by Dina Mishev
While Amelia has formal training from Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, much of the menu at Streetfood comes from the recipes of Marcos’s mom, Carmela. (“We make different salsa though,” Marcos says. “Hers is too hot.”) Marcos grew up in Leon, Guanajuheo, 4 hours south of Mexico City, and was the youngest of eleven kids. During the day, Carmela managed the cafeteria at a factory with 1,000 workers. She’d come home from this job and cook for her family. “We tried to cook for ourselves,” Marcos says, “but she never let us. She was excited to make us dinner.”
Carmela hasn’t yet visited Jackson or Streetfood, but “she is happy with the idea” people in Wyoming are eating her recipes, Marcos says. But there is one condition. “She told me I have to make everything fresh. ‘If you do something frozen I’ll be disappointed in you,’” she said. Amelia says, “We would never want to do it any other way. It’d certainly be easier if we didn’t make everything ourselves—our chicken tinga requires a full day of prep time—but we’ll never change that. We don’t think food has to be fancy, but it has to be fresh.” streetfoodjh.com
STREETFOOD’S MAHI MAHI FISH TACOS
Marcos grew up eating these mahi mahi tacos on Fridays during Lent. The slaw is his addition to his mom’s traditional recipe.
MAKES 12 TACOS
FISH
1½ pounds mahi mahi or similar firm white fish
½ bunch of cilantro, chopped
2 cloves of garlic, diced fine
Olive oil as needed
Salt and pepper as needed
Chop the fish, and then marinate with olive oil, cilantro, and fresh diced garlic. Sauté the fish in a large pan on medium-high heat. Season as needed.
SLAW
1 head of red cabbage, sliced
4 tomatoes, diced
1 red onion, diced
½ bunch cilantro, chopped
Olive oil
Mix fresh cabbage, red onions, tomatoes, cilantro, and olive oil. Season with black pepper and salt.
SALSA VERDE
6 tomatillos
1 jalapeno (more if you want spicy salsa)
1 garlic clove
½ bunch of cilantro, stems removed
Boil tomatillos and jalapenos in water, until the tomatillos and jalapenos feel soft, about 20 minutes. Cool, then puree the tomatillos and jalapenos with just enough cooking liquid to blend smooth. Add garlic and cilantro, and then season to taste.
To plate, heat corn tortillas on both sides until soft. Top tortillas with fish, slaw, and salsa verde. Serve with fresh lime wedges.
ROAD TRIP 3 ART AND CULTURE
Jackson Hole drew artists long before it drew art collectors. It was Thomas Moran’s paintings that he created while traveling through the area in 1872 that helped convince Congress to designate that land as the world’s first national park. Today the valley is home to some of the country’s finest western and wildlife painters and sculptors (both traditional and contemporary), nearly thirty art galleries, and the National Museum of Wildlife Art. The valley has a resident symphony orchestra in the summer too.
Art for the Ears
“One of the world’s great orchestras is hidden in a small town in Wyoming,” Zubin Mehta, the former music director of the New York Philharmonic, once said. The small town he was referring to is Teton Village and the orchestra is the one that plays during the Grand Teton Music Festival (GTMF). For 7 weeks every summer—early July through mid-August—the music festival brings together the country’s—and world’s—finest orchestral musicians, guest conductors, and soloists. Orchestra concerts are Friday and Saturday; Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are “spotlight” concerts highlighting ensembles and genres of music.
The Grand Teton Music Festival was founded in 1962 and has come a long way since. In its earliest years, performances were held in the old Jackson Hole High School gymnasium, at Jackson Lake Lodge, and on the lawn of St. John’s Church. In 1967, the orchestra began performing in Teton Village. Full orchestra concerts were outside, under a carnival tent. Chamber performances were inside the Mangy Moose Saloon. It wasn’t until 1974 that Walk Festival Hall, at the base of the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, opened, and it wasn’t until 2007 that the hall had heat installed. (Since then, while the main Grand Teton Music Festival season remains the summer, the group has hosted winter performances.)
