High Iron is a moving piece of public art—a modified train car— presently in Laramie, Wyoming through summer 2025. It houses an interactive labor exhibit, an oral history collection station, and is the center of accompanying community programming. High Iron features stories of ancestors who constructed the transcontinental railroad, multigenerational laborers who built the economy of Wyoming, and contemporary rail workers and their unions. High iron shines light on buried narratives of: crucial labor, an incredibly diverse state, a culture of care, and immigrant contribution.

Involvement:

  • Full project design, facilitation,

    administration, fundraising

  • General organizational support

  • Creative research

  • Collaborative anthropology

  • Community engagement

Partners and supporters:

  • Monument Lab

  • Mellon Foundation

  • City of Laramie

  • Sites of Conscience

  • Wyoming Humanities

Re-Storying the West hosts state-wide story-gathering events designed to amplify the voices of everyday Wyoming citizens across a range of identities and roles. From the folks who cook our food, educate our children, serve in the military, build our homes, and keep our communities running through the good times and the challenges, their stories deserve a spotlight. Primary outcomes of our project include a sharable repository of materials for pursuing storywork, promotion and support of high impact humanistic methods at graduate and undergraduate levels of the university, a living public archive of Wyoming stories generated through innovative methods, and an effort to promote university-community relations through high quality interactions and dialogue.

Involvement:

  • Community engagment

  • Design and branding liason

  • Creative research

Partners and supporters:

  • University of Wyoming English Department

  • Mellon Foundation

  • Lincoln Community Center

  • Laramie Plains Civic Center

YOUTH JUSTICE INSTITUTE

The Youth Justice Institute (YJI) is rooted in youth voice and action. It supports community-building, civic education, and resource mapping with teens in Albany County. YJI supports spaces and programming where young folks can discuss issues that affect them in their communities, explore these issues with adult community leaders, and envision their futures through art making.  

Youth participants spend a full week engaging with facilitators who lead workshops on: art making as social justice, restorative justice, storytelling as advocacy, and organizing. Learning is coupled with creating as articipants collaboratively design a large scale public art installation.

Involvement:

  • Full project design, facilitation, administration, fundraising

  • Organizational support

  • Curriculum development and programming

Partners and Supporters:

  • Wyoming Community Foundation

  • Wyoming Humanities

  • Laramie Plains Civic Center

  • Laramie High School

  • University of Wyoming Art Museum

  • Laramie Public Art Coalition

ART FOR ALL

Through Art for All, we provided free arts-integrated opportunities for seven Laramie nonprofits, tailoring each collaboration to the unique needs of our partners. We worked closely with local artists to bring the joy of artmaking into community spaces—supporting them through commissions, purchasing artwork, and hiring them to lead workshops. This responsive, community-informed programming served at least 1,374 individuals and infused $15,000 into Albany County’s creative economy.

Partners and supporters:

  • Wyoming Community Foundation

  • Wyoming Arts Council

  • Laramie Interfaith

  • Laramie Soup Kitchen

  • United Way

  • Home on the Range

  • Family Promise

  • SafeProject

  • Coooper Center for the Arts

Involvement:

  • Fundraising and grant management

  • Partnership creation and nurturing

  • Reponding to creative needs of non-profits

  • Artist curation and relations

Rural Youth Leaders is a new collaborative initiative rooted in place, culture, and the transformative power of youth leadership. Rural Youth Leaders (RYL) is designed to uplift and invest in the leadership of creative young people and the cultural stewards who support them in rural communities. RYL was born from the Rural and Tribal Youth Assembly that took place on Alex Haley’s farm outside of Knoxville, Tennessee in the summer of 2024.

Involvement:

  • Steward for Wyoming cohort of youth leaders

  • Presenters at Partners for Rural Impact Summit 2023-2025

  • Youth recruitment and sustained support

  • Assistance with project design and outreach

Partners and supporters:

  • Clear Creek Creative

  • Partners for Rural Impact

  • Native Americans in Philanthropy

  • Liberation in a Generation

Diamondville’s United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) local 1307 in District 22 is the oldest actively coal-producing local in the union, having produced coal for over 110 years and still producing coal today. Multiple generations have worked in the mines, and more recently, in the coal-fired Naughton power plant built in the 1970s.

By 2028, Naughton is slated to close and transition from coal to a Natrium reactor nuclear power plant, a project of the Bill Gates-backed TerraPower.

This transition holds many unknown consequences for the coal workers these towns. Using oral histories, archival photos, and objects of labor, this online archive and public art project celebrates the multigenerations who worked in the mines and organized their labor.

Involvement:

  • Full project design, facilitation,

    administration, fundraising

  • General organizational support

  • Creative research

  • Collaborative anthropology

  • Community engagement

Partners and supporters:

  • American Heritage Center

  • Wyoming Humanities

  • University of Wyoming Anthropology Department and American Studies Department

  • Charles Reher Fund

  • Slater Fund for Linguistic Anthropology

DIscuss and construct

Wyoming Humanities launched Discuss & Construct, a new statewide project under the NEH’s United We Stand: Connecting through Culture initiative, which seeks to counter hate-based violence through cultural engagement. As part of this effort, we curated an evening with intergenerational Albany County residents, sharing a meal and participating in a guided conversation focused on community challenges, diverse perspectives, and collective hopes for the future. From those conversations, we designed and printed a series of four posters—meant to spark joy, celebrate diversity, encourage civic engagement, and build community. These posters are available to community members and now hang in local gathering spaces and small businesses throughout the area.

Involvement:

  • Full project design, facilitation,

    administration, fundraising

  • General organizational support

  • Facilitation

  • Community engagement

Partners and supporters:

  • Wyoming Humanities

  • National Endowment for the Humanities

  • Laramie Plains Civic Center

An ongoing series of community events designed to bring creatives and artmakers together to explore practice, process, and inspiration through conversation. These gatherings celebrate the vibrancy of artistic communities while fostering deeper community connections by creating space for shared learning, listening, and dialogue. We partner with local venues to curate exhibitions, produce artist books, and host vibrant conversations that strengthen social bonds and build understanding across differences. By centering creativity as a tool for connection, these events cultivate belonging, amplify diverse voices, and contribute to a more inclusive and resilient cultural landscape in Wyoming.

in conversation

Involvement:

  • Programming

  • Artist curation

  • Exhibtion and publication design

  • Community engagment and outreach

Partners and supporters:

  • Wyoming Community Foundation

  • Wyoming Arts Council

  • Berry Biodiversity Center

  • Gorgon Gallery

Re-envisioning lpcc

Alces partnered with the Laramie Plains Civic Center to design interpretive materials that illuminate the rich history of the building. Drawing from LPCC’s archival collections and historical documents, we created a public-facing exhibit that shares the layered story of the space, from its origins to its evolving role in the community. This collaboration aimed to deepen public understanding of the building’s past while enhancing its visibility as a site of cultural and historical significance.

Involvement:

  • Full project design, facilitation,

    administration

  • Grant administration

  • General organizational support

  • Creative research

Partners and supporters:

  • Laramie Plains Civic Center

  • Community Impact Cooperative