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‘They look like us’: new exhibit highlights female artists at the turn of the 20th century

A black-and-white photograph with three women in the center of the frame on horseback. Behind them is a herd of cattle
Evelyn J. Cameron Photograph Collection
/
Montana Historical Society Research Center
“Mabel, May and Myrtle Buckley on horseback,” circa 1913.

A new exhibition on display at the Jackson Hole History Museum shines the spotlight on female photographers and painters in the American West at the turn of the 20th century. Their work offers an intimate look into the lives of creative women on ranches in Wyoming and Montana and offers a different artistic take on that moment in history.

Gone are the soldiers, gold miners and fur traders. In their place, there are cowgirls, female friends and even the artists themselves. For some, art itself was the key to economic independence, as well as travel, adventure and community in a time of great change.

The exhibition features the work of Evelyn Cameron, Fra Dana, Lora Webb Nichols, Josephine Hale and Elizabeth Lochrie and will be on display at the Jackson Hole History Museum through July 12.

The show is a collaboration between History Jackson Hole and the Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions (AWARE), an international nonprofit that works to increase public appreciation of the legacy of women in the arts.

When the two organizations were in the early stages of the project, they realized that the Jackson Hole History Museum collection didn’t include any paintings by female artists in that time period.

“ That was kind of a sobering realization to come to and urged us even more that of course we had to explore this partnership and give space to this story,” said History Jackson Hole Executive Director Morgan Jaouen. “Perhaps it will encourage some expansion of our collection here.”

They’re not alone: A recent analysis of 18 major museums in the U.S. found that roughly 87% of those permanent collections are made up of art created by men.

Wyoming Public Radio’s Hannah Habermann heard about some of these trailblazing artists and their work from the women who brought the show to life.

Editor’s Note: This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

Morgan Jaouen, executive director of History Jackson Hole: One thing that really stands out to me when I look at these photographs and the paintings is how important relationships and friendships were. Clearly their friends and their relationships influenced and fueled their artistry and made it possible for them to survive and thrive out here.

On the right side of a black-and-white photograph, a woman wearing a long skirt is branding a calf in front of a wooden fence. On the other side of the frame, another woman is sitting on a dark horse.
Montana Historical Society Research Center
/
Evelyn J. Cameron Photograph Collection
“Evelyn Cameron and Janet Williams branding calf,” circa 1910.

Kirsten Corbett, exhibits and communications director at History Jackson Hole: My grandmother came to Wyoming during this time period, and I find looking at the photos and the entire exhibition to also be like a connection for me to my roots in Wyoming and to the strong women in my family. 

Camille Morineau, exhibition curator and AWARE executive director: I think they look like us. I mean, this one is dressed like you. They are smoking, holding guns, riding horses and having friends.

Their husbands were more or less gone, or just letting these women do what they wanted to do – also, in a country, in a place where equality or parity was more or less ingrained in their story, if only because they got the right to vote very early on.

It's some kind of model of today, of the present, maybe of the future, that here, where we stand, is a place where things were invented for women. And it's kind of nice to have that. It’s a small show, but it's a powerful demonstration.

Evelyn Cameron

KC: Evelyn Cameron came from England with her husband to Terry, Montana to start ranching.  She actually came from a pretty privileged background, and it was an intentional choice that they made to come to the frontier.

However, it's very interesting, because Evelyn's husband had other pursuits. He was interested in ornithology and a lot of the ranch running was really left up to Evelyn.

She also became a professional photographer and was hired to take photographs and that really added quite a bit to their income as a family and added income to the ranch.

A black-and-white photograph of a woman in a long white skirt standing upright on a saddled white horse. Behind them is an old wooden fence and rolling plains.
Evelyn J. Cameron Photograph Collection
/
Montana Historical Society Research Center
“Evelyn Cameron holding reins and standing on her horse, Jim,” circa 1905-15.

CM: It's a woman standing on a horse in a photograph. She's smiling, she has a tan. You can see that she's working outdoors, but she's still pretty chic. She has a beautiful dress, a beautiful shirt, a sort of tie and a hat. She looks very confident. You can feel that she's been riding a lot. She can stand on a horse and she's really relaxed about it.

