are not predictions. They are an argument: that Zion is a project with no ceiling, that “worlds without end” is an invitation to meaningful work, and that the pioneers who settled one impossible place were practicing for something larger. Put one on your wall. Let your guests ask questions. Then tell them the frontier is still open, and someone has to go first.

Browse the Transfigurist Artwork Series