Officially known as the Equality State, in 1870 Wyoming was the first in the nation to recognize women’s right to vote. 150 plus years later, Wyoming women persevere in their efforts for the state to live up to its original moniker, rather than what it’s most commonly referred to today; the Cowboy State.

In 1987 the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) in Washington, DC opened as the first museum in the world solely dedicated to championing women through the arts. Nearly two decades later the museum began their critically acclaimed Women to Watch exhibition series, a collaborative effort between NMWA and state-led committees who help underrepresented regional artists gain a national stage. In 2021 a Wyoming outreach committee was formed by NMWA board member and Wyoming based arts advocate Lisa Claudy Fleischman (1958-2023). With her passionate guidance, a dozen impressive and influential women from across the state joined forces to raise the funds needed to include Wyoming women in NMWA’s exhibition in Washington, DC.

Unlike a standard group show, the Wyoming Women to Watch traveling exhibition allows each artist their own space to express their individual process and practice. Selected by Wyoming curator Dr. Tammi Hanawalt, the show honors each artist’s singular voice. From Jennifer Rife’s (Cheyenne) ephemeral land art to Bronwyn Minton’s (Jackson) undulating 9 foot ceramic installation, to Leah Hardy’s (Laramie) miniature anthropomorphized insects, and Katy Ann Fox’s (Jackson) attention to overlooked moments, we see a connection between human interaction with the natural world; likely an inspiration from living in our wild and expansive landscape. “Having my work, which concentrates on idea and process rather than product, recognized and amplified through WYNMWA has validated my vision and voice as an artist.” says artist Jennifer Rife. “Participating in conversations with new audiences about being a woman artist and the challenges presented has provided important discussions for the arts in Wyoming.”

The Wyoming artist selected to be featured in NMWA’s Women to Watch exhibition is Sarah Ortegon HighWalking, a Wind River mixed-media artist. Her oeuvre combines painting, beadwork and performance to retell narratives of modern Indigenous women like herself. Ortegon HighWalking is an accomplished artist, actress, and dancer who was also named Miss Native American USA in 2013. She will perform two songs from her signature black light Jingle Dance during the opening reception at Shari Brownfield Fine Art.

The exhibition will run from March 4th to May 14th, 2024, with an opening reception co-sponsored by the WYNMWA committee on Wednesday, March 13th from 5-7pm. A performance and brief discussion with several of the artists, members of the WYNMWA Committee, and curator will begin at 5:30pm. At the end of the Jackson exhibition, the show will travel to its next stop at the Ucross Foundation in northern Wyoming.

December 4, 2023, Jackson, WY: Rock, Paper, Canvas is the new exhibition at Shari Brownfield Fine Art that explores the subtle connections between fine art and the childhood game Rock, Paper, Scissors. The opening reception will be held on December 14 from 4-7pm in conjunction with the downtown Holiday Stroll. In the exhibition, which runs from Dec 4, 2023, to March 1, 2024, a heavy focus is placed on the different ways 33 artists play with their mediums, specifically, rock, paper, and canvas.

Rock, dirt, sand, bark, fiber, and paper were some of the earliest materials used for communication and language; and early communication was rooted in pictures. “So often we think of art and imagine paint on a rectangular canvas, or perhaps a bronze sculpture,” says Shari Brownfield, who curated the exhibition. “Art can look like anything and be made of everything. Many artists feel more freedom when they practice outside of traditional art-making norms; they experiment and play. Works in the exhibit have glitter in them, colored pencil that looks like watercolor, pointillist painting that goes beyond hyperrealism, wire and strips of fabric, pastel smeared pages, mandala rock piles, and so many other found materials. What is so intriguing to me is how the medium can inspire the art.”

Less traditional materials have been used in artmaking throughout time and genres, whether by necessity or experimentation of new ideas. Mud-caked paintings by self-taught Alabama artist, Jimmy Lee Sudduth, became his oft-chosen medium due to lack of money to buy paint. Late New York sculptor, Boaz Vaadia, first experimented with bluestone because he came across it in a SoHo dump, and it was so plentiful that it eventually inspired an entire body of work. Other elements take shape more traditionally, such as the hyper realist paintings of river rocks by Alan Magee, the carved sandstone sculptures of self-taught artist Lonnie Holley, or the sundrenched landscape oil painting by Herman Maril.

As one moves through the exhibition in the cozy cabin, we see how organic elements – rock, paper and fiber – permeate artmaking. Spanning a multitude of genres and even centuries, delicate works on paper from the 1890s by French artist, Henry Moret, are contrasted with the contemporary digital collage art making process by Nigerian artist, Saidou Dicko, to the heavy, thick, sand filled impasto oil painting by the American abstract expressionist, Stanley Boxer.

The exhibition, Rock, Paper, Canvas runs from December 4, 2023, to March 1, 2024. The opening reception will be held from 4-7pm on the evening of December 14, 2023.

