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JH Magazine

Written By Dina Mishev

Women gallerists and curators make Jackson Hole's art scene more vibrant. 

"There is a very high percentage of women-owned and women-run galleries in Jackson Hole, which is exciting.” —MARIAM DIEHL, FOUNDER OF DIEHL GALLERY "

“There are great artists who, throughout history, have gotten the short end of the stick,” says National Museum of Wildlife Art curator of art, Tammi Hanawalt, PhD. “They were well-known in their time but were then left out of the art history and survey books.” What artists is Hanawalt talking about? Women. (And this could be said for any minority, as well.) 

In the 572-page first edition of History of Art by H.W. Janson used in most art-survey courses in U.S. colleges and universities, there wasn’t a single female artist included. (The first edition was published in 1962.) By the time the sixth edition was published in 2006, among the hundreds of artists whose stories were told and work admired were 16 women. The British equivalent of Janson’s art-survey book, The Story of Art by Ernst Gombrich, was/ is even worse. First published in 1950, its 800-some pages don’t include a single mention of a female artist. As of 2024, The Story of Art is in its 16th edition, which includes one woman artist. Historically, creating art was more difficult for women—women artists in Europe weren’t even allowed to be admitted to the life-drawing studio until the 1890s—but there were women who persevered. “There were women who were accomplished, professional artists despite everything against them,” says Shari Brownfield, founder and owner of the Jackson-based boutique art advisory and appraisal firm Shari Brownfield Fine Art. “But they’ve been left out of our history books.”

It’s not just history that is hard on female artists. In the present, of the 3,050 art galleries in Artsy’s database (Artsy is a New York City-based online art brokerage), 10 percent represent not a single female artist and almost half represent 25 percent or fewer women. According to the 2024 Artnet Intelligence Report, only 11 women were among the 100 top-selling artists at auction globally in 2023. Working female visual artists today earn, on average, seventy-four cents for every dollar made by male artists. Recent data from the National Endowment of the Arts reveals 89 percent of museum acquisitions and 85 percent of museum 

exhibitions in the U.S. are dedicated to male artists. 

If these facts and statistics are a surprise to you, you’re not alone. “The under-representation of women in art didn’t dawn on me when I was in art school,” Brownfield says. “It wasn’t until I was working in larger galleries that I realized it was almost entirely male artists that I was selling, and the few times I had requests for work by female artists, it was typically for the same few women—and their prices were significantly lower than their male counterparts. The more I paid attention to this, the more I began to believe that they were not collected and not expensive for no other reason than that they were female artists and their stories hadn’t been told.” While the macro story of females in art is sobering, Jackson Hole’s art scene—from its galleries to the National Museum of Wildlife Art and artists themselves—could be viewed as a beacon of hope. The top two curatorial posts at the NMWA are held by women, and the museum is actively trying to increase its representation of women and minorities in its permanent collection and in temporary exhibits. Of the 25 member galleries of the Jackson Hole Gallery Association, seven are owned or run solely by women and a handful are owned by husband-and-wife teams. There are four galleries founded and run by women artists (Ringholz Studios, Gallery Wild, Turner Fine Art, and Thal Glass Studio). The leader of the nonprofit Jackson Hole Public Art is a woman (Carrie Geraci), as is the executive director of the Jackson Hole Art Association (Jennifer Lee), which annually teaches about 220 art classes a year to more than 1,000 students of all ages. Hit one of the Art Association’s two summer Art Fairs and you’ll see an almost equal number of male and female artists. Same for the NMWA’s Plein Air Fest, Etc. “Our town has so many talented women in leading roles in the visual arts, which is really an incredible thing,” Brownfield says.  

Hanawalt says this improves the Jackson Hole art scene. “I think with any art experience, the more perspectives you have, the more your experience is enhanced,” she says. “If I see a lot of different perspectives, that can only enrich my experience. And it makes me more aware of the whole world instead of just a little piece.” 

Two decades ago, two subject matters, painted traditionally, dominated Jackson Hole’s art scene—the West and wildlife. Today, you can still find traditional takes on Western and wildlife art in our galleries, but there are also galleries that represent artists painting and sculpting these subjects from nontraditional perspectives. And there are galleries that don’t have a single piece of art with wildlife, cowboys, or Native Americans in them. Brownfield credits the valley’s female gallerists for this evolution. “It’s not impossible for women to relate to cowboy art, but they are often male-dominated deals,” she says. “I think the women running galleries here went looking for art and artists they felt they related to more and they were more passionate about, and that still held a sense of place yet expressed it in a different manner.” 

Mariam Diehl is one such gallerist. She bought the Jackson Hole Meyer Gallery in 2005 after having been its director for several years. Founded in Park City in 1965 and expanding with a Jackson branch in 2001, Meyer Gallery represented many of the finest traditional Western and wildlife artists. After purchasing the Jackson location, Diehl spent several years slowly transitioning its roster of artists to be more contemporary. In 2005, she told the Jackson Hole News&Guide, “I had been doing research on artists for some time—artists whose work I liked or who I had heard great things about—and as soon as it seemed likely I was going to get the gallery, I started tracking them down.” When she had fully transitioned the gallery, in 2008, Diehl renamed it Diehl Gallery. “At that point, I felt that the artists in the gallery were all ones that I really loved and whose work I was passionate about.” 

The fact that Diehl Gallery’s stable of artists fluctuates between 30 and 50 percent women is a bonus. “I do make a conscious effort to represent women artists, but not at the expense of the quality of the art in the gallery,” she says. “It is most important to me to represent talented artists and artwork that I really love rather than focus on the sex of the artists I represent.” Which perhaps is the goal of any woman artist. One of painter Georgia O’Keeffe’s most well-known quotes speaks to this: “Men put me down as the best woman painter. I think I’m one of the best painters.”