It's clearly a staged photograph, so someone is taking that photo for her. That's a declaration: This is who I am, really. A proud woman, a professional woman. I can be chic, I can be a ranch woman, I can be a lot of things. And you can feel that in that photo.

It's also, I think, a bit of a joke on the story of sculpture, where you have men standing on horses in bronze in every square of every city. I think that she's turning that model upside down.

Fra Dana

KC: Fra Dana was originally from Indiana, and she settled in Montana as a rancher and a painter. She actually began painting when she was quite young, at 16. She studied with a number of notable painters, including William Merritt Chase in New York City and also painters in Paris and in France.

CM: I have to say that this one, “Storm Coming Down,” Fra Dana, is important for me because [of] my first trip here last July. I was going around in a car with Véronique Parke [president of AWARE-USA] and visiting one of her friends who had a house up in the mountains, and there was a storm coming.

An oil painting of a yellow plain with blue-purple mountains in the background. In the upper-right corner of the painting, a dark storm is rolling in.
University of Montana
/
Montana Museum of Art and Culture
Fra Dana. “Storm Coming Down,” oil on canvas.

And this is exactly what she paints: This really dark, dark storm coming up and rushing very quickly at a speed that you do not find, for example, in France. It was exactly that same kind of landscape, and it's a small landscape, actually, but you can feel the immensity of it, even if it's small.

Lucia Pesapane, AWARE art historian and co-curator: If you think about the traditional painting or how we know the West from the male perspective, it is often big paintings and vertical, very dramatic landscapes with a cowboy, with one man who is trying to fight against this very wild and difficult nature.

In this case, the scale is much more intimate. The format is horizontal, it’s often watercolor and not only oil on canvas.

This also shows a different approach to nature, where nature is really the most important element. You don't have a man who wants to dominate or fight.

Lora Webb Nichols

KC: Lora Webb Nichols grew up in the small mining town Encampment, Wyoming, and she was 16 years old when she received her first camera. She started using that camera to photograph her community, her family, her friends, as well as the copper mining and the railroads, things that were happening of import in her community at the time.

She also opened her own photography studio in 1925 and during her lifetime, she amassed more than 24,000 negatives. This is a huge and very valuable archive that we have of what life was like in south-central Wyoming.

A black-and-white photograph of a railroad being built along the curve of a river canyon.
University of Wyoming American Heritage Center
Lora Webb Nichols. “Scene in Baggott Canyon, Wyoming,” 1909.

LP: Here you can see a canyon, but a very strong intervention of man with these railroads, the Pacific Railroads, that were really crossing all the United States. And of course it changes the landscapes in these states, not only Wyoming, but where the railroad passes.

Four women stand smiling in front of a wall with black-and-white photographs.
Hannah Habermann
/
Wyoming Public Media
Kirsten Corbett, Lucia Pesapane, Morgan Jaouen and Camille Morineau in front of the new exhibition, “Women Artists of the American West: Trailblazers at the Turn of the 20th Century,” at the Jackson Hole History Museum.

“Going beyond”

CM: I hope what you can feel in the show is that history is usually written by men, for men, about men. The frontier, these guys holding guns and fighting each other – and the woman attending to children, is like the general story.

Except that the women were much more active than we think. This is a woman taking that photo, this is a woman who's traveled maybe days and days riding her horse to get to that special photo.

She's documenting something. Not only that, but also the lives of women. She's going beyond what we think, and I think this is what people will learn from the show, to have a different point of view on history.

Hannah Habermann is the rural and tribal reporter for Wyoming Public Radio. She has a degree in Environmental Studies and Non-Fiction Writing from Middlebury College and was the co-creator of the podcast Yonder Lies: Unpacking the Myths of Jackson Hole. Hannah also received the Pattie Layser Greater Yellowstone Creative Writing & Journalism Fellowship from the Wyoming Arts Council in 2021 and has taught backpacking and climbing courses throughout the West.

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