While Grand Teton Music Festival has only had three music directors over its fifty-plus years—Ling Tung (1968–1996), Eiji Oue (1997—2003), and Donald Runnicles (2006—present)—dozens of soloists and conductors have performed with the group. The list reads like a who’s who of classical music: violinist Itzhak Perlman, pianist Yefin Bronfman, soprano Christine Brewer, conductor Zubin Mehta, and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, among others. Orchestra members love Grand Teton Music Festival as much as audiences. More than a dozen musicians have been playing in the orchestra for over 25 years. A couple have played for more than 40 years. gtmf.org
LOCAL LOWDOWN JIM WILCOX
Over the course of his almost 50-year career as an artist, Jim Wilcox has won some of the most prestigious awards in the western wild-life genre. When he first moved to Jackson full time, however, not one of the three galleries in town was interested in representing him. So he and wife, Narda, rented a space “about the size of a large bathroom,” Wilcox says, and sold his paintings of the Tetons from it. As Wilcox’s own artistic career became more successful, so did Wilcox Gallery, which now represents several dozen other artists.
Q: Did you always want to be a painter?
JIM WILCOX: I decided halfway through college I’d rather live in Jackson Hole and paint than be in a smoky office in some city.
Q: So you moved here right after college?
JW: No. I was willing to be poor if need be to be an artist, but I wasn’t willing to starve. I taught art for a couple of years in Seattle after graduation, and we spent summers in Jackson when I’d paint and sell what I could. Finally, I sold enough one summer I thought we could make it.
Q: But then no galleries would represent you, right?
JW: None of them was interested in having my work.
Q: What were you painting at the time?
JW: The Tetons were the only subject I was interested in painting. I only did foregrounds because I needed somewhere to place the mountains.
Q: What is it about the Tetons that appeal to you as an artist?
JW: The Tetons are really complex, especially when they have snow on them. They are some of the most difficult mountains to paint because they are so iconic. When you paint them, you’re almost painting a portrait—you have to be that accurate because everyone knows what they look like. Painting them is intimidating, and I was very intimidated painting them early on. I don’t paint them because they’re easy, but because they’re exciting to me.
Q: What finally inspired you to paint something other than the Tetons?
JW: I went out to paint the Tetons one day and I looked east and the clouds were so exciting. I painted them instead.
Plein Air Painting
“It’s really important as a landscape painter to spend time outside,” says Kathryn Mapes Turner, a Jackson Hole painter whose watercolors and oils of landscapes, horses, and wildlife are included in museum collections across the country and at Trio Fine Art in Jackson. “That’s where the initial seeds of inspiration come from. You see nuances and subtleties that can’t be captured even with photographs.”
Turner is one of many local landscape artists who spend time outside painting. A French term for this has been universally adopted: en plein air. It translates literally as “in full air.” A plein air painting is one that was painted outside, usually with its subject matter in full view.
Drive into Grand Teton National Park almost any summer day and you’re sure to see at least one painter with her box easel set up alongside the road. “The practice of plein air painting is just really fun,” says Turner, who was born as the fourth generation to be raised on the Triangle X Ranch in Grand Teton Na
tional Park (GTNP). “There’s spending quality time with the landscape and noticing subtle stuff photos don’t capture, and also there are challenges around painting outside you don’t get in the controlled environment of a studio.”
Turner’s had her easel blown over more times than she can remember, has been eaten alive by bugs, gotten mildly hypothermic, and, once at Oxbow Bend, had a moose swim across the Snake River and emerge just in front of her. “I had been standing there for so long and was so still that it didn’t even notice me. It shook itself dry right in front of my canvas,” says Turner.
If you want to increase your chances of finding an artist painting plein air, look for the annual July event “Plein Air for the Park,” sponsored in partnership by the Rocky Mountain Plein Air Painters, the Grand Teton Association, and Grand Teton National Park.
The National Museum of Wildlife Art also has a plein air event, “Plein Air Fest Etc.,” in mid- to late June. Held on the museum’s Sculpture Trail, which looks out on the National Elk Refuge and the Gros Ventre Mountains, you can walk behind the artists and watch each develop their painting over several hours. At the end of the event, the fresh paintings are auctioned off.
