BUILDING A BETTER WORLD: FROM THE SHELL OF THE OLD

Field Notes: Building a New World from the Shell of the Old and the World Workers Keep Building

For three weeks this June, Gorgon Gallery on the third floor of the Laramie Plains Civic Center became a room where labor history and the present tense sat down together.

Building a New World from the Shell of the Old ran June 8 through July 2, curated by ALCES Community Works in conjunction with the Working-Class Studies Association Conference — so that for once, artists and labor scholars were in the same building at the same moment. The exhibition takes its title and its spirit from the Industrial Workers of the World, whose century-old call to collective action feels newly urgent today. Your power lies in organization. Rooted in the High Plains of Wyoming, the show treats labor not as background or inevitability but as a creative, political, and relational force. Workers have always been builders of worlds.

The work came from Jess Brauer & John Wilhelm, Brittney Denham-Whisonant, Aubrey Edwards, Anjel Garcia, Conor Mullen, Adrienne Vetter, and Tennessee Watson. Through archival inquiry, material experimentation, personal narrative, and speculative futures, their artworks trace how communities resist exploitation, care for one another, and envision worlds beyond extraction. Some pieces reach back: a mixed-media memorial to Frank Little, the IWW organizer lynched in Butte in 1917, insists on remembering the miners who built worlds underground. Others look outward, toward the work still unfinished.

But an exhibition about labor couldn't only ask people to look. At the center of the gallery sat a station built from time cards and a single prompt: Today I am clocking in to ___. Over the run, the answers accumulated in the open, card after card, until the wall became a kind of collective ledger — honest, hopeful, and entirely made by the people who walked through.

On June 18, the artists gathered for a roundtable during the opening reception, turning the gallery into the kind of room the IWW would have recognized: workers, makers, and scholars thinking out loud together about what gets built and who does the building.

Worlds don't arrive finished. They get built, shift by shift, by people who refuse to believe the old shell is all there is. Let’s build a better world, together.

Partners include: Wyoming Humanities, Laramie Plains Civic Center, Gorgon Gallery, Working Class Studies Conference