What’s painted in the clouds

In the Laramie Plains Civic Center, the theatre’s north wall is covered in four framed oil-on-canvas paintings. The panels, painted by Florence Ware of Salt Lake City, depict frontier people across the Wyoming plains. Opinion In the murals, women in hoop skirts wave handkerchiefs at a passing steam engine. Children play — a young boy with a bow and arrow, a young girl with a bonnet-clad doll. Men and their dogs rest on a prairie hill, while others move cattle in the background. Throughout the landscape, Indigenous and settler caricatures stand alongside historic figures from the state’s past — Jim Bridger, Jacques La Ramie, Father DeSmet, Chief Washakie. Yet, the paintings don’t depict the grim truths of settler colonization. That absence unsettles me. It is my job to steward this building, and thus, these paintings and the story they tell. In one panel, cowboys and their border collie take a break in the foreground.

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