Welcome to Breaking Down Patriarchy. I'm Amy McPhee, all the best. One time I was at a friend's home,

and as we walked past her mantle, I saw a framed print of a family. There were two parents and four

kids embracing each other in love and safety under a roof.

And the whole home and all the people in it were painted in rainbow stripes

amidst a neighborhood that wasn't in rainbow.

I stopped in my tracks and immediately got tears in my eyes.

The painting is called We Have a Rainbow House, and it's by

the artist J. Kirk Richards. I later learned that Kirk has created an entire universe of profoundly

moving and visually stunning artwork, a lot of which deals with themes that I would call

egalitarian and perhaps somewhat

controversially egalitarian. He currently has an exhibit in Provo, Utah, called Apology,

but we'll get into that a little bit later in the episode. For now, I'd like to extend

the warmest welcome to my friend Jay Kirk Richards. Welcome, Kirk. Thank you. I'm so happy to be here.

I'm so excited to have you here. We have a really rich and really fascinating discussion planned.

But first, as always, I'd love to introduce you with a bio. But as you and I were talking before we

started the episode, you said maybe you'd rather

just introduce yourself. So maybe you can just tell us a little about you, where you're from,

and how you started into the art world and kind of the things that have made you who you are today.

Yeah, so I was born in Provo, Utah, in the shadow of Brigham Young University, just right up the street. And I grew up in a

family of musicians. My mom is a violin teacher. All of the kids took music lessons. I had French

horn lessons. I was a little kid carrying around this big French horn. And oftentimes my lessons were in the fine arts

building. So I would walk through the galleries and I would see paintings on the walls and

...