Nominated Artists
Wyoming’s Women to Watch
Nomination Process
Wyoming Curator Dr. Tammi Hanawalt selected 5 Women to Watch artists to represent our state, and NMWA selected artist Sarah Ortegon from this group to be featured in the upcoming national Women to Watch exhibition.
SELECTED ARTIST
Sarah Ortegon HighWalking
Painting, Beadwork, Performance | Wind River Reservation
Sarah Ortegon HighWalking was born in Denver, CO to a Basque preacher father, and an eastern Shoshone and northern Arapaho native mother. Ortegon HighWalking grew up with eleven siblings in a home where bible studies were strict, yet each summer would be spent more freely on the Wind River reservation in Wyoming with her mother’s family, learning about the history and culture of her people. At age seventeen, Ortegon HighWalking was disowned by her father, which made her seek further connection with her mother’s side of the family, spending more and more time at the Wyoming reservation. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Metropolitan State University of Denver in 2013, also spending time abroad studying art history in Italy. The artist received her hiking and instructing certificate from National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) in 2019 and has led courses through the Wind River Mountain range for up to a month at a time.
Ortegon HighWalking learned traditional beadwork from her mother as a young teenager, enjoying the art and storytelling as part of the process of creativity. The artist felt most in her element when learning about spiritual practices of her indigenous heritage, and she found that all the art that she produced naturally referenced this history. In 2013, after being crowned Miss Native American USA, she toured with the Native Pride Dancers, which was funded by US embassies to teach about Native American culture around the world. A dancer, performer, actor, and painter, Ortegon HighWalking expresses herself through her indigenous lens in each of her mediums. In 2020, Ortegon collaborated with Choctaw artist Jeffery Gibson and performed in Times Square, NY for the Midnight Moment titled She Never Dances Alone. Her contemporary take on traditional indigenous arts combines beadwork, painting, and performance.
Ortegon HighWalking’s work has been shown across Wyoming and Colorado and will be included in the exhibition Women to Watch at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC in 2024. The artist was featured in an Emmy nominated PBS story titled The Art of Home; a Wind River Story and has numerous performance projects on the horizon. Ortegon HighWalking is currently the assistant director of Human Resources for Native American Rights Fund (NARF), a 50-year-old firm that works to preserve tribal existence and protect its resources.
Learn More: Sarah’s Art | Wyo Humanities podcast with Sarah
Katy Ann Fox
Painter, Teton Valley
Katy Ann Fox grew up in Grangeville, a north-central Idaho town with a population of 3500. After high school, Fox majored in Business Economics with a minor in Art at the University of Idaho, graduating in 2009. Fox then moved to San Francisco to pursue her art practice, earning a Master’s in Fine Art at the Academy of Art University in 2012.
In San Francisco, Fox grew deeply inspired by painter Edward Payne and classic oil painting. After graduation, Fox looked to move to a place in the west where she could find a stronger connection to the land, with wide open spaces that hold nature’s traces left behind. She moved to Jackson Hole, WY that year, where for over a decade she continues to impact, and be impacted, by the community.
In Katy Ann Fox’s work, we see attention and reverence given to places and spaces otherwise overlooked. Her paintings often contain imagery of weathered buildings, cracked concrete grounds, or electrical boxes, all metaphors for the many quiet places and objects that connect us and hold community together. In her work, she depicts optimism, modesty, respect, and harmony through a deep understanding of oil painting, color harmony, composition, and texture. The artist is a continuous explorer, delving into other mediums such as printmaking, pottery, and textile.
Fox has been the recipient of numerous awards and recognitions, including Artist of the Year in 2015 at the Art Association of Jackson Hole, artist in residence in Goldfield, NV, a vast desert ghost town, selected for a permanent mural in downtown Jackson Hole by Jackson Hole Public Art, and a featured artist in an exhibition commemorating women’s suffrage at the Jackson Hole Historical Society. Her work has appeared on the Jackson Hole Still Works Great Grey Gin label, which is sold nationwide. In 2022 the artist opened a gallery and studio in Driggs, Idaho, where she exhibits her work, as well as artists whom she is inspired by.
Learn More: Katy Ann’s Art | Wyo Humanities podcast with Katy Ann
Leah Hardy
Metalsmith | Laramie
Mixed media artist Leah Hardy grew up in eastern Kansas, where she recalls how she and her father would hunt morels in the hilly plains. Accustomed to looking down at the micro view during hikes, the young Hardy would often collect bugs and sticks to take them home and create dioramas and assemblage artworks. As an uninhibited five-year-old, she declared to her parents that she would become an artist, making the statement true by studying art throughout high school, and receiving her Bachelor of Fine Art in 1987 from the University of Kansas, and a Master’s in Fine Art from the University of Indiana in 1990.
Hardy’s long journey to become a metalsmith with an oeuvre known for anthropomorphizing insects comes from her belief that artists can amplify tiny moments in life.
