Fra Dana, ‘On the Window Seat,’ oil on canvas.
Montana Museum of Art & Culture, University of Montana
Settlement of the American West by European colonizers was a violent affair as all such incursions into indigenous land across the world have been. Genocide, stolen land, broken treaties, introduced disease, warfare, massacre, extermination of wildlife.
Colt’s ‘Peacemaker’ revolver. Winchester’s repeating rifle. Sharp’s .50 caliber buffalo killer. Dynamite. Steel jawed animal leg traps. Barbed wire. Railroads. Indentured labor–cowboys weren’t unionized, neither were the thousands of Chinese immigrants who toiled and died constructing the railroads.
That is how the West was won. How the West was taken. How the West was stolen.
Western art has largely glorified that storytelling, promoting “rugged individualism,” the heroism of gunfighters and cowboys, the enterprise of ranchers. A “rootin’-tootin’est, shootin’est, rip-roarinest” Yosemite Sam version of events. The Donald Trump, flag-waving, Manifest Destiney version.
Thankfully, Western art has taken great strides in the last handful of years to stray from this creative cul-de-sac. Museums, curators, and artists are expanding narratives of the historic and contemporary West to include Chinese and Japanese American stories critical to the region’s evolution, stories of the Mexican-American borderlands, stories of African Americans in the West, enlivening the genre.
Women too.
Women artists and women’s stories.
“Women Artists of the American West: Trailblazers at the Turn of the 20th century,” on view through July 12, 2025, at History Jackson Hole in Jackson, WY, throws another log on the fire of the movement to expand Western art, presenting the work of five historic female artists living and working in Wyoming and Montana. Their work defies traditional Western tropes, and Western art tropes.
Absent are the romanticized cowboys, fetishized Native Americans, cattle drives, and mountain men idealized in a million dusty paintings pining for the “Old West.” These women aren’t focused on celebrating dominance over the landscape, killing animals, or displacing Indigenous people. Instead, they highlight cowgirls, female friends, and sisters. They offer a counter-narrative to the melodramatic, epic, and hyper-masculine imagery of the pop culture West, portraying instead a realistic account of a region in transition.
Their works and writings challenged stereotypical depictions of Western women as either dutiful homemakers or bawdy sex workers.
Be careful, however, not to confuse these white women of education, means, and privilege as complete innocents. Some were ranchers themselves, their beef herds pushing out native animals. They were all outsiders–even those born in the region–settlers, occupiers of mostly swindled Native land. They were, at some level, complicit with the wider currents sweeping the West.
Historic Women Artists In The West
Fra Dana quote and painting installed for “Women Artists of the American West: Trailblazers at the Turn of the 20th century” at History Jackson Hole.
Chadd Scott
The five artists featured in the exhibition—Evelyn Cameron (1868-1928), Fra Dana (1874-1948), Josephine Hale (1878-1961), Elisabeth Lochrie (1890-1981) and Lora Webb Nichols (1883-1962)—witnessed first-hand the rapid transformation of women’s roles in Western American society at the turn of the 20th century.
Cameron and Nichols were photographers. Dana, Hale, and Lochrie were classically trained painters. Dana studied in Cincinnati with William Merritt Chase before moving on to New York City and Paris. Hale similarly studied in Paris. She exhibited at the 1934 Paris Salon. Hale, Lochrie and Nichols were born in the West, Cameron in England, and Dana in Indiana.
No evidence points to any of the women knowing each other. Uniting them were a willingness to travel, embrace adventure, and immerse themselves in the challenging wilderness of Montana and Wyoming.
Wyoming, let it be known, where women were “allowed” to vote in 1869, before statehood, long before America ratified the Nineteenth Amendment providing women the right to vote in 1920. Jackson had an all-woman town council in the 1920s, an all-woman government, in fact, including the town marshal. Once the menfolk realized how important these positions were, Jackson wouldn’t elect another female councilperson until the 1980s.
