There used to be a lively diner in the middle of the Nevada desert. It was a watering hole, a community gathering place, and it was right at the edge of Yucca Flat, where scientists were testing nuclear weapons back in the 1950s.
It was also the go-to spot for an eccentric man named Bert Tuttle. Yucca Fountain burned down in a mysterious fire in 1958, but Tuttle salvaged parts of the diner, its neon signs, anything he could find.
Sixty years later, two artists stumbled across his collection. They never met Tuttle, but they became fascinated with the stuff he left behind and turned that collection into art exhibits.
“Where the Heck is Yucca Fountain?” is now on display at the University of Wyoming Art Museum. Boston-based artists Helen Popinchalk and Andy Bablo will be on campus from Mar. 5 to 7 for a panel discussion, lunchtime conversation and an art-making workshop. The exhibit is on display through May 23.
Wyoming Public Radio’s Hannah Habermann sat down with the two artists to learn more.
Editor’s Note: This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Hannah Habermann: How did you come across this collection in the first place and what made you want to turn it into an art exhibit?
Andy Bablo: We had been traveling out West separately and came across this antique store, if you will, this roadside store, and they had these cool old neon signs.
The woman there said, ‘Hey, you should really talk to this guy, Bert. He's the one that owns this stuff.’ We took the info down and said, ‘Yeah, we'll check it out.’ Later, we ended up going back and trying to make contact with this guy Bert, and found out that he had passed away, unfortunately.
Helen Popinchalk: From what we understand, Bert was an enthusiastic patron of Yucca Fountain and he saved remnants of the Fountain: neon signs, parts of the original soda fountain fixture, all manner of paper ephemera related to Yucca Fountain.
AB: The new owners of the house said, ‘Hey, we still have a lot of this stuff out here. There's a lot of junk in these outbuildings. If you guys would like to come and take a look, we were going to get rid of this stuff.’ So, we went to take a look. Then the idea sparked for both of us, of like, ‘Hey, maybe there's something more here.’
HP: So we really came to know Bert through his collection.
HH: A previous exhibit of yours recreated the actual diner Yucca Fountain in Colorado. This UW installation fleshes out other parts of Tuttle's life. Tell me first about the desert workshop.
AB: We look at this iteration of the show at UW as a kind of prequel to the original Yucca Fountain show.
This is Bert Tuttle's workshop. This is his outbuilding, his desert shanty, his kind of hangout place where he collected this stuff, where he worked as an amateur electronic radio enthusiast and tinker of all things.
This gives you a deep dive into more of who he was. Why did he save this stuff? How did he live? What did he collect? Why was he working on these things? Why did it mean anything to him?
This is a little more of a glimpse into the man that we really don't know. We never met. We don't know a ton about [him], only through his archives, the stuff he saved. To a lot of people this might just be junk. It's just strange stuff! That's a little bit in a nutshell of what this version of the show is.
HP: We really tried to channel Bert as sort of a silent collaborator in this exhibition. We really wanted to build out a space that helped people understand what we first encountered when we found this collection.
HH: There's the desert workshop, and then there's also the mobile research lab. What's in there?
HP: The mobile research lab was another piece that we collected from him.
There was this canned ham trailer, this little 13-foot travel trailer. When we came to it, it was chock-full of hoarder-style materials. We slowly sorted through everything, and it was clear that he had used this on these forays out into the desert, to drag out stuff that had been at Yucca Fountain, to travel across the desert Southwest on these adventures.
This aspect of the installation was a part of our first iteration, when we built out the diner [in Colorado]. We worked with the university and all kinds of wonderful folks to get the mobile research lab installed in the Centennial Complex [at UW].
There's something about it that not only speaks to desert travel culture, but also speaks to some of the eeriness of being in ghost towns or out in the middle of nowhere and just encountering a space, a place, an old building, a travel trailer.
And there's something kind of voyeuristic and wonderful and a little bit spooky about being able to go into these spaces, that captures a moment in time and being able to rifle through someone else's collection of stuff. That was another part of recreating this experience.
AB: We've really tried to break down the boundaries of what a gallery exhibition is. We've tried to eliminate the perception that everything has to be in a white-walled gallery and that only certain people are allowed to go in there. And don't touch anything!
We encourage you to gently browse through Bert's stuff, flip through his magazines. You can actually touch this exhibit.
HH: In that vein, there's also a pop-up coffee shop installation. Tell me about that.
HP: We were able to collaborate with Sunshine Coffee in the Laramie Plains Civic Center to create this really cool little pop-up, because we weren't able to use a lot of the diner ephemera in this exhibition.
We were able to install a diner booth and all of this great diner and travel-related ephemera in the trophy display cases in the civic center. For the opening, we made specific Yucca Fountain drinks that you could order.
Again, it's like the travel trailer, the mobile research lab. We really just wanted a way to get this out into the community. It's also a nod to the coffee shop as a community gathering place, as a nod to Yucca Fountain being this gathering place in the Amargosa Valley [in Nevada].
AB: This diner disappeared. We don't know a ton about it. It meant a lot to at least one person that we know, but we found all these other photographs that are autographed and so meant something to other people who passed through here.
Whether they’ve been lost to time or not, a lot of these diners and these community gathering places have been lost. Especially during COVID, we just saw a huge uptick in a lot of these mom and pop businesses that just dissolved and disappeared.
This was another way of throwing a nod to the community and saying, ‘Hey, you've got this coffee shop down here and this is a great asset for the community.’
HH: This project is both an archive and an art piece. How did you all go about merging those two different worlds?
HP: It's so complicated and Andy and I have had a lot of discussions about this. Are we archivists, are we artists? Andy, I don't want to speak for you, but I definitely am an artist first and an archivist second.
I think we both really understand the importance of this collection and the importance of preserving this collection. It definitely becomes tricky because we potentially have something that is of historical value. Are we using it appropriately?
I'd like to think so. I'd like to think that we're honoring this man's collection. I mean, it's certainly doing better at the University of Wyoming Art Museum than it is rotting out in and outbuilding the desert somewhere.
AB: These items were either going to be sold off individually or just thrown out. The fact that we've given it a second life, I think means a lot.
We can only dive so deep into the archives here because there’s only so much that we can find out about him and about Yucca Fountain, and we've kind of found all that.
So from there, I think it's about creative licensing. We try not to get too caught up on ‘What would he have thought?’ or ‘How accurate is this in the end?’ because we know that we're still doing a service to these items that he saved all those years ago.
I think the point is to have fun with it and be an artist first and still try to pay homage to this man and his collection.
