Meet the Artist: Laura Jordahl

Painting William Levitt

Laura studied architecture, and she still thinks like an architect. Every piece starts as a problem to solve, and art is just her way of answering it from her own angle.

She's been making things her whole life: paintings, hand-dyed clothing, garden design. These days it's graphite and colored pencil, oil and chalk pastels, and encaustic, a technique where pigment is melted into hot wax. For her, the experimenting is the fun part. The finished piece is almost a side effect.

So when she landed on William Levitt, she came at him the way an architect would.

After World War II, America had a housing problem. Millions of soldiers were coming home, starting families, and had nowhere to live. Levitt's answer was to build houses like Henry Ford built cars. He broke the job into 27 steps and sent specialized crews from lot to lot, each doing one step over and over. At their peak, they were finishing around 30 houses a day.

On former potato fields on Long Island, Levittown went up between 1947 and 1951. More than 17,000 homes. For a lot of young families, it was the first time owning a house felt possible. It became the blueprint for the American suburb.

But not everyone was allowed in. Levittown's homes were sold with rules that kept Black families out, including Black veterans who had served in the same war. When he was asked about it, Levitt said he could solve a housing problem or a racial problem, but not both.

Laura spent part of her childhood on Long Island, so this isn't a history-book story for her. She's been reading Perfect Communities by Edward Berenson and Levittown by David Kushner, and she's found Levitt's actual vintage ads and slogans to work right into the piece. She wants visitors to see the whole man: what he built, and who he built it for.

At home in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Laura is a master gardener who keeps 28 acres intentionally wild for birds, insects, and small mammals. When she's not in the studio or the garden, she's off in her campervan, reading, at the movies, or watching Inspector Lynley mysteries with her husband.

Builders + Titans is Part 3 of Influencers Over Time, a five-part exhibition inspired by TIME's 100 most influential people of the 20th century. 18 local Utah artists. 20 portraits of the people who shaped the modern world we live inside every day. Every portrait comes with its own audio story, and there are treats to grab as you wander.

🗓️ October 23–25

📍 The Studio, 4750 W 800 N, West Point, Utah

Admission is free!

Hope to see you there!