“There are a lot of important female artists… the only problem is finding information about them,” French curator and art historian Camille Morineau once told the Institut Français. Her fatigue at seeing women artists being overlooked prompted her to create the Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions (AWARE), a nonprofit dedicated to championing female artists through conferences, symposiums and an ever-growing online reference database. She has made a career of bringing women into the conversation within art historical discourses and institutions alike. Per Morineau, the fallacy of women’s absence from art history reflects their lack of visibility on the record, not their actual dearth.
In this spirit, Morineau recently spearheaded the exhibition “Women of the American West: Trailblazers at the Turn of the 20th Century.” On view at the Jackson Hole History Museum through July 12, 2025, it acts as an art historical corrective and introduces the work of five exceptional Midwestern women artist/rancher hybrids at the turn of the 20th Century: two photographers (Evelyn Cameron and Lora Webb Nichols) and three painters (Fra Dana, Josephine Hale, Elizabeth Lochrie). These women disrupt the clichéd American West mythology so tethered to inflated masculinity.
Morineau—who pursued gender studies in the U.S. and loves the novels of Cormac McCarthy—blended her inclusive feminist retelling of art history through a territorially specific lens. She selected the five artists for the quality of their work and their non-average life stories. They all lived in American territories that had granted women the right to vote in 1869, in what would become Wyoming (that is to say, long before the Nineteenth Amendment’s ratification in 1920). Note that it wasn’t a progressive gesture; it was motivated by a racist imperative to spur white procreation, to rival the Native American population.
Observer spoke with Morineau in her Paris office about the necessity of research to expand gendered artistic references, travel as a form of liberation and hardy Midwestern endurance.
Paint me a picture of “Women of the American West.”
The museum itself is rather small, but it’s a gem, really beautiful. It’s right in the center of Jackson Hole, in the midst of amazing scenery. We’ve got the Rockies on two sides. On the first floor, there’s a dense history of Jackson Hole as a community: lots of Native American objects, to pay homage to the first inhabitants of the land, who are still inhabitants of the land.
The second floor has the exhibition room. It’s not very big. In the corridor leading to it, we decided to place the photographers, because we could show smaller formats. In the exhibition space, we have two walls for Fra Dana. Her ranch was at the border of Wyoming and Montana. She had a super interesting life. She got an education, went to Paris, studied with a painter in New York. She has a palette and a brush that are really strong, which evokes a bit of Cézanne. In the background, there is gold—a bit like Klimt used gold to give beautiful light within the painting. She used very strong colors. It’s all within her home, although we know that she was working outside. There are wonderful portraits of people she asked to be models. There’s a farmer with a very white forehead from under his hat, while the rest of his face is completely tan. He is sitting up straight. There’s a boy, smoking—you can feel that he’s put on nice clothes to model. There are also beautiful self-portraits where she’s reading, projecting herself as an intellectual, like Mary Cassatt from that period.
There’s a wall of Elizabeth Lochrie, a painter of Native Americans. She was accepted as a member of the Blackfeet Nation, given a Native American name. Her story, I think, is really unique.
Bringing visibility to communities who are underrepresented seems very contemporary.
Quite a lot of men artists represented Native Americans, but they were commissioned to do so—they were sometimes paid by the railroad companies to document what was going on, and they would represent them with what I call a “political style,” and gave an ideal vision of things. They were certainly not accepted within the communities; they gave an outside vision of the situation. In Lochrie’s case, she was not commissioned by anybody. The fact that she was given an Indian name, I think, is big.
I came across so many interesting artists that I said, “It’s not going to be one show, but two shows, because how can I squeeze them all in a small space?”
The second show will be about Utah in 2026, right?
Exactly—the one now is about Wyoming and Montana, and the second one will be about Utah and Colorado. It’s going to be more about landscape and larger formats. All these women lived in this region, and the majority of them were ranchers. They had amazing lives. They were artists on the side. A few of the photographers ended up making a living with photography—a better living than being ranchers—because the soil isn’t good in that region.
Would photographers have considered themselves artists at that time? Wouldn’t photography have been considered a trade rather than a form of creative expression?
I would say a bit of both. The late 19th Century was the moment when photography started being seen as an art in elite circles. But “the new woman” in the States was linked to photography in many ways. Women were freer to express themselves within photography, more than in painting or sculpture, because there were no academies, no schools. I was surprised to see so many of them in that region. But if you think about it, you get it. They could travel with it. They could photograph landscape. They could photograph their life. It’s really moving.
Another common point with all these artists: they wrote diaries. Their aspirations and what their dreams were, what they tried to do and achieve, what they couldn’t achieve. Like many artists, they worked without the eye of somebody else on their pieces. They just built a body of work, which I consider professional artist work—training themselves, or with other painters, traveling and getting a real art education. But during any century, you can become an artist without schooling. You just watch the world and learn to use tools or mediums.
Do you think that their work says something about the region today, or is it simply a portal into the past?
