Since the National Center for Arts Research began measuring arts vibrancy in every U.S. county in 2015, Jackson Hole has rated in the index’s top 10 for small to medium-size cities. We’ve got one of the most vibrant art scenes—including visual and performance arts—in the country. If you want to immerse yourself in the valley’s art scene, you don’t have to leave it behind when you head home for the night. Some of our luxury vacation rentals have museum-quality art.
Amy Ringholz
In 2005, Southwest Art magazine named Amy Ringholz an “artist to watch” in its annual “21 Under 31” feature. She was selected to be the 2012 Jackson Hole Fall Arts Festival’s featured artist (the youngest-ever at the time). In the years since, Ringholz, who lives and paints in Jackson Hole (in a studio nicknamed the “Imagination Station”), has lived up to her early promise, showing work at the National Museum of Wildlife Art and opening her own gallery in downtown, Ringholz Studios.
Edward Aldrich, Three Kings
A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Edward Aldrich was juried into the prestigious Society of Animal Artists in 1991, at age 26. More recently, in 2016, he won the People’s Choice Award at the National Museum of Wildlife Art’s annual Western Visions Show. The Golden, Colorado, based painter’s work is prized for his precise brush technique and sense of light and composition. He painted Three Kings in 2006. See more of his work in Jackson at Mountain Trails Art Gallery.
Linda St. Clair
Growing up on a Tennessee farm, Linda St. Clair studied the animals around her. Today she’s known for her portraits of both domestic and wild animals. To study grizzly bears like the one in this painting, she’s traveled around Yellowstone National Park and to Alaska’s Katmai Peninsula. Whatever species she paints, “Linda really captures an animals’ personality,” says Maryvonne Leshe, managing partner of Trailside Galleries, the first gallery to open in Jackson Hole, and the one that represents St. Clair.
Ewoud de Groot
Dutch painter Ewoud de Groot has pieces in the permanent collection of the National Museum of Wildlife Art and was the museum’s featured “Western Visions” artist in 2014. “To me, as an artist, producing a good painting is about exploring all the different facets of composition, color and technique and not just reproducing an image in a photorealistic way. Although I consider myself a figurative painter, I always try to find that essential balance and tension between the more abstract background and the realism of the subject(s). In a way you could say that I am on the frontier between figurative and non-figurative, or the traditional and the modern.” See more of de Groot’s work at Astoria Gallery in downtown Jackson.
Bo Bartlett, The Goddess
Artist Bo Bartlett paints realism in the same vein as Thomas Eakins and Andrew Wyeth. Last year, he received the prestigious 1858 Prize for Contemporary Southern Art from the Society 1858 of the Gibbes Museum in Charleston, South Carolina. In author Tom Butler’s book Bo Bartlett, Heartland, the artist is described as, “an American realist with a modernist vision. Bartlett looks at America’s heart—its land and its people—and describes the beauty he finds in everyday life.”
A Blend of Western and Contemporary
Nancy Dunlop Cawdrey
“Whatever medium I am working in, I like to mix color on the surface of the painting—giving the work more immediacy and spontaneity—what I call spirited silk painting. On silk I can really float brilliant color with spirit and gusto,” says artist Nancy Dunlop Cawdrey. Spirit and gusto are evident in Cawdrey’s piece hanging above the fireplace in the great room of Villa at May Park II. Cawdrey’s work is also included in the permanent collections of the National Museum of Wildlife Art, Tulsa’s Gilcrease Museum, and Prescott, Arizona’s Phippen Museum. In this home’s entryway and master bedroom are additional Cawdrey paintings.
Dave McGary sculpture
Two of Dave McGary’s bronzes, Horse Thief and Buffalo Warrior are in the permanent collection in the Old Executive Office building at the White House Complex in Washington, D.C. Another McGary sculpture, the 30-foot tall Touch the Clouds, depicts a nineteenth century Miniconjou Chief who fought alongside Crazy Horse at the Battle of Little Big Horn, and is in front of the Houston Astrodome. McGary’s 11-foot tall statue of Chief Washakie is on permanent display in the U.S. Capitol’s National Statuary Hall Collection. Here a Dave McGary statuette greets you. There are also McGary pieces in the great room and media room.
A Gallery In The Grand Room
The great room of the Rocking V has paintings by Nancy Glazier, Ken Carlson, Scott Christensen, and Lanford Monroe—all of whom have work in the National Museum of Wildlife Art’s permanent collection and are represented by art galleries in Jackson.
To learn more about what makes Jackson Hole the “Art Center Of The Rockies,” visit the Jackson Hole Gallery Association.
