Sue Sommer is a contemporary artist based out of Pinedale, Wyoming. She serves on the National Advisory Board of the University of Wyoming Art Museum and is a founder of Pipeline Art Project. She also contributes writing to the Studio Wyoming Review on WyoFile, which she helped establish with other Pipeline Art Project members in 2016.
Sue spoke to Nick Thornburg over the phone in March of 2021.
Nick Thornburg: If we think back on the past year, clearly it’s been difficult all around, especially in the arts. The arts field, the nonprofit field, have been pretty significantly impacted. As an artist and as someone who is actively involved in developing and growing the regional arts community what have you been thinking about during this time?
Sue Sommers: It’s interesting you see me as someone who is interested in developing the arts community. It’s funny to have that as a tag because mostly what I’ve done is thought about what I wanted to see for myself and then noticed that I had friends who wanted the same thing, and then we all got together and tried to make something happen for all of us. It seems like it’s easy in Wyoming to extrapolate from the individual to the community because so many of us know each other. But that’s not really answering your question, I kind of did a circuitous route there.
This is coming up on almost the exact one year anniversary of my last art opening—it was March 12th, and I had a solo show in Pinedale. That was kind of the last event anybody in town got together and showed up at that I was part of. After that, to me, the pandemic has meant really no in-person art shows. I really appreciated when some of the shows I was already in—I had work in the Governor’s Capitol Art Exhibit in Cheyenne and also at the Old West Museum at that time—those two entities put their shows online and it was amazing and wonderful to have that. It wasn’t the same as being in front of a painting or being able to walk around a sculpture but it was the next best thing. They put a lot of work into those and I did sell work that way. But after that I thought long and hard about applying to exhibits during 2020 and even 2021. I like to have a regular exhibition record but I really want people to be with my work in person so I’ve held off applying for things. That hasn’t been a hard shift for me. I don’t depend on sales of my work so I’ve used the time to do more in the studio and I’m thinking harder about what I want to say and how I want to say it. Just like so many people in Wyoming, being forced into hermitdom is not really a big leap, it’s almost a pleasure in so many ways and closer to our normal mode than people in other places, so I’ve turned that to my benefit like a lot of people I know.
NT: Has that shift toward an online exhibition mode brought up any ideas as far as how you might want to incorporate that kind of exhibition into your plans for the future? Or are you just concentrating on a return to exhibitions in the physical format?
SS: I think it’s too soon to tell right now for me. It has made me think that if a person’s work is going to be virtual you might as well be doing video or digital photography imagery and I’ve thought about those things too because I could see working in both those media. But I know myself pretty well by now and nothing is going to happen really fast. I’ve sort of tucked it in the back of my mind. For right now I’m still moving forward with ideas I had before the pandemic.
NT: As far as those ideas that you had about projects you wanted to work on that seemed to coincide with the interests of your peers, can you elaborate on what those were?
SS: Earlier what I was referring to was some of the things my friends and I have tried to do working with the Wyoming Arts Council, like bringing back the Arts Summit. It might have been in 2011 or 2012, which seems like a long time ago now. I have formed collaborative groups with other artists, too. Pipeline Art Project is a handful of folks in Laramie and Pinedale and we get together and talk about art. One of the things we’ve collaborated on was a pretty ambitious project to get accepted to an art fair in Miami during Miami Art Week. And we did. There were three of us who pitched in and we did a crowdfunding thing and got accepted to one of the less prestigious but still busy art fairs down there. We had a little gallery booth and showed our work and brought back our experience to Wyoming. One of our members had written a grant proposal and got some funding to do a public presentation about our experience in Miami and show work. We packaged that into a pitch to the Wyoming Arts Council to say hey, why don’t we help you have an arts summit, a weekend for artists. The Arts Council is really good about providing workshops and seminars for educators and community stuff, but their services for individual artists had become more limited over the years. They used to do an annual conference for artists and we said let us help you bring that back. We’ve got a little funding, we know people in our communities, we’ll stir things up. And they worked with us. We started something called CLICK: A Weekend for Wyoming Visual Artists. For a while every year they were doing that and now it’s turned into a biannual arts summit that hopefully will come back after the pandemic. So that was something we instigated.
