On Friday, Sept. 15th, the University of Wyoming Art Museum (UWAM) hosted their annual fall opening. The event provided a unique opportunity for guests to have conversations with the curators about the museum’s latest collection, the New West Exhibit.
Guest curator Robert Martinez was unable to make the event, due to his truck breaking down near Casper, WY, so rather than the planned panel discussion featuring all the curators, Robert Martinez, Nicole Crawford, and Michelle Sunset, Crawford and Sunset lead tours through the New West exhibit.
“The way we thought about this exhibition is we’re coming up on 50 years at the UW art museum that started in the basement of the visual arts department when it used to be in the performing arts center,” said Crawford during her opening remarks.
Taking a look at the museums’ collection through an alternate lens was one of the main goals of the New West exhibition. Martinez was invited to spend time going through the UW collections, during which the curators thought about not only what the collections contained, but where that art came from.
“Museums right now are really starting to look internally at our collections and think about how these collections were formed, who collected them, who donated them, who was in charge at the time in these museums. So that’s kind of how we started this project,” said Crawford.
The New West exhibition was modeled after the 1992 exhibition “Mining the Museum”, done by the artist Fred Wilson, working with the Maryland Historical Society. The exhibition focused on Wilson’s discomfort with the Maryland Historical Society’s collections, and how he, as a black man, felt underrepresented. The exhibition was incredibly upsetting to some, and powerfully affirming to others.
“When we wrote the terra grant, we used [Mining the Museum] as a theoretical framework for this exhibition. Because of our face in the West, we wanted to bring in an indigenous curator and artist to take a look at our collections and help us to see where we have omissions and where we’re misrepresenting things and where we could use some extra context and a different perspective.”
The New West exhibition attempts to accomplish this task by showcasing Indigenous art in many mediums, from sculpture to painting to digital, and framing that against art centering indigenous folk made by nonnative artists.
“This exhibition seeks to recontextualize objects in the museum’s permanent collection to reframe narratives common in western museum practice,” reads the event description for the Fall Opening.
The New West exhibition goes through May 18th, 2024.
