Art town:Can 'old west' Jackson cultivate contemporary art?

Tuesday, September 02, 2008

By Henry Sweets

Jackson Hole, Wyo. - Mike Tierney lived in Steamboat Springs, Colo., when he read a half-page article in the October 1996 Powder magazine about a new Jackson ski company, called Igneous.  He moved here to design graphics for their skis, and more than 13 years later, he still makes spray-paint art in the Igneous factory. Then this summer, he had his first commercial art show at the Teton Artlab.

There is no telling how many artists, like Tierney, were drawn to the valley for a reason besides art, but found here an ideal spot to do their work.
Artlab and a few other galleries show these artists, but in the town that fancy’s itself as “the last of the old west,” some local contemporary artists say that their art is more palatable in other markets.

Tom Woodhouse makes art full-time, but recently has sold more paintings in Chicago than in Jackson. He has been commissioned to paint a forty-foot mural in Denver, Colorado.

Painter Craig Spankie contacted two galleries in Houston, and they both offered him a show. Though he has seen some commercial success in Jackson, his last show didn’t sell a single piece.

Charlotte Potter sold more work in one show at Artlab than she had in one place before, Teton Artlab owner Travis Walker said, but has recently left for a program at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Mike Tierney, who has by nature a rambling soul, said that he sometimes wonders if he should leave the town, ever becoming more glamorous and expensive, for some other new frontier, like the alps of France or New Zealand.
Carrie Geraci, painter and director of the Center of Wonder,

“There are so many young talented artists here of all these different unique styles
and everybody is just hungry for stuff like that right now,” she said, but added “I’m also  worried about what’s going to happen to all the young talent as housing prices and cost of living skyrockets.”

Walker says one of the difficulties in forming a tangible New West art scene in Jackson is corralling the artistic talent of a transient community – a diverse group, ranging from ski bums, like Tierney, to carpenters from New Zealand and stockbrokers from Brooklyn – into an artistic force that he thinks can re-define the way people understand western culture. At very least he wants to prove that

Jackson is capable of growing its own art community.

Craig Spankie explained that buying contemporary art is not always an easy decision, and maybe Jackson isn’t quite ready for it.

“You don’t buy it because you think it will look nice on your wall,” he said. “You buy it because it draws you in . . . and it pushes you.”

Artlab owner Travis Walker says that as a younger set with a taste for modern ideas gets older and purchases homes, they will want original works by Jackson artists to fill the walls.

Located next to Teton Thai, a gathering place for Jackson’s twenty-something set, Artlab gets a lot traffic, and feedback, from people who can’t necessarily afford the art there. And even though the town is abuzz about galleries showing work by living artists in contemporary, almost industrial spaces, it doesn’t mean that contemporary art is selling like hotcakes.

Walker said the “diverse structure” of his business plan includes selling books, t-shirts and prints that offer an affordable way to own original art.

Right now, Artlab supplements its art sales with Web and graphic design work.
Walker will tell you that Jackson Hole’s art market mostly peddles nostalgia: cowboy and Indian myths and the beckoning romance of open spaces, immortalized in dime-store novels, radio programs or the works of master painters, like Thomas Moran. He thinks that a new type of Western art can be cultivated in a town like Jackson, where cultural tides converge from all over the world and the established art market is a sort of status quo to which his artists react.

“To me [Jackson] has this great potential that all these [historic] art movements have had because it has such a powerful legacy, a powerful stigma that people think they know what it is,” he said. “[The Artlab] was like this Petri dish where we dropped different artists in and are seeing what comes of it. Does it actually produce the cure for bad art?”

For the past year, he has had new shows every month; painting, drawing, ceramics, glass, collage and printmaking – “art created by conditions of our times,” he said, “and not by something that existed 100 years ago.”

Well-educated twenty-somethings move West to skim fat from a stream of tourists who not only come here for the myth of the Old West, but also for the excitement of action sports and to mingle with “extreme” athletes. There is a new urbanism generated by the inability to encroach on the openness surrounding it, because it is protected wilderness, or prohibitively expensive. Today, Ranchers ride ATV’s and snowboarders, while Native Americans living on reservations struggle with poverty and addiction.

As the realities of that culture become apparent, it is up to artists to be there, interpreting what that means.

“The West is still really young; there is a lot to say and a lot to explore,” Walker said.

Charlotte Potter, a local glass artist who has shown at the Artlab, began blowing glass antlers, then mounting them on foam heads and retro-kitschy fabrics.
The sculptures, she said at the time, were about the dialogue between tourists who travel to Jackson looking for a piece of the Western myth, as well as locals who play along and sometimes embellish or fabricate answers to ill-informed questions, like “at what elevation to deer turn to elk?”

Cary Tijerina, who is showing portraits of Jackson locals, has done a unique job capturing the personalities of Jackson’s food-service industry, from cooks to hostesses. His subjects have migrated here from Mexico, Eastern Europe and wealthy communities on the east coast of the United States. Craig Spankie juxtaposes sleek surfaces above rough, aged, textured found objects from construction sites that express the power of open space. Mike Tierney, who skis some of the scariest lines on Cody Peak, created a spray-enamel homage to the mountain, but also makes abstract experimental pieces that look like a graffiti-meets-cubism.

By placing these artists in close contact with each other, Walker has begun some dialogue between them, and their commentaries on contemporary western life are mingling.

But though Jackson might have the potential to create art that specifically addresses, and defines what it means to be western, some artists say that the contemporary art scene in Jackson is merely a hodgepodge of artists working in isolation from each other.

“There’s a contemporary art scene [in Jackson], but everybody’s doing something different,” local painter Tom Woodhouse said.

Woodhouse says that creative people will always be drawn to Jackson. But since many artists work out of a garage-studio and are too busy working day jobs, he said, it is difficult to have the exchange of ideas that brings artists together and gives them momentum as a group.

But the beauty of a disjointed art scene is the diversity of art it creates, the individuality it preserves and the solace of not being bombarded by ideas.
Steven Glass, who paints on glass, said “there’s something nurturing about a small town” like Jackson, where peace and the time to work are perhaps easier to find than in a big city.

David Gottfried explained that isolation can be a muse in itself. Without being bombarded by a need to be “hip,” up to date, or drawn away from their own personal path by a desire to emulate others, an artist has the freedom to follow their own genius.

Several other artists said though they might be subliminally influenced by their peers, they are largely doing their “own thing.”
Gottfried likened the traditionalism of the art scene to some residents who think tall buildings will ruin the character of Jackson. He asked if a town that can’t accept four story buildings could accept new ideas in art.

But most contemporary artists interviewed for this story, Gottfried included, didn’t want to pick a fight with the traditional artists or galleries – most said they should be a part of a larger art community that can coexist despite aesthetic or theoretical differences.

Susan Thulin, who has made contemporary art in Jackson for 20 years, said that contemporary artists do not necessarily have a better vision of the West, but simply appeal to a different brand of viewer.

“People who purchase work purchase for different reasons, some want to think about and reflect about who they are and the world around them, and some simply want to be a part of stories or myths,” she said.

What really matters, Woodhouse said, is that patrons, donors and artists understand that Jackson has fertile ground to work with. The first step is to avoid an identity crisis and to support artists regardless of their style and commercial viability

“Jackson has always been promoted as a Western art town, and not as an art town,” Woodhouse said. “And until people in this town understand that [all art] is valid, there’s going to be a bit of a philosophical war, over the traditional Western artists and Western galleries, and those looking for a more contemporary vision of the future of this town”

Photo: Zippers by Abbie Miller




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