LHS CLUB MURAL

Field Notes: Something New on the Wall

On the evening of May 26, we gathered at Laramie High School to celebrate the unveiling of a new mural — the culmination of months of collaboration between the school's environmental club and the Laramie Zonta Club. A mural uplifting girls and women in wild spaces. ALCES has been offering consultation and support to this project since its earliest stages, and it was a genuine joy to see it come all the way to completion, and to the wall.

We catered the evening — good food, good people, a real sense of occasion. Aubrey spoke to the crowd and to the young leaders who drove the work. An excerpt from that address:

Collaboration is one of the most underrated skills a person can carry through their life. It's harder than working alone — it requires you to hold your own vision loosely enough to let someone else's in. What you practiced here, in this building, on this wall — that's a muscle. It will serve you in every room you walk into for the rest of your life.

Public art is a form of civic courage. To put something you made where anyone can see it — where people who never asked for it will encounter it on an ordinary Tuesday — is a generous act. But it's more than generosity. Public art is one of the oldest ways human beings have said: we were here. This is what we believed. This is what we loved. From cave walls to city murals, people have always reached for a surface and said: let me show you something.

When art lives in a public space, it belongs to everyone. It doesn't require a ticket or an invitation. It meets people where they are — in a hallway, on a walk to class, on a hard day when they weren't expecting to feel something. A single image can shift the mood of a room. It can make someone feel seen who didn't know they needed it. It can start a conversation between two people who might never have spoken. That is power. Quiet power, but real.

Congratulations to the students, advisors, and community partners who brought this to life. The wall is better for it. So is the school. So are we.

Partners Include: Laramie High School, Zonta Club, Environmental Club, LHS art teacher Justin Deegan, LHS club advisor Nicole Bondurant