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Indian Arts in the Park
Grand Teton National Park’s Colter Bay Indian Artist Museum closed a decade ago, but the park still hosts the American Indian Guest Artist Program and displays portions of the museum’s collection at the Colter Bay and Craig Thomas Visitor Centers.
// BY DINA MISHEV
An exhibit featuring pieces of Native American artwork from the David T. Vernon collection and the private collection of Laine Thom is on display at the Colter Bay Visitor Center and the Craig Thomas Discovery and Visitor Center until October 2021.
There are twenty-four Native um was closed in 2011 so the collection, American tribes associated with half of which had been on continuous Grand Teton National Park (GTNP), display since the museum opened in from the Apache Tribe of Oklahoma 1972, could be conserved. This meticuto the Eastern Shoshone Tribe and the lous conservation work was finished Northern Arapahoe Tribe, both of the in 2020, but, to ensure the collection’s Wind River Reservation, Wyoming, long-term preservation, now only about and the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes one hundred items from it at a time are of the Fort Hall Reservation, Idaho. displayed. (The rest are in storage.) These tribes are tied to the lands that The current exhibit, Living Tradiare today GTNP for a variety of rea- tions, Reflections on the Past at Colter Bay, sons—some having seasonally lived is divided between the Colter Bay Visiand hunted here— tor Center and the Craig Thomas DisIt is important that we understand the relationship " and others passing through the area as they were forced covery and Visitor Center. It includes thirty-one items from the Vernon Collection and forty-seven items on loan between Native Americans and this land.” from their ancestral lands onto reservations by the U.S. from the private collection of Laine Thom, a former park ranger (interpretation) of Shoshone, Goshute, and —BRIDGETTE GUILD, GTNP MUSEUM CURATOR government. “It is important that we Paiute descent, and an artist. “For me to loan pieces to the park was to allow understand the re- people to interpret the culture’s past, lationship between Native Americans present, and future,” says Thom. Living and this land,” says Bridgette Guild, Traditions will be on display through GTNP museum curator. this summer, although access could be
Flimited due to Covid-19. or four decades, GTNP was home Colter Bay is also home to the longto the Colter Bay Indian Arts Mu- running American Indian Guest Artist seum, which displayed the David T. Ver- Program, which allows Native artists non Collection, a world-class assem- to demonstrate, talk about, and sell blage that included art and artifacts their work over week-long residencies from one hundred tribes. That muse- from late May through mid September.
RYAN DORGAN
Laine Thom retired from the National Park Service in 2020. Of Shoshone, Goshute, and Paiute descent, Thom is an artist himself and also a collector of Native American artifacts. He loaned pieces from his personal collection to accompany artifacts on display from the David T. Vernon Indian Arts collection.
Artists in Action
Many guest artists have been coming to Colter Bay for years.
Colter Bay started hosting Indian artists from across the country in the 1970s. This program was, and remains, as popular with guest artists as with park visitors. “The park has a roster of artists who love to come back,” says Clyde Hall, an artist of Shoshone/Metis descent who has been a guest artist at Colter Bay annually since the early 1980s. Andrea Two Bulls, an Oglala Lakota artist born, raised, and still living on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, first came to Colter Bay when she was ten or eleven and her father, acrylic painter Edward Two Bulls, was a guest artist. “We loved it in the park,” she says. For more than twenty years, Ms. Two Bulls has been a guest artist herself, sharing her painting, photography, and jewelry. “Buses come with people from across the U.S. and
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Pieces from the David T. Vernon collection and the private collection of Laine Thom are on display at the Colter Bay Visitor Center and the Craig Thomas Visitor and Discovery Center through October 2021.
NATIONAL PARK SERVICE PHOTO
NATIONAL PARK SERVICE PHOTO from countries like Japan, Germany, and England. Some people would buy our work and we’d know where it went in the world and it would have greater meaning for them after talking to us about it,” she says. Hall says the program “gave me the opportunity to inform people about what I do—beading and quill work—and we’d meet people who had never met an Indian before. You were the first Native American they talked to. We could familiarize them with a little bit of Native culture and our art.”
Originally part of the Colter Bay Indian Arts Museum, the program changed when the museum closed, but not how you might guess. “People came to the museum because it was world famous. They were looking for Native American art and artists,” Hall says. “Nowadays, people come upon us cold. They stumble into the gift shop and stumble onto us—here are these Native American artists demonstrating and selling their craft work. They’re delightfully surprised.”
The residencies are informal. “We’re just working, and people can talk to us,” Hall says. For the full roster of this summer’s Indian guest artists, go to nps.gov/ grte/planyourvisit. Hall is taking this year off because of Covid-19, but look for Andrea Two Bulls and also Thom. Thom was a constant presence at the guest artist program because of his position as a ranger (interpretation) at Colter Bay, but this will only be his second time as a guest artist. (In 1981, he took the summer off from the NPS and was a guest artist. He’s able to be a guest artist now because he retired from the NPS last year.)
LEFT ABOVE: Lyle Miller, Sr., painting as part of the American Indian Guest Artist program at the Colter Bay Visitor Center. LEFT BELOW: National Park Service conservators with artifacts from the Grand Teton National Park Museum Collection.
The Vernon Collection
An unlikely, expansive collection that brought Indian art and artifacts to GTNP.
David T. Vernon’s collection of Native American art and artifacts started with arrowheads found on a Lake Michigan beach. It was the early twentieth century, Vernon was a Boy Scout, and arrowheads were cool. He began combing beaches regularly looking for more. By the time he was a teen, his interest in arrowheads had widened to include the culture of the people who had made them. In high school, Vernon worked on dude ranches in Wyoming and Montana and came to know the Crow and Blackfoot tribes. He bought as much work from their artists as he could afford. After establishing a career as an illustrator, Vernon continued collecting and became known as an expert collector, particularly of the Reservation Period (1875–1900). By the 1960s, he had one of the finest collections of Indian art and artifacts in the country; it included pieces from one hundred tribes.
Vernon’s goal was to one day open his own museum, with his collection as the main exhibit, but he was not able to make this happen. Wanting his collection to be shared, in the late 1960s he sold it to Laurance S. Rockefeller, then president of the Jackson Hole Preserve, an organization committed to the preservation of the history of the West, on the condition that it be displayed in a museum.
In 1972, the Colter Bay Indian Arts Museum opened to exhibit Vernon’s collection, which Rockefeller first loaned to the park before donating it in 1976. Google Arts & Culture includes two online exhibits about the Vernon Collection. Find them by searching for “David T. Vernon” at artsandculture.google.com.
Hidden Away
Putting a collection into long-term storage.
For forty years, more than half of the 1,428 pieces in the David T. Vernon collection of Indian art and artifacts were on continuous display at the Colter Bay Indian Arts Museum. Starting in 2005, pieces that were not on display went through meticulous conservation work at the Western Archaeological Conservation Center (WACC) in Tucson, Arizona. The museum was closed in 2011 so that the pieces on display could go through the same conservation process. By 2020, the 1,357 items in the collection that required conservation work were finished. “The whole point is to slow deterioration and minimize loss from the collection,” Guild says. “Thanks to this conservation work, the objects are going to exceed all expectations of how long they will last.” To ensure they continue to last, at any given time the majority of the collection will be in storage. JH
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