According to the National Endowment for the Arts’ 2019 data, 89% of museum acquisitions and 85% of museum exhibitions in the US are dedicated to male artists. Even more unbalanced, only 3% of auction sales account for art created by women. These statistics are especially telling when taking into account that approximately half of MFA graduates today are women.

A new exhibition titled No Man’s Land at Shari Brownfield Fine Art assembles a collection of over 20 influential and emerging female artists from the past 70 years. Artists in the exhibition include pioneering abstract expressionists Helen Frankenthaler and Mary Abbott, famed Colombian textile artist Olga de Amaral, avant-garde Fluxus sculptor Mary Bauermeister, self-taught ‘outsider’ artist Nellie Mae Rowe, transcendentalist painter Leila McConnell, artists from throughout Europe, Africa, and Canada, as well as the local Jackson Hole region, such as encaustic painter Pamela Gibson.

“What lens does each artist bring to their artwork,” asks Shari Brownfield, who curated the exhibition. “Do men and women bring the same point of view to their genre and aesthetic? Might a mother and child artwork be painted differently by a male versus female artist? Or perhaps a nude, a landscape, an interior scene, or an abstraction? It seems that the obvious answer is ‘yes,’ however, women artists have typically been omitted from art history. This exhibition aims to be a reminder of the influence women had on art and on their male counterparts.”

The exhibition also reflects the deep personal values of Shari Brownfield Fine Art’s team of supporting and empowering women at all levels of the local community. After serving six years on the board of Jackson Hole’s Community Safety Network, a refuge for people affected by domestic violence, sexual assault and stalking, Brownfield has stepped into the role as Board Chair this month. Concurrently, Elisabeth Rohrbach is on the board of Jackson-based nonprofit, Womentum, which is dedicated to inspiring and connecting women as leaders. She joined the board in 2018 and recently concluded two years as Board Chair.

No Man’s Land runs from July 11 to November 27, 2023. A reception to celebrate the exhibition will be held on Thursday, July 20 from 5-8pm at the project space, located at 55 South Glenwood Street.

Analog film photographer Robert Buelteman grew up in the Bay Area, his boyhood home overlooking the thousands of acres of the San Francisco State Fish & Game Preserve.  Visitors were, and still are, forbidden on the sensitive watershed property, whose landscape remains nearly unchanged for over two centuries.  In the early 1980s, after three years of begging for access to photograph the untouched property, Buelteman was given a one day permit, which was extended to a month, and eventually to an entire decade.

In the exhibition Unseen | Seen, this unrelenting desire of the artist to give voice to the natural world in the absence of humanity, remains a common thread.  In keeping his work black and white, Buelteman removes himself, his interpretation, his lens, from what is seen so that his subject may speak for itself.  “Heaven is at our feet every single day if we are willing to take the time to perceive it” says Buelteman.

While Buelteman creates space for the unseen, longtime local photographer and painter Anne Muller inserts her translation of the unseen directly into her mixed-media photography.  Through a process of digital photographic transfers on abstract paintings, the artist attempts to balance the energy of our natural world with its physicality.  “I see my art as a translation of something unseen or unnamed” explains the artist, “I’m trying to speak ‘Tree’ [what the artist muses Mother Nature’s language might be called] and with each work I create, I feel the smallest bit closer to fluency.”

In Muller’s work, the artist aims to expose the hidden energy and interconnectedness of the natural world.  This desire “to speak Tree” is what drives her creation, sparked since her childhood days of taking long nature walks with her grandfather.  While Muller uses creative license to imbue her interpretation of ordinary perception of the landscape, Buelteman’s work is an expression of the suchness of the natural world. Through these lenses, both artists compose their own love letters to Mother Nature, as well as showcase the duty they feel as creatives to present the unseen.

The exhibition Unseen | Seen runs from April 11 to June 30, 2023.  A reception to celebrate the exhibition will be held on Thursday, May 11 from 5-7pm at the project space, located at 55 South Glenwood Street.

When approaching Shari Brownfield Fine Art’s log cabin on Glenwood Street one is drawn to the stillness the artworks provoke, while paradoxically sensing the fleeting moments of our world. In Be Still; Distill each of the artists’ varying approaches to nature reveal its essence, making history the present and creating a connection to the unseen.

The title of the exhibition, Be Still; Distill, echoes Georgia O'Keefe’s sentiments that, “Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things.” Each of the six artists - Kate Breakey, Robert Buelteman, Pamela Gibson, Alan Magee, Anne Muller, and Richard Painter - is inspired to capture nature in its purest form. Through their individual processes they make thoughtful edits to distill the real, thus becoming unreal. 

Australian born Kate Breakey’s luminous, modern day 'orotones’ are showcased across a 14 foot, 19-piece salon hung gallery wall. The constellation of imagery pays homage to the artist’s visits to natural history museums with her father. Her black and white photography focuses on natural elements -flowers, animals, insects and trees - coupled with exquisite hand painting and 24K gold leaf. These works come on the heels of Breakey’s solo exhibition at the Grace Museum in Texas.