SS: Before that, Pipeline Art Project started the Studio Wyoming Facebook group, a place where Wyoming artists could share ideas and opportunities with each other. That’s got over 700 members now, I think, and people post on that a lot. We try to do stuff on a regular basis but we haven’t been actually making art collaboratively so much. That hasn’t been the focus. It’s been mostly getting things going in the Wyoming arts community, keeping people aware of what’s going on, and trying to keep us connected. The crazy thing about Wyoming is that if you travel around the state you find artists everywhere, but it’s hard to stay in touch. Facebook has been fantastic for Wyoming because it lets people stay in touch, so we leveraged that for an art group. That was a way of translating the analog experience.
I went to so many of those Wyoming Arts Council conferences—that’s how I met those people in the first place. My friends and I had been at the same conferences, so we had been creating this web of relationships around the state. When social media became easier to use and more widespread it just clicked into place that we could bring everybody together in that space. That’s been really good, and when you bump into people in real life from that space it’s a little freaky and wonderful.
NT: That’s really interesting. In a place like Wyoming where everybody’s dispersed, getting the benefits of a community effort is definitely a challenge. It seems like leveraging technology with Facebook and these other communications platforms is a smart way to do it. Projecting into the future, do you have a vision for how to further develop those ties within the Wyoming arts community?
SS: Personally, I’ve decided that if we’ve done anything self-sustaining like the Facebook group, or our ties to the Arts Council—which any artist can call up the Arts Council and lay a good idea on them and start a conversation, it isn’t like we’re the only ones who can do that—if something occurred to me or my friends we would probably jump on it, but for now I’ve decided I really need to work on my own projects. So I’ve started trying to do more for myself.
It’s easy to think of doing things for yourself as selfish but if you don’t do it for yourself nobody’s going to do it for you. You know, I’m the only one who can make my art, so I’m trying to do more of that. I do have a lot of interests, I’m easily distracted, I love to help people, and you have to make the art before the art can go out anywhere. So right now I’m just trying to make my own stuff.
NT: I suppose that’s a pretty healthy place to be, especially during this time, where larger visions or community visions may not be able to be developed in the way they need to be. So taking the time and the opportunity that the isolation that we’re all experiencing right now offers is a kind of blessing in disguise, right? Do you find yourself getting some good ideas out on the canvas or on the page?
SS: I think I started that before COVID, actually. I had to have a serious meeting with myself and decide what my priorities really were. It’s tough being an artist no matter where you live. Our culture doesn’t give a lot of kudos to regular folks who want to make art. There isn’t a deep understanding of that life. And in Wyoming that is intensified. I like to think of Wyoming as everything America is times ten. It’s more concentrated. If you make generalities about American culture, it’s really true about Wyoming culture. If you just think about attributes—you know, the John Wayne thing—start there and keep going.
In Wyoming what we have is an amazing place to make art and a true sanctuary for pursuing an individual vision but no real commercial scene for a wide range of art. You can make it here but it’s really hard to market art here or get it out in a milieu where it’s going to get traction. You have to be really creative about that, and there’s no formula, there’s no one way to get that done. I would also say, if you want to explore alternative media—say you want to use industrial materials or you want to do something wild and crazy in the digital world or with any kind of technology—you are probably going to have a hard time finding people who can show you how to do that or get those materials in hand, because we don’t have a lot of industry here and we don’t have a lot of that high-tech stuff going on where you can drop into a design studio where they’ll give you some cool tools. So the limitations are real. Those are the pros and cons I see of being in Wyoming.
Another plus I forgot to mention—and this should have been the first thing I mentioned, because I’ve lived in Chicago and spent time in New York—what Wyoming has over all of those places is room to think for yourself, and not be overwhelmed by what’s hot this five minutes or by what everybody else is doing, who’s getting the attention, ‘do I need to do that too?’ You don’t have that tidal surge to push against, and for me that’s been fantastic.
If I could make a wish for Wyoming artists and the Wyoming economy, it would be to have more customers. I wish we had more people in the state. I think the more people you have the more perspectives, the more different kinds of tastes and the more creative ideas [you have]. And even though we may end up with a state art scene that has its fads and fashion trends, maybe we would have more commercial galleries that cater to a broader spectrum of the arts. It would be interesting to see. I think Wyoming could soak up a higher population and still have a lot of solitude, and I think it would be good for Wyoming artists. We have a lot of nonprofit community galleries, but we need commercial galleries that foster contemporary art. It isn’t going to happen until Wyoming has a less volatile economy, until we’re not doing the boom-bust thing every ten years. But if we could ever climb out of that cycle it’s going to be so much better for business in general but for artists in particular.
Sue Sommers’ work can be found on her website, Facebook, Instagram, and at various regional exhibition spaces around Wyoming. Links to her writing for the Studio Wyoming Review can be found on her website.
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