The Wyoming Art Party is a community art group founded in 2014 by three art collectors named June Glasson, Meg Thompson and Adrienne Vetter, who aim to create opportunity in the state of Wyoming.
The Wyoming art party carries out various projects, such as the Laramie Pop-Up Art walk, Parade Project, Portrait of Wyoming and more. For the Portrait project in Wyoming, they created a different kind of Wyoming collaborative project where artist from all varieties were invited from visual arts to performing arts to collaborate in a portrait across the entire state.
“We started doing pop up art shows individually and then in small groups,” Vetter said.
They also started pop up art walk with a partnership with Laramie Main Street Alliance, as an idea of using the business model and to collaborate with artists from various sectors.
“It kinda turned into this thing as we added more and more artist[s] and business where for a weekend in September, turned the entire downtown in arts and music and just creative space for the weekend,” Vetter said.
The Wyoming Art Party has made all their events as inclusive as possible, from an established artist to a high school art class student or anyone who works in a creative field can join and participate in the project, Vetter said.
“Everything we do has to be collaborative, it’s community focused and it’s free and accessible,” Glasson said. “So, nothing we do is charged money for. Everything we do is supported by the community.”
The Laramie community and other organizations donate the materials for the various art projects. This allows the Wyoming Art Party to be free of cost and easily accessible to the public.
“The three of us are pretty interested in having a practice beyond our studio practice, but a practice that involves the community,” Vetter said. “We talked about how the Wyoming Art Party as a collective is a name and an identity that allows us to put the more community involved projects within that category.”
The Wyoming Art Council has supported the Wyoming Art Party since the beginning. Other organizations are also involved due to the positivity of the Wyoming Art Party.
“The department supports them to [a] certain degree,” UW art professor Margaret K. Haydon said. “What they do is they create space for dialogues for artist[s] to talk about ideas and content especially art that involves with social commentary and political commentary. I mean not just that, but they do go into that aspect as well. They are definitely a positive movement in the city.”