 “As O’Keefe articulates, thanks to the artists’ ability to literally ‘be still and distill,’ they encourage us to question what we are seeing and provide timelessness to a short-lived moment,” explains Brownfield. 

Unlike Breakey’s streamlined detail, Alan Magee’s hyper real pointillist paintings deliver what appear to include every possible detail, thus tricking us into a false moment of actuality. Magee’s widely celebrated trompe l’oeil paintings of stones, illustrated with extreme clarity, ultimately make the viewer question reality. With timeless subject matter the artist provokes the viewer’s senses to feel a surface with our eyes and to sense the object’s essence.

 The 34 artworks in the exhibit also includes Richard Painter’s Big Grass; a massive charred wood and pastel triptych, which may look familiar to those who have traveled through the Jackson Hole Airport, where a major work by the artist hangs. Jackson Hole painter Pamela Gibson’s molten beeswax paintings, which combine hints of vibrant pigment and found objects, reveal the artist’s distillation of her senses of the landscape. Robert Buelteman’s ‘camera-less’ photographs of plant life, combined with 80,000 volts of electricity, uncover an unseen spirit of the natural world. To complete the show, photo emulsion transfers by local artist Anne Muller are a thoughtful representation of the classic still life, featuring soft glimmering reflections of the artist’s peony photographs warmed by acrylic paint.

Tom Gilleon is an artist who has lived a lifetime of creative experiences. From being hired by NASA to illustrate the Saturn and Apollo programs in the 1960s, to becoming a highly revered Disney Imagineer who created the conceptual drawings of EPCOT and many other iconic Disney theme parks in the 1970s and 80s, no one imagined that becoming a Montana rancher would be his next step in the 1990s. It should therefore come as little surprise that after beginning a full time career as a fine artist in the 2000s, GIlleon quickly gained gallery representation and a strong collector following, and by 2013 earned the title of being the first living artist to be honored with a solo exhibition at the C.M. Russell Museum.

Despite all these successes, in early 2020 Gilleon realized that there was yet another path ahead for him. As he sat on a flight, with a bird’s eye view of the land where his Scottish grandfather immigrated and where his grandmother, a full blooded Cherokee, raised him, he wrote himself a note. “What if an artist knew his next painting would be his last? What would he choose to paint? [Would he] make every stroke purposeful, effective, and masterful? Would the paint flow effortless or would [the] hand create a bloody battlefield?” And so he sought to find out.

Today, Gilleon wants to share his thoughtful attempts to answer his own questions in a new exhibition titled Dream Catcher, hosted at Shari Brownfield Fine Art in downtown Jackson, WY. Light and darkness, contrast and harmony, balance each of the artist’s paintings in the exhibition, which include small gestural landscape watercolors to large, ethereal floating figures. In each painting the viewer can see traces of the intermingling of the artist’s distinct roots, and how their convergence, six decades later, play out. In one of the paintings, titled Brulé, Gilleon showcases his mastery of paint in a return to familiar subjects, such as his beloved glowing teepee’s – yet this time the scene glows from the intensity of the fire that consumes it.

Dream Catcher can be viewed at Shari Brownfield Fine Art, located at 55 South Glenwood Street from August 15 to October 15, 2022. A special reception, hosted by First Republic Bank, will be held on September 17th, during the Fall Arts Festival, from 3:00 - 6:00pm. The artist will be in attendance, available for conversation and discussion about his paintings.

Generations of artists have tried their hand at capturing the grandeur and beauty of the Tetons, resulting in iconic artworks that continue to inspire us today. For Kelly, WY based painter Wendell Locke Field, the Tetons are not the only source of awe around here; these majestic mountains serve as the backdrop to lives lived. A new exhibition at Shari Brownfield Fine Art titled Collective Grace showcases Field’s uniquely intimate and charming pieces of visual storytelling, highlighting the grace and humanity that he has experienced in our valley and around the globe.

Since his childhood living on a dairy farm in Michigan, Field has cherished the natural world and the adventure it holds. The farm soil, forest trees, and lake waters fostered Field's curiosity for nature, and he felt that the entire universe was present in even the smallest leaf or stone. His curiosity developed alongside a deep creativity, spurring him to translate the sights and textures of the outside world through painting. Eventually, Field came to understand that painting was not merely a way to capture his own past and present, it was also a way to imagine and create his own future. He came to adopt a motto written by Henry David Thoreau: “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined.”

Field’s paintings reveal a deep love for the tradition of painting blended with a hunger for new experience and adventure. “I studied those who came before me and those who stand beside me. I study the craft and practice the fundamentals, Drawing is seeing after all. You are forced to be still. To be.” says Field of his approach to painting. What Field sees, of course, is not just the beauty of mountains - but of the people, objects, structures and even trinkets that come to ‘be’ with these mountains too. It is this collective grace that inspires his work.

Collective Grace opens March 3, 2022 and will remain on view through April 30th, 2022. An opening reception with the artist will be held March 17th from 4-7pm.