Fluff And Fold With Culture: Dubois Buffalo Skull Laundromat To Host Art Exhibit

Most of the time, art shows consist of a boring expanse of white wall, punctuated with a canvas or three of artful color. 

But Dubois is about to have an art show that will be quite different. That’s because to get into the show, gallery-goers will first have to step through a giant, 15-foot-tall skull. 

The skull is a fiberglass buffalo head that forms the entrance to the laundromat in Dubois. While the business is owned by Chuck Bryant, the sculpture was created by the late artist Vic Lemmon, who signed his handiwork in 1982.

Lemmon just wanted to add a little pizzazz to his business, the Grub ’n Tub, which was a combination coin-operated laundromat and restaurant. It’s been a fixture of the laundromat ever since. 

Bryant, who now owns the laundromat, told American Coin-op in 2018 he has no plans to ever sell or get rid of his unique entrance, which is a spot that frequently attracts tourists taking selfies on their way to Yellowstone.

The skull also brings a certain flair for an art show, artists Brooke Hsu and Louis Eisner told Cowboy State Daily. Not the least of which are all the metaphors suggested from passing through a portal that symbolizes giant, oversized death.

“I’m a big fan of mythology, and in Greek mythology, you have many, many episodes where a person, God or someone, will go into the underworld to retrieve something or someone,” Eisner told Cowboy State Daily. “There’s the comedy by Aristophanes called ‘Frogs’ in which Dionysus, the god of wine and good times, decides there are no living poets skilled enough to sing his song.”

That forces Dionysus to make a dangerous trip to the underworld to resurrect Euripides, which he does disguised as a much tougher soul — Hercules. 

“For me, besides the fact that it’s sort of funny, I saw this cow skull, in a way, as a sort of gateway,” Eisner said. “It’s a gateway of death. But does it have to be morbid? Not necessarily.”

Fluff And Fold Meets Art

As Eisner and Hsu imagine it, their show, which will begin Thursday and last four months, pays homage to history and art, from old Western posters to European paintings.

These will be artfully arranged inside the laundromat, right over the spot where customers fluff and fold their clothes. 

The laundromat isn’t as atypical to such a process as one might think, Hsu and Eisner said.

“People don’t usually spend all that much time in an art exhibition,” Eisner said. “The thing about hosting an art exhibition in a laundromat is that people will be occupying the space for hours doing their laundry.

“Or maybe not hours, but at least an hour, doing their laundry.”

During that time, people are typically bored with little to do.

Having an art show on site gives those people something constructive to do while they await the washing, drying and then the folding, which often happens on site.

“There’s like a performative element of people doing laundry underneath and around the artwork,” Eisner said. “The difference between the laundry machine and the people doing the laundry and the people of Dubois and the art — it all fuses into one thing. It’s all one experience. They’re not separate. It’s sort of an interweaving of art and life.”

History and art, meanwhile, have long been intertwined, Hsu said.

“We look at history to understand our time,” she said. 

Granted, the historical element here, is all about death, and how it was once perceived down through the ages.

“The story of Aristophanes’ ‘The Frogs,’ involves a process they call katabasis, which is a journey to the underworld where you ask a question of yourself or the world, and try to go on this journey to find an answer,” Hsu said.

That, to Hsu, really describes the lifelong journey of all artists.

“We’re asking a lot of questions of artwork and of ourselves to make a representation of it for people to experience that,” she said. “It might give them any range of emotion or a feeling of like, acceptance or understanding, or a spiritual experience that might be without any kind of dogma.”

Bringing Tourists To Western-Inspired Art

The clientele of the laundromat is also much greater than the usual clientele at an “official” art show, Hsu pointed out.

“That’s the only laundromat in Dubois and people, like the whole community, when you talk to people in town, everyone washes their blankets and stuff there,” she said. “Even if they have a washer-dryer at home.”

The town also attracts a wide variety of people who come through in all four seasons for various activities.

“There’s this transient nature of different groups of people getting to come in and also experience the artwork,” Hsu said. “Like a lot of people doing the Continental Divide come through and will take showers at the laundry and wash their clothes. There’s all the dude ranches and camps and all the kids and camp counselors who come and wash their clothes as well. And there are like rodeo cowboys on Friday night who might go in there to use the ATM or something.”

That diverse element is particularly appealing to Hsu, who said she’s always before had to show her work in big cities.

“I come from a small town in Oklahoma, and I’ve never gotten to share in a rural location,” she said. “It’s really meaningful to me to be able to do that.”

Buffalo Bill Cody And The Bucking Frog

All the work that Eisner and Hsu are showing has been specifically developed for the laundromat as an art venue, and much of it is Wyoming-inspired.

While both artists live and work in New York, both have also been spending a fair amount of time in Wyoming. Those New York art connections, however, are what helped them bring a Bortolami art show to Wyoming. Bortolami is the name of an art gallery in New York.

“Stephania (Bortolami), who is the owner of the Bortolami gallery, knew I’d been spending time out here and she was like, ‘I’d love to do an artist city project in Wyoming.’”

Bortolami’s city art projects have all been from formulated around the idea of doing art shows in unusual, unconventional spaces, and are intended to be more artist-driven than a typical gallery might be.

In the same timeframe, Hsu had happened to meet Eisner and the two began talking about their Wyoming roots. With both artists having family members who live in the Cowboy State, the idea naturally occurred to them that it’d be cool to do an art show together.

“It was serendipitous that Stephania asked around the same time Louie and I had been talking,” Hsu said.  “We were also pretty reliant on who we knew as friends. So the laundromat is actually owned by a friend of mine who I met through my partner.”

Hsu has produced five new paintings for the laundromat show. 

“There’s a focus on animals in them, because my connection and affection for being and living in Wyoming is now very much rooted in my relationship with animals,” she said.

Some of Hsu’s paintings were also inspired by a poster from Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show.

“I spent some time at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, going through the archives and learning about that history,” she said. “And there’s a couple of paintings that make reference to Buffalo Bill’s rough riders, which was part of the Wild West Show, but all the figures have been turned into frogs.”

That particular change was inspired by an actual poster Hsu saw of Buffalo Bill riding around on a bucking frog, which is hanging up at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West.

Preparing The Space

Eisner has done a couple of sculptures and three paintings, among them a re-imagination of one he did of a log near the Snake River.

“I painted it to look like a sort of deteriorated copy of the original,” he said. “All of the paintings have this sort of black and white, grainy texture to them. And I did that intentionally, because I felt it spoke to this sort of morbidity that we were talking about earlier, the underworld and death and the skull and digging things up from art history.”

The bronze sculptures include one of Aristophanes’ book, “The Frogs,” which has a bronze lizard partially buried within it, as well as coat hangers garnished with some frogs. 

To prepare the laundromat for the art show, some light renovations were undertaken, rebuilding and shoring up the center island. That way, paintings can be mounted right over the spot provided for people to fold their clothes. A wall was also built out to hang some additional paintings on, to make room for everything. 

Those changes to the laundromat are permanent improvements at no charge to the owner. For the renovations, Hsu and Eisner were helped by people in the community, making it something of a team effort to bring the art show about.

“A local cowboy who works with my partner and also rides bulls in the rodeo on Friday helped us weld the stand for the paintings,” Hsu said. “And a retired gentleman who runs an auto body painting shop helped paint (the wall) for us.”

Whether the laundromat will host more art shows is unknown at this point, Hsu said. 

“It’s up to Chuck,” she said. “I’d be happy to help him figure it out. I’ve been meeting with local artists, too, and I think it’s such a great space and a great way to look at art.”

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.