Video coverage of the symposium, The Red Desert: Among Dead Volcanoes and Living Dunes, A Public Conversation on the Value of Place, is now available online. For those who missed the September 28-29 events at the University of Wyoming Art Museum, or for those who would like to view the symposium again, visit www.uwyo.edu/artmuseum and click on Red Desert Symposium.
For the past five years, photographer Martin Stupich, writer Annie Proulx, archeologist Dudley Gardner and geologist Charles Ferguson have been exploring, photographing, and researching the Red Desert. Their collected stories, images, observations, and learned scholarship will result in a publication on the Red Desert (University of Texas Press, 2008). The publication is as much a study about the region’s natural landscape, archeology, and human history as it is a study on public lands and last use over the last century.
Curated by Susan Moldenhauer, director and chief curator of the University Art Museum, the exhibition, Portrait of a Place: Wyoming’s Red Desert, photographs by Martin Stupich, featured Stupich’s images and became the platform for a larger discussion. The symposium included presenters as diverse as the desert itself. In addition to Stupich, Proulx, Gardner, and Ferguson, more than 20 presenters representing the arts, humanities, sciences, industry, public policy, and conservation provided insight on a particular region of the desert—Boar’s Tusk and the Kilpecker Dunes—and collectively offered a portrait of the Red Desert.
The symposium was made possible by the Richard and Judith Agee, Guthrie Family Foundation, the National Advisory Board of the UW Art Museum, the Argosy Family Foundation and the Haub School and Ruckelshaus Institute of Environment and Natural Resources, UW Program on Ecology, the Wyoming Council for the Humanities, and the Wyoming Arts Council through the Wyoming State Legislature and the National Endowment for the Arts which believes a great nation deserves great art.
Bringing the world of art to Wyoming, the Art Museum is located in the Centennial Complex at 22nd & Willett Drive in Laramie. The Museum and Museum Store are open Monday through Saturday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. with extended hours until 9 p.m. on Mondays February through April. Admission is free.
