4th Street Studio in downtown Laramie has organized an art gallery event entitled “What’s Your Message?” where various artists from Laramie and the University of Wyoming have come together to express their views through their artwork.
Isabel Perez, completing a communication masters at UW working on her thesis project, that is based on promoting social justice art. Perez thought about promoting it and contacted Rene Williams, the owner of 4thStreet Studio. Perez’s vision was to let the artist express themselves through their artwork, so they together decided to title this exhibit “What’s Your Message?”
“[The exhibition] is more about what inspires an artist to create good art,” Williams said. “We have really good artists but the ones that we selected for this show had a lot of variety in their messages so the people who exhibited their view in their work were who we really wanted to show.”
Altogether 20 various artists applied for the event but since the studio had limited occupancy, Williams limited the artwork to only 10 artists. The artist statements were intentionally printed with their piece to let the audience know their message and not only interpret their work but to understand the artist’s mission.
“Sometimes you don’t want your audience to know, sometimes you want them to feel whatever you want to feel from their artwork but because this show is about the artist we wanted them to have a dialogue with their audience,” Williams said.
The artworks for the exhibit will be in the studio through May 9 after which they will be posted on opal studios online website opalstudios.org for viewing.
“I have always loved and appreciated art, but it gave me a chance to focus on that, focus on art history and artists and culture and history, how art has been a messenger through 1000 of years,” Williams said. “To me, art is all about the process, it’s not the end. It’s a process of making art, creating art experimenting with materials stimulating and creating and message eventually or just letting someone relax for the day.”
“It’s my project that I have just started but it’s really new, but I am really excited to kind of move it forward,” said Perez. “It’s been a year that I have worked on this but barely at the beginning of this year was when I opened up the website and started putting content out there, so it’s been there since 2018.”
Luke Anderson, a Wyoming resident, was one of the artists representing their thoughts through art. His pieces were named “Leftover” and “Always Chasing the Frontiers.”
“Mostly it’s about not wasting materials and also about trying to satisfy that a duty as an artist we have to create something out of nothing,” Anderson said. “I think it’s a really good mix, representing artists of this area. There are student artists who are here and there are professional artist, who are scientist artists there is a good mix that can show students what art can do and what art can be in the community.”
The event is an outreach program for the grant which is partly funded by the National Science Foundation, Wyoming EPSCoR and Science Loves Art.
The gallery will be open for viewing during store hours Monday, Wednesday and Friday 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday noon to 3 p.m.