The featured artists concentrated on their personal experiences and interests: the local landscape, the domestic sphere, and above all, their roles as women and creators. Their perspective and artworks were more intimate, smaller in scale, quieter in tone than their male counterparts. When turning to the landscape, they did so with a subtlety in opposition to the bombast of Thomas Moran or Albert Bierstadt’s soaring mountain peaks and raging waterfalls.
“There was a cold pure wind, smelling of pine and sage brush, and to look down over the valley was like looking into the heart of an opal,” Fra Dana said in 1907.
The tenderness of that quote perfectly encapsulates the women’s feelings about their surroundings. Dana’s portraits stand out among the work on view. A little-known figure in either Western art or more broadly among female American artists, her talent stacks up with the best produced by either genre.
From Paris to Jackson Hole
(Left) Evelyn Cameron, ‘Evelyn Cameron standing on her horse, Jim.’ (Right) Lora Webb Nichols, ‘Lora Nichols, suit and hat with camera 2/3 PM,’ 1915.
Montana Historical Society Research Center and Lora Webb Nichols papers, Coll. 1005, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.
Dana is just the sort of figure exhibition organizer AWARE works for. AWARE, the Archives of Women Artists, Research & Exhibitions, is a non-profit association cofounded in Paris in 2014 and directed by Camille Morineau.
The president of AWARE’s U.S. based chapter, Veronique de Champvallier Parke, was the conduit connecting Morineau and History Jackson Hole. Parke is an art collector and advocate with a home in Jackson Hole.
Morineau was unfamiliar with Western art prior to Parke pitching her on the idea of producing a show highlighting the genre’s female artists. What Morineau discovered upon visiting art museums across the Rocky Mountain states proved eye opening.
“I was surprised that I found women artists from the 19th century, early 20th century, because in my mind, these regions, and even the States at that time, there were a few art schools, and a few big cities, and a few very well-known men artists, but not so many women artists that I knew of,” Morineau told Forbes.com. “I was surprised by the number of interesting women artists and by the quality of what they did, and the radicality of the practice. There were so many photographers, for example, (and) the painters had very much in mind international modernity.”
As one example, Morineau recognizes the influence of Paul Cézanne in Fra Dana’s paintings. Again, these women were educated, they travelled. They were in the loop, so to speak, of Modern art trends, despite their geographic remove from Paris and New York.
AWARE strives to make women artists of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries visible by producing and sharing free bilingual (French/English) content about their work on its website. The database brings together women and non-binary artists born between 1664 and 1974 working in the visual arts, with no limitations on medium or country.
“Women Artists of the American West” is AWARE’s first museum exhibition. Another is planned for History Jackson Hole in 2026 centering on historic female artists working in Utah and Colorado.
The Last Of The Old West
Jackson Hole, WY – July 10, 2019: Tourists along the city park at night.
getty
Jackson bills itself as “The Last of the Old West.” The town installed wooden boardwalk sidewalks to carry out the theme. Jackson–synonymously referred to as Jackson Hole, more specifically a reference to the valley the city calls home–was never a boomtown or cow town or gunfighter town like Dodge City, Deadwood, or Tombstone. Its settlement came relatively late, not incorporated until 1914. That does nothing to diminish its exceptional mountain town charm, elevation 6,200 feet.
History Jackson Hole opened in June of 2024 among the art galleries, bars, and restaurants of downtown Jackson, iconic for its elk antler arched square. The museum shares the history of human inhabitation of Jackson Hole with an emphasis on the late 1800s through today when white people began dominating the landscape.
That landscape has become some of the most desirable in the world. Depending on your preferred metric, Teton County, Wyoming is the wealthiest in America. Jackson Hole, where it’s colloquially said, “the billionaires push out the millionaires.”
By cab fare it feels that way. An eight-mile taxi ride to town from the Jackson airport–the only commercial airport in the U.S. located inside a National Park (absurdly scenic Grand Teton National Park)–will set you back $80 after tip! That’s as much as from JFK airport to midtown Manhattan. Uber’s are less expensive, Lyft’s less expensive still, but still outrageously pricy. Jackson experimented with an airport bus shuttle for the winter ski season, $10 per rider, that hopefully becomes permanent.
