Artists, public humanities, and the work of making memory public
When Adrian Hall and Carlos Córdova talk about the railroad, they aren't reciting history. They're carrying it. Their years on the line live in how they talk about the work, the crews, the track. That knowledge didn't come from an archive, and much of it never made it into one. For a long time, the official record of the Transcontinental Railroad had very little room for elder Indigenous railroaders, or for the immigrant and migrant workers who laid and maintained the iron across this corridor.
High Iron, our mobile monument housed in a historic railroad boxcar, began with a simple premise: the knowledge was already here. It lived with the people who did the work, and with descendants like Chris Vigil, Maren Kallas and Lena Newlin who carry their stories forward. Our job wasn't to discover it. Our job was to make room for it to be seen, heard, and held in public.
That idea is why ALCES Community Works exists. It comes down to two questions we ask in every project: who gets to make history, and how do we share it?
What public humanities is (and isn't)
Public humanities is the work of sharing history, culture, and stories with everyone, not just people in universities and museums. It's usually described as experts bringing knowledge to the public. I think that gets it backwards. You, your family, and your neighbors already hold knowledge that matters, and the best public humanities work starts there, with historians and archivists as collaborators rather than gatekeepers.
This matters most for histories that have been left out of the official record: labor histories, immigrant histories, Indigenous histories, the histories of people whose lives were essential to building the West and incidental to how it was later told. Those histories don't get recovered by better footnotes alone. They get recovered when the people who hold them are recognized as experts, and when the forms we use to share history can actually carry what they know.
Where artists come in
That last part is where artists come in.
Think about the things your people know, that aren't written down anywhere. How your grandmother tells a certain story. How a crew moved together on the job. How your people mark a goodbye. That kind of knowledge lives in voices, bodies, and habits, passed from person to person. Archives and the history books have a real hard time holding it. But, art can.
This is why I've come to think of artists as knowledge makers rather than illustrators of knowledge made somewhere else. When an artist works alongside a community over time (listening, researching, making, revising, returning) the work itself becomes a method of inquiry. The making is how the knowing happens. A portrait installation in a boxcar, a sound piece built from oral histories, a textile that holds a family's migration: these aren't decoration laid on top of research. They are research, conducted in a different language and accountable to different people.
That's the heart of how ALCES works. We bring artists and communities together to remember, and to put what they remember out in the open. Not just recorded, but visible: out in shared space, where neighbors can see it, talk about it, argue with it, and add to it.
Monuments that move
Most of us grew up with a certain idea of a monument: a statue on a pedestal, in stone or bronze, telling one official story that's meant to last forever. Artists have been pushing back on that idea for a long time. They make monuments that move, change, or ask you to take part, so the remembering is done by the public instead of for it.
High Iron moves in that tradition, literally. A boxcar travels. It arrives in a town, opens its doors, and asks people to step in and bring something with them. The commissioned artists, including Swoon, Danielle Seawalker and Chip Thomas each answered the history differently, and that difference is part of the point. There is no single, finished account. There's a conversation, and it keeps going.
The same approach holds when a story crosses borders. Migration scatters families and their memories across places, so we gather stories on every side of the journey, from descendants where people left and where they landed. The artwork doesn't stand in for that memory. It gathers it, and lets communities shaped by the same leaving find each other again.
Belonging as method
One thing I've seen again and again in this work is that belonging spreads. When someone sees their family's story treated as history, as something worth a public space and a careful hand, they bring others in. A neighbor shows up with a photograph. A granddaughter remembers something she hadn't thought about in years. I've been calling this contagious belonging, and I've come to see it not as a happy side effect of community-engaged art but as one of its methods. Belonging is how the knowledge gets in.
Why this is ALCES's work
ALCES Community Works exists because Wyoming's I-80 corridor is full of histories that haven't had their public yet. Through all of our anchor projcts—High Iron, American Wake, the White Pelican Project, The Lung—each is, in its own way, an experiment with the same question. What happens when we treat artists and communities as co-researchers, and treat what they make together as knowledge?
The knowledge behind this work didn't start in a classroom or an archive. It started in a boxcar and kitchens and civic centers, with people who already knew what they knew and were waiting for someone to make room.
That's the work. We're still making room, and if you have a story, there's room for yours.
— Aubrey Dawne Edwards, Founder, Director & Practitioner, ALCES Community Works
