Art

It isn't easy keeping America's folk arts alive, but the Wyoming Arts Council has been doing their best to preserve Wyoming's. Each year, they give out grants to folk artists who pass on their knowledge to the next generation.

Jack Mease braids rawhide to create beautiful horse tack like reins and hackamores, and now has taught numerous students, including Soliana Abernathy. Mease and Abernathy were among last year's recipients of the Wyoming Arts Council's Folk and Traditional Art Mentoring grant. You can see Mease's work at the State Museum in Cheyenne.

Wyoming Public Radio's Melodie Edwards visited Mease's workshop in Lander.

Wyoming has been working towards economic diversification and one way to do that is to make Wyoming's culture, arts and humanities programs a bigger part of the effort. Recently the former CEO of the Wyoming Business Council, Shawn Reese, joined Wyoming Humanities to further this effort. The Director of Wyoming Humanities is Shannon Smith and she and Reese explain the idea to Wyoming Public Radio's Bob Beck.

The Charles Russell painting titled “When Law Dulls The Edge of Chance” depicts two North-West Mounted Police or Monty's disarming two horse thieves. Karen McWhorter, the curator of the Whitney Western Art Museum, said the painting has had many different names and one of those included the phrase “horse thieves”

Beads were one of the main products traded between Native Americans and Europeans. For museum curators and historians, the presence of beads on objects helps place an approximate time frame of when it was created.

The library at Wyoming Indian Middle School in Ethete is hands-down the coziest place in the building. When I walk in after driving through a snow storm, the lights are dim and there's some kind of woodsy incense burning. But a few weeks ago, librarian Jenn Runs Close to Lodge said the atmosphere was a bit more chaotic.

Your phone, your house, your car. It all originally comes from the earth. Artist Nina Elder is fascinated by the complexity of land being at once something beautiful, sometimes sacred, and often extremely valuable - providing resources that the modern world depends on. Through long journeys to mining-based communities, Elder collects found materials and creates intricate drawings that help tell the multilayered stories that lands have to tell.

She's been supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation, Rauschenberg Foundation, and the Pollock Krausner Foundation. Elder has been features in VICE Magazine, PBS and Art In America. She's also held positions as an Art + Environment Research Fellow at the Nevada Museum of Art and Polar Lab Research Fellow. Wyoming Public Radio's Cooper McKim speaks with Elder about her latest exhibit now at the University of Wyoming's Visual Arts Building called Nina Elder: Accumulations.

Jackson's Snow King Sports Center usually hosts skating lessons and peewee hockey games. But for one weekend in mid-September, it was filled with about $50 million worth of art.

The space had been taken over by the brand new Jackson Hole Fine Arts Fair. Visitors were greeted at the door by a giant inflatable goldfish — the work of Jackson artist Bland Hoke — before visiting booths from more than 50 galleries based all over the country.

When a visitor enters the Whitney Western Art Museum one sculpture might confuse the visitor. Choosing of the Arrow by Henry Kirke Brown might remind people not of the West, but of a classic European sculpture. But Karen McWhorter, the curator of the museum, said it’s actually the first bronze case made in America in 1849. 

Crow Fair is unlike any other Powwow in the world. For one, horses and their riders have the right of way on roads throughout the Powwow grounds. It also begins every morning with a parade. 

The Whitney Western Art Museum at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West hosted explorer artist Tony Foster for a week. For the past 35 years, Foster takes journeys to paint wild areas…many of them in the American West. Before his residency at the Buffalo Bill Center, he went on a rafting journey on the Green River. Wyoming Public Radio's Kamila Kudelska spoke with Foster to get a better understanding of what it means to be an explorer artist today.

The Ucross Foundation's ranch is usually very quiet and serene, but tonight, the art gallery that sits on the grounds is filled with the sounds of people and the art itself.

A Wyoming artist, James Jackson has received a National Heritage Fellowship. It's the nation's highest honor that celebrates traditional and folk art. Jackson is most well-known for his intricate leather carving and spent most of his career at King's Saddlery in Sheridan. Wyoming Public Radio's Catherine Wheeler sat down with Jackson in his leather shop at the Brinton Museum to talk about how his career has been infused with Wyoming's culture.

About 30 miles southeast of Sheridan, the Ucross Foundation sits on a 20,000-acre working cattle ranch. But that's not what it's known for.

The ranch is home to the Ucross Foundation Residency Program. Foundation president and executive director Sharon Dynak said it's a place for writers and artists to focus on their work. 

The Brinton Museum in Big Horn, Wyoming, is home to a collection of artifacts and objects from many Plains Indian tribes. As it open for the season, the Brinton along with the Center for American Indian Research and Native Studies put together an exhibit centered around the Lakota creation story. Wyoming Public Radio's Catherine Wheeler sat down with Craig Howe, the director of the Center for American Indian Research, to talk about how the story has an impact today.

The Plains Indian Museum recently acquired two pieces of artwork from Lakota artist Dyani White Hawk. The two paintings are small 13 inch cubes. Rebecca West, the curator of the museum, said the paintings really evoke White Hawk’s formal artistic training and generational skill of beadwork. West said the pieces are bands of color done in acrylic and beadwork.

At the University of Wyoming Student Union, a long line of students made their way down a row of tables, carefully examining artifacts, many of them taking photos with their phones. They are visiting the Black History 101 Mobile Museum. 

Frank Perely Fairbanks was a classmate of Phimister Proctor’s, the famous American sculptor, at the American Academy in Rome.

Fairbanks, who was himself was a portraitist, admired Proctor greatly. So much so that he painted a monumental portrait of Proctor. Karen McWhorter, the curator of the Whitney Western Art Museum, said the painting doesn’t only portray Proctor but his family as well.