What a Wall Can Say
Public art does something that galleries can't. It doesn't ask you to seek it out, pay admission, or decide in advance that you care about art. It just exists - on the side of a building, at the edge of a plaza, on a wall that hundreds of people pass every single day. When it's done well, it changes how a place understands itself.
Jackson has always been a town with a complicated relationship to its own history. The landscape draws people from everywhere, but the land has a much longer story than the one most visitors arrive with. Public art, at its best, is one of the ways that story gets told: not in a museum or a textbook, but on the street and in plain sight, for everyone.
One of our favorite pieces of public art anywhere in Jackson is the mural on the History Jackson Hole museum by Nanibah "Nani" Chacon. A Diné (Navajo) and Chicana artist with over twenty years of public art experience, Nani developed the mural in deep consultation with Eastern Shoshone leaders, including language preservationist Lynette St. Clair. Its title, Damma newadaygwap gay nasoowazeet, translates as Never forget our language. The work centers the Shoshone language (Newe Daygwap) as a living, essential part of this place and its people, and as a direct act of language preservation for a community whose number of fluent speakers continues to decline. It's a conceptual billboard, as the mural's collaborators describe it, reclaiming space and making the Eastern Shoshone presence impossible to walk past without acknowledging.
Nani's work has always operated this way. She believes art should be accessible and a meaningful catalyst for social change and her murals, painted in locations across the US and internationally, bring the complexity of indigenous identities into public space with intention and specificity. She's also no stranger to the highest levels of the contemporary art world: her work was included in the Whitney Biennial, one of the most prestigious showcases of American art.
We were honored to host Nani while she was in Jackson working on the mural — a small thing, we know, for work of this scale. We're also proud partners of both Jackson Hole Public Art and History Jackson Hole, the two organizations that co-produced the piece. What we love about this kind of project is what it represents: an artist, two local nonprofits, and a community willing to put something true and complicated on its own wall, in plain sight, for everyone. We just made sure she had a good place to sleep while she did it.
The mural is at 175 East Broadway. Go look at it.
Photo credit: JH public art