Under usual circumstances—i.e., when they’re not required to finish a piece for immediate sale—plein air painters have different processes. Jennifer Hoffman, who owns Trio Fine Art in downtown Jackson with fellow valley painters Bill Sawczuk and Kathryn Mapes Turner, uses studies she creates plein air to do larger works in her studio. “Most of the stuff I do in the field is small,” she says. She also tends to shy away from the valley’s jaw-dropping views. “I do paint the Tetons occasionally, but I am generally drawn to smaller, more intimate things. I never get tired of painting aspens—they’re different in every kind of light and in every season.” Hoffman also loves painting in the South Park area. “With the Snake River running through and Flat Creek and all the willows—the patterns and textures are interesting to me,” she says. Hoffman also likes painting in the snow. One February, she did twenty-eight plein air paintings, one per day for the entire month. Turner says plein air painting is “as addictive as fly fishing or skiing. It’s an experience; you’re doing so much more than just painting.”
Jackson Hole’s First Art Gallery
Today you can’t throw a snowball in downtown Jackson without hitting an art gallery. But in 1963 when Dick Flood Sr. decided to open a gallery here, he hid what he was doing for as long as possible. Because there wasn’t a single art gallery in the valley, he had an inkling, which proved to be correct, that locals would think his idea was crazy, but he didn’t want to be talked out of it. Flood instructed the man painting the name he had chosen—“Trailside Galleries”—on the gallery to do it Wheel of Fortune—style (in other words, not to paint the letters in order). Eventually the lettering was completed, and Flood couldn’t hide his gallery any longer.
LOCAL LOWDOWNMARIAM DIEHL, Owner of Diehl Gallery
A Manhattan transplant, Irish-Iraqi Mariam Diehl bought Meyer Gallery in 2005 after working there for 3 years. At the time, the gallery represented only traditional western and wildlife artists. Since then, this equestrienne—Mariam had been a volunteer mounted officer with the New York City Parks Enforcement Patrol—has not only renamed the gallery but also transformed it. Today it is one of the valley’s most contemporary galleries, representing artists including Donald Martiny and Hung Liu and traveling to national exhibitions like Chicago’s SOFA.
While many people who end up spending time in Jackson Hole do not plan on landing here permanently, Mariam did. “I was ready to leave New York and researched small mountain towns in the West,” she says. “When I stumbled upon Jackson, I knew right away I’d found my future home. And when I landed a job and moved here, it was everything I knew it would be—spectacularly beautiful with a tremendous number of outdoor pursuits available within spitting distance of the front door and full of interesting people. And you can see the New York City Ballet—I love that.”
When Mariam says there are outdoor pursuits spitting distance from the door, she’s not exaggerating. The home she shares with husband Scott and son Quinlan is on the Snake River. They can cast a line into the river from their backyard. She has to drive to horseback ride however. “My current favorite riding spot is in the Snake River Canyon down in the river bottom below Astoria Hot Springs,” she says, “though Emma Matilda Lake always takes my breath away. And I love riding to Phelps Lake and swimming with the horses.”
JACKSON’S ART SCENE
“When I started in the gallery world here, there was a very small contemporary art scene and since then it has blossomed,” Mariam Diehl says. “It’s still not huge, but it exists, which is pretty fantastic for a small mountain town.” Top galleries to check out include Diehl Gallery, Tayloe Piggott Gallery, Altamira Gallery, and Heather James Fine Art.
According to Mariam, there are three artsy things visitors to the valley should do:
1. Walk the Sculpture Trail at the National Museum of Wildlife Art at dawn or dusk.
2. Check out the current installation in the outdoor courtyard at the Center for the Arts.
3. See the exhibition in the Art Association Gallery.
Because Flood was a passionate collector of western and wildlife art, that’s what Trailside Galleries specialized in. It had works by Charles Russell, Olaf Wieghorst, Ernie Berke, Nick Eggenhofer, Ned Jacob, and Asa Powell. Trailside Galleries has moved around the Town Square several times since it opened and has changed ownership, but it still specializes in western and wildlife art.
