The White Pelican Project
New Orleans–based artists and culture workers travel across Wyoming each year for free community workshops — an annual exchange between two places and two creative traditions.
A migration between two homes
The American white pelican migrates between the Gulf Coast of New Orleans and the Intermountain West every year — a long, improbable commute between two entirely different landscapes that, for one bird, are both simply home. The project that takes its name leans into that same idea: connection across distance and difference.
Each year, New Orleans–based storytellers, artists, and creatives travel across Wyoming to share their practices through free community workshops, presentations, exhibitions, and performances — bringing a distinct creative tradition into direct conversation with communities statewide.
It is built as an exchange, not a one-way visit: a standing invitation for two places, a continent apart, to keep teaching each other something new every year.
Artists Who've Made the Trip
Elena Ricci & Kelwin Coleman
The Photograph in Print
Cheyenne · Nov 21 ·
Cheyenne Creativity Center
Casper · Nov 22 ·
Art 321
A hands-on gelli printing workshop that layers participants' own photographs into one-of-a-kind monotypes, built around the prompt something you had, something you wanted, something you lost.
Elena Ricci is an archaeologist, educator, and visual artist whose work, shaped by her background in anthropology, explores material culture, found-object assemblage, and place-based storytelling. elena-ricci.com
Kelwin Coleman is a New York City–raised artist and curator whose work opens new conversations about social narratives. He holds a BFA from Purchase College and an MFA from Tulane University, and has curated grassroots shows of under-represented artists.
Jon Greene
Devised Theatre: Autobiographical Playwriting & Performance
In partnership with Relative Theatrics & PLAY/WRITE
Participants wrote and performed from their own lives, connecting with personal truth and then making deliberate choices in presentation to lift that truth into something emotionally resonant and visually alive.
Jon Greene is an award-winning director, theater-maker, performer, and arts educator based in New Orleans. He holds a BFA from Boston University, trained and toured Europe with Italian Commedia maestro Antonio Fava, and is a Kennedy Center Directing Fellow. He is the founding Artistic Director of The Radical Buffoon(s), a New Orleans theater company devoted to work that is outsize in scope, idea, or presentation; physically evocative; socially provocative; and always couched (broadly) in humor as a vehicle for storytelling. He loves movies, chopping wood (for true), and spinning yarns by running his mouth.
Madeleine Kelly
Watercolor Workshop
In partnership with the Berry Biodiversity Conservation Center
Participants explored watercolor as a way to reflect on their relationship with the land and waters that hold us here in Laramie, sharing stories and making intuitive paintings with water collected from the area.
Madeleine Kelly is an artist and educator based in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her paintings, etchings, and installations explore encounters with mystery in the natural world, especially through the flora, fauna, light, and water of the swamps of Southeast Louisiana. Her practice explores kinship, reverence, and awe as an antidote to estrangement from the spirit of the land.
Nick Slie
Story as Source: A Story Circle Workshop
July 11, 2024 · Phoenix Ballroom, Laramie Plains Civic Center
An introduction to the story circle process, passed down from Civil Rights activist John O'Neal of Junebug Productions and the Free Southern Theater. Using storytelling to bring people together and build relationships, the circle generated honest material in a short time and made room for every voice to be heard.
Nick Slie is a New Orleans–born performer, director, producer, and cultural organizer.