PUBLIC LANDS //
PUBLIC HANDS
Alces is thrilled to launch the pilot of Public Lands // Public Hands. This responsive initiative partners artists from across Wyoming with public lands advocates and policymakers to co-create a series of free, accessible posters that celebrate—and advocate for—our shared public lands. Great for rallies, hanging in your living room window, or sharing with another pal in the West.
The pilot poster design will emerge from a conversation between Alces’ in-house creative, Conor Mullen, and Wyoming House Representative Karlee Provenza of District 45. Drawing from their dialogue, Conor will design the inaugural poster in the series. We will share Conor’s posters with our community late July 2025, and will host artist invitationals and open calls for the ongoing series.
Involvement:
Full project design, facilitation, administration, fundraising
General organizational support
Creative research
Community engagement
Partners and supporters:
Representative Karlee Provenza
Statewide shops, libraries, and advocacy organizations (more soon)
The Derek Piotr Fieldwork Archive was established in August 2022. The Archive contains over one thousand audio recordings collected from March 2020 onward, and preserves diverse representations of folklife; ballads, hymns, tales, poems, children’s songs, and interviews among them. Alces has partnered with the archive to conduct statewide folkloric field recordings to include Wyomingites who can relate a song or folkloric memory to the archive.
Involvement:
Statewide folklore fieldwork
Creative research
Collaborative anthropology
Community engagement
Partners and Supporters:
Derek Piotr Fieldwork Archive
Re-Storying the West
Audio Library of the West
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 engagement
Design and branding liason
Event cooridation and facilitation
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
We also love doing work on a national scale. Alces partnered with the Anthracite Heritage Museum to help tell the layered story of immigration, migration and labor in Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal region. Working alongside community members, we co-created an online exhibition highlighting the contributions and lived experiences of Hispanic communities in the area today. For generations, this region has been a destination for immigrants—from the Irish in the 1850s to later arrivals from Eastern and Southern Europe—who faced dangerous working conditions, discrimination, and economic hardship while powering the nation through coal mining. This project builds on that legacy, honoring the resilience and ongoing presence of immigrant communities in shaping the region’s cultural and economic fabric.
Involvement:
Research and project design
Creative research
Collaborative anthropology
Community liaison
Multimedia content creator
Partners and supporters:
University of Maryland
Anthracite Heritage Musuem
Eckley’s Miners’ Village
