"Minerva Kohlhepp was just four years old when her mother... gave her a set of watercolors. From that moment, the child considered herself an artist. Everywhere she went, Minerva carried a sketchpad and charcoal or pencil."

"Born on 28 August 1888 in North Ogden, Utah, Minerva was the second of ten Kohlhepp children. Most of her early years were spent on her family’s Idaho homestead." 

"Minerva left home for the first time at age fourteen to work as a nursemaid for a wealthy Idaho family in San Francisco. There she saw museum art for the first time and attended classes at Mark Hopkins Art School. But it was not until she had graduated from high school back home and taught school for several years that she was able to pursue any serious training in art."

 "By age nineteen, she had scraped together enough money to go to Chicago, where she studied at the Chicago Art Institute under the great draftsman John Vanderpoel, a master of the academic school of painting. Several times during her three-year course she had to go home to earn more money in the fields or in the classroom. But always she returned to follow her dream. With characteristic confidence, Minerva once confronted Mr. Vanderpoel, asking why he criticized her work so harshly when so many classmates were doing much poorer work. She later recalled, “I shall never forget the disappointment on the dear little man’s face when he answered in a choked voice, ‘Miss Idaho, can it be possible you do not understand; they’re not worth it, they will drop out, but you—ah, there is no end.’ ” (“Miss Kohlhepp’s Own Story.”)

"In April 1915, Minerva attended the Art Students’ League in New York City.  ...At the time, the League was one of the most important art centers in the world, the great European academies having waned in influence and American art having begun a period of vitalization. Minerva paid for the privilege of studying there in a variety of ways, including sketching cadavers for medical schools and performing rope tricks and Indian dances. Minerva’s trademark headband, which she jokingly said she wore to “hold in her brains,” was a reminder of her colorful employment as an Indian dancer in New York."

"Studying under George Bridgman and Dimitri Romanoffski and then on scholarship under Robert Henri gave Minerva solid training in drawing and portraiture. Robert Henri, a renowned teacher and prominent American realist, reportedly ranked her among his top three students—along with George Bellows and John Sloan, later recognized as foremost twentieth-century American artists. According to Robert Davis, curator of the Church museum’s Teichert exhibit, at the end of her course at the League Minerva was poised “on the threshold of becoming a major American artist.” (“I Must Paint,” in Rich in Story, Great in Faith: The Art of Minerva Kohlhepp Teichert, Salt Lake City: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1988, p. 43.)

"At this critical juncture of her life, Minerva had two experiences that steered her out of the mainstream of the art world and back to the West. The first experience crystallized her desire for life with a family—specifically, for life with Herman. In a testimony meeting in the Harlem Ward, she was listening to a sister speak on the joys of marriage and motherhood. “I thot of all the men I had met in my search for getting gold,” wrote Minerva later. At that moment, she realized that “back on the Idaho desert, herding his cattle and branding his calves was a man more nearly meant for me than anyone else in the world.” (Unpublished autobiographical sketch, 1937, transcription from handwritten manuscript.) Never one to agonize over decisions or to doubt her own judgment, Minerva determined to return home."

"The other experience helped her to solidify her feeling that she had a mission as an artist and that she should place her art in the service of her faith. Minerva later recorded how Robert Henri asked her, shortly before she left New York, whether any artist had ever told the “great Mormon story.”

“ ‘Not to suit me,’ I answered. ‘Good Heavens, girl, what a chance. You do it. You’re the one. Oh, to be a Mormon.’ I said to him, ‘You could be.’ He paused almost reverently for a moment, then answered, ‘That’s your birthright. You feel it. You’ll do it well.’ I felt that I had been commissioned.” (Unpublished ms., 1947.)

"Minerva Teichert spent the rest of her life and her enormous vitality answering these two callings—one to love and serve her family, the other to tell the story of her people and her faith through her art."

"By her death in 1976 at the age of eighty-seven, Minerva Kohlhepp Teichert had created perhaps as many as a thousand pieces of art. “Eternity seems very real to me,” she wrote in her 1937 autobiography. Then, expressing her eternal wish: “I want … to be able to paint after I leave here. Even though I should come back nine times I still would not have exhausted my supply of subjects and one life time is far too short but may be a schooling for the next.”

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