Art

The auditorium at the Sheridan VA Health Care System is a space for veterans to come, shoot pool, play board games, or just hang out.

But on Tuesday, March 3, it was serving as an art gallery. The VA is hosting its annual Creative Arts Festival that allows veterans from across the state to submit a wide range of artistic creations.

A Pinedale artist has a new show on display that was inspired by…roadkill. Cristy Anspach has spent the last two and a half years making ceramic jars to honor each animal killed on her route between Boulder and Pinedale. Over the course of eight months she made 110 jars. The show, titled "Unintended Consequences" will be on display at the Mystery Print Gallery until March 1.

Anspach talked to Wyoming Public Radio's Megan Feighery about finding beauty in death and how every creature deserves respect.

Governor Mark Gordon honored five Wyoming artists with the 2019 Governor's Arts Award, including visual artist and graphic designer Robert Martinez. Martinez is Northern Arapaho and Chicano, and grew up in a family of talented painters and beadworkers on the Wind River Reservation. He draws and paints portraits using bright, contrasting tones in a style intended to challenge the viewer's assumptions of what Native people and Native art should look like.

"You see many depictions of Natives as black and white or sepia toned, and that connotes to a dead culture," Martinez said. "So, one of the things I was doing with this bright paint was I wanted to show that we're not dead, we're alive and strong."

Wyoming Public Radio's Savannah Maher visited Martinez at his studio outside of Riverton and talked with him about his work and what it means to be one of only a few people of color ever awarded the state's top artistic honor.

The Plains Indian Museum doesn't only collect art from the past. Rebecca West, the curator of the museum, said their job is also to collect contemporary art like those of John Isaiah Pepion, of the Blackfeet nation in northern Montana.

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.