National Museum of Wildlife Art
You’d be hard-pressed to guess that what started the National Museum of Wildlife Art (NMWA)—celebrating its thirtieth anniversary in 2017—was a small painting titled “Favorite Panfish” bought from a gallery in Minnesota. In 1962, Joffa Kerr gave this painting by artist Les C. Kouba to her husband, Bill, to celebrate his graduation from law school. The next summer, they bought another painting, “Trophy Mule Deer,” by Frank Hoffman. The year after that, the couple bought their first “big” painting, Carl Rungius’s “Wanderers Above Timberline.” It was such a big purchase they had to make it on layaway.
THE NMWA’S SCULPTURE TRAIL
National Museum of Wildlife Art Petersen Curator of Art and Research Adam Harris says a sculpture trail was something the museum had been thinking and talking about even before he started working there. Harris started at the museum in 2000. The sculpture trail opened in 2012. Now that it’s happened, no one denies it was worth the wait, mostly because, by waiting so long, the timing worked out for California-based landscape architect Walter Hood to design it. Prior to the National Museum of Wildlife Art Sculpture Trail, Hood’s best-known projects included gardens at San Francisco’s De Young Museum, community parks in Oakland, and two public spaces in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. The National Museum of Wildlife Art project was Hood’s first in Wyoming. “I’ve probably never worked in such a changing landscape,” says Hood. “Every visit, I saw something else.”
And what Hood was seeing wasn’t what the National Museum of Wildlife Art saw. “They wanted a trail around a parking lot,” he says. “I said that that’d be awful.” What the museum ended up with is a gently undulating trail that winds ¾ of a mile along the edge of a butte overlooking the National Elk Refuge. Along the trail, there are Douglas fir benches and, of course, sculptures. Pieces here are made of bronze, wood, and metal, and depict wildlife of all kinds, from a horned toad to an isis (this sculpture is 10 feet tall) and a herd of seven bison. The bison piece, by artist Richard Loffler, is the largest sculpture in the museum’s collection—it’s 64 feet long. The trail is free and, in the summer, home to live music, theater, and even yoga.
Fast forward 25 years to 1987. The Kerrs had one of the finest collections of wildlife and sporting art in the country. At that time, there weren’t any museums dedicated to or even exhibiting the genre on any real scale. (Some in the art world didn’t even consider it fine a
rt.) So the Kerrs, along with a handful of other Jackson Hole locals, started their own museum, renting 5,000 square feet of space on Jackson’s Town Square and naming it Wildlife of the American West. Their collection formed the backbone of the new museum’s holdings, but was regularly supplemented with visiting exhibits from other sources. And then the Kerrs kept collecting. By 1993, Wildlife of the American West had outgrown its space and went looking for a new home, and a new name.
In September 1994, the National Museum of Wildlife Art, then constructed out of 4,033 tons of Arizona sandstone (which was replaced in 2011 by Idaho quartzite), opened on WY 89 just north of downtown. The heart of the collection remained the pieces from Joffa and Bill Kerr, but, in total, the museum had over 1,000 wildlife and sporting works of art. At the opening ceremonies, Bill Kerr said, “May [this museum] long serve those who come to this place in search of the wild, the natural, the forgotten, and the serene.”
When the museum turned fifteen, Bob Koenke, the publisher of Wildlife Art magazine said of it, “The National Museum of Wildlife Art is to animal art what Cooperstown is6 to baseball.” In April 2008, then-President George W. Bush signed a bill that named the NMWA as the National Museum of Wildlife Art of the United States. And it all started with a fish.
By the museum’s thirtieth anniversary, the permanent collection included nearly 5,000 pieces that included the work of John J. Audubon, Carl Rungius, Charles Russell, John Clymer, and Albert Bierstadt, as well as Georgia O’Keeffe, Andy Warhol, and Pablo Picasso. Works range from paintings to 4,500-year-old stone carvings and even a 24-foot-tall totem pole.
While the National Museum of Wildlife Art definitely complements Jackson Hole’s art scene, its location here makes sense on an even greater scale. “Jackson Hole is in the middle of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem,” National Museum of Wildlife Art Petersen Curator of Art and Research Adam Harris says. “We’re at the bottom of this amazing corridor that goes from Yellowstone up to the Yukon for large animal migrations. There is this whole synchronicity happening between what is happening outside our building, the architecture of our building, and then what you can see inside.” wildlifeart.org