I would say it’s more of a portal to the past because, today, Jackson Hole is a ski resort, which I think I couldn’t afford. It’s linked to Yellowstone and the National Park, which didn’t exist at the time, so there was no business around that at all. I don’t think there’s such great adventure in Jackson Hole today, but I don’t want to criticize it—this spirit of the frontier, I find, is still alive. That’s why I love traveling there: there’s enthusiasm that I don’t find elsewhere. It gave me some strength to do what I do. Some people don’t care about it, it’s ‘woke,’ and some are like, “Wow.” These women existed during this horribly violent moment where everybody was killing each other, and women were raped. The people who hoped to make a living being ranchers found out that the land was really difficult. In that region, life was really tough. It’s freezing cold. The fact that they managed to produce work and nobody looked at it at the time…
Since they were ‘inconspicuous,’ what kind of digging did you have to do to find them?
I did a research trip last July. Wyoming was the first territory (it was not even a state) to give women the right to vote. It was in order to start families and populate the land, but it gave them power. There was a council composed of only women; there were women attorneys—a lot of women in power. When I started my research trip, just having a vague idea of doing a show, I was really surprised to find so many interesting late 19th-century/early 20th-century artists in these regions. The pioneer region—like, how can you be an artist? But of course, it’s more complex than that. Maybe there should be a school named after the painters in the Rockies. It’s going to take quite a few years of research to find out and to map.
I did some research thanks to my team here in Paris, then I made appointments at university museums, city museums and state museums. I met some colleagues, and sometimes they’d say, “Oh, you’re interested in that photographer?” and wanted to give me the name of another one that I hadn’t heard of. Then, like a police investigator, I’d go see the work to see if I found her interesting.
The five artists in the show are the ones you thought were the most aesthetically ambitious? Meaning there were other references, less notable in what they produced?
Absolutely.
Five already seems like more than one would find a century ago. How many women artists were there, even those who weren’t necessarily very talented? Double the amount?
I think three or four times the amount.
Oh, wow.
I mean, women aspire to be artists exactly as men do. It was difficult to become an artist, but not impossible, because the territory was well-connected to the rest of the country by train. And if you were a bit educated or a bit ambitious, you could get information either by reading the newspaper or by traveling to a big city. Pennsylvania had fine arts schools, and a few of them were open to women. If you had the means to travel, you would go to Europe, spending a few weeks in Paris. Traveling when you have a ranch means someone has to take care of the cattle, et cetera. But also, traveling was less expensive. People didn’t expect four-star hotels—especially women coming from Wyoming, right? Not everybody had the opportunity to spend two years at the Beaux Arts. So they would just spend a few weeks, look around and visit museums.
In terms of subject, these women represented relatively domestic themes. Was that a socially conditioned thing, or was it just normal to represent the quotidian?
That’s a difficult question, but I don’t think it was a social rule. In the case of Fra Dana, for example, her husband was completely okay with her traveling. There are a lot of supportive husbands who let them do whatever they wanted to do. And in that region, nobody looked at art anyway. Nobody was looking.
Reading Fra Dana’s diaries, she’s like, “I hate my life, it’s really difficult.” She chooses to represent her domestic life: the light is beautiful, the objects are beautiful. I think she represented what she felt happy with. My favorite portrait of hers is of a young girl seated next to a bird in a cage, which is, for me, so clearly a metaphor.
But I think they were really quite free, especially in that region, more than on the East Coast in big cities, where rules applied to bourgeois society. This is my gut feeling. I mean, they could ride horses… one of them wore pants. Women were empowered—for the wrong reasons, to create a population to rival the Native one—but at the time, they just used it. People who chose to make the trip to go that far west were pretty extraordinary. It takes some kind of vision to believe in that. They were all adventurers.
AWARE’s mission is reframing art history, which is skewed, to be more inclusive in its references. How was this particular sample of women artists of the West reflective of AWARE’s bigger mission?
I have great respect for research, but research has been directed towards male artists, that’s for sure. There is evidence, in every century, of women artists being great and successful, having markets, working for kings and queens, et cetera. But history wipes them out. It’s mainly linked to economies and the way institutions work.
Somehow, in the States, although there’s been intensive research about women artists in general, it’s revolved around big cities, where women got an education: in New York or Pennsylvania, because there were schools. The Rockies were like a black hole—women were sitting in a wagon, right? And trying to survive. Which is the idea I had!
You just need to dig, to do a bit of research and you find them—it’s completely natural. Of course there were women artists. That kind of research, pushing through with extra effort, is what AWARE is about. We have to put a lot more effort into finding women artists and documenting their work and producing information about them. We have to double-check a lot more, because there were no critics and no newspaper articles about their work, so you have to do the archival research and understand the context. It’s not like Picasso and the 500 retrospectives there. You have to do the digging yourself.
AWARE is about stressing that it takes more effort. Women artists are out there, and actually not so difficult to find. But once we find them, then we have to accept the fact that the art historical narrative is going to change completely.
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