Originally a ceramicist, her desire to make delicate yet strong sculptures inspired her shift to metalwork. Nearly thirty years ago Hardy and her husband moved to Wyoming, where Hardy taught, eventually creating the Metalsmithing Program in 2009 in the Visual Arts Department at the University of Wyoming. Employing insect-inspired forms that become metaphors for the present human condition, Hardy’s works are a springboard for conversation.
Hardy’s career has included teaching University of WY art courses and conducting research on traditional metalsmithing techniques in northern India. In 2017, Hardy was an invited Visiting Artist at the University of South Australia, Adelaide. Exhibited nationally and internationally, Hardy’s intimately scaled mixed media sculpture has garnered numerous awards and inclusions in books, periodicals, juried and invitational exhibitions. Residencies have taken Hardy to Australia, New Zealand, China, and India. Hardy’s work is in public and private collections in the US, China, Czech Republic, New Zealand, Australia, Europe, and India. In 2023, Hardy and her husband retired from teaching and moved to New Mexico for new adventures and art creation.
Learn More: Leah’s Art | Wyo Humanities podcast with Leah
Bronwyn Minton
Mixed Media | Jackson Hole
Bronwyn Minton is a multi-disciplinary artist, educator, curator, and arts leader living in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Though Minton grew up in southern Vermont and New Hampshire, she made Wyoming home every summer beginning at age ten, attending and later working at a summer camp in the Wind River Range where her mother had once worked as well. Her parents, educators and artists, encouraged Minton to experiment in the arts throughout her life, which fostered her curiosity and desire to make objects in all different mediums. Minton received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, and her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Though she made cities like Portland and New York home, she found herself moving to Jackson, Wyoming in 1992. For 13 years, Minton worked at the National Museum of Wildlife Art, later working as the executive director at the Art Association of Jackson Hole.
Minton’s artworks and installations convey notions related to human interaction within the natural world. Creating from both a macro and micro lens, her mixed media work consists of drawing, animation, photography, sculpture, clay, printmaking, and interactive installations. Using simple forms inspired by the patterns and textures found in nature, her work exploits radically different scales, from the microscopic to the monumental, bringing attention to how we each individually fit into, and construct, our own connections to the natural world.
Minton’s works have been shown nationally and internationally and can be found in public and private collections. She is the recipient of the Wyoming Governor’s Arts Award, two Wyoming Arts Council Visual Arts Fellowships, a Wyoming Arts Council Visual Arts Fellowship Honorable Mention, and the Cultural Council of Jackson Hole’s Creative Pulse Award.
Learn More: Bronwyn’s Art | Wyo Humanities podcast with Bronwyn
Jennifer Rife
Land Art Installations | Cheyenne
Jennifer Rife spent most of her life in the West, growing up in a rural town of 7000 in southeastern Colorado along the banks of the Arkansas River. Her parents were constant makers and innovators, welding or sewing objects for their home throughout her life. Art fascinated Rife from a young age, and she pursued a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a major in Art History and studio concentration in clay from the University of Kansas. An avid visitor of museums, land art sites, and petroglyphs, Rife found that while most artworks were intended to be permanent, she wanted hers to only evoke emotion and a fleeting sense of time, rather than something material
Rife moved to the high plains of Cheyenne, Wyoming in 2001, creating her art under the online moniker ‘art in the middle of nowhere.’ Through the word ‘nowhere’, she plays on the ideas of what is nowhere, or nothing, versus somewhere, or something.
The vast landscape and empty spaces of Wyoming have endless swathes of native plants, vegetation, and wildlife. It is in these places that her conceptual art is created. As an artist, Rife works in her studio with materials ranging from clay, leather, dried plants, plumbing pipes, and other castoff objects, turning these disparate materials into one unified piece. To complete the work, Rife takes her objects on long drives, stopping in random landscapes on public land to situate, photograph, and then disassemble her objects, creating a momentary installation that leaves the land untouched. Her photographs, titled by their location coordinates, are by-products of the artwork, generally intended to be displayed in an ephemeral nature, such as light projections, or handed out as postcards.
Until her retirement in 2023, Rife was the exhibition and design supervisor for the Laramie County Library System. Rife has exhibited her work throughout the United States and is included in the public collections of the Wyoming State Museum, the Nicolaysen Art Museum, the Southeast Colorado Arts Council, and in numerous private collections. Her work has been featured in books and articles, and the artist has earned multiple recognitions and a fellowship with the Wyoming Arts Council.
Learn More: Art in the Middle of Nowhere | Wyo Humanities podcast with Jennifer
“With this gorgeous state as their inspiration, our artists are telling powerful stories through their art. I’m so excited to elevate these 5 artists through their nomination to this exhibit.”
— Tammi Hanawalt
Tammi Hanawalt
Consulting Curator | Wyoming
Five Wyoming women artists have been nominated by Wyoming-based consulting curator Dr. Tammi Hanawalt, one of which will be selected by NMWA to be featured in the national and international exhibition in Washington, D.C.
“I’m so excited to elevate these 5 artists through their nomination to this exhibit, and in turn I hope to raise the profiles of all artists creating in our beautiful state of Wyoming.”