As the U.S. marks 250 years, we’re diving into the early American art world—and the figures the spotlight missed—who are finally getting their due. Read about the 19th-century pottery star Nampeyo, the forgotten artist Sarah Miriam Peale, and the overlooked first Black professional artist, Joshua Johnson.

In 1877, Helen Henderson Chain climbed to the 14,011-foot summit of Mount of the Holy Cross in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. She was the first non-Indigenous woman to reach the summit, and she did so wearing heavy skirts, petticoats, and a corset. Soonafter, she painted her heavenly Mount of Holy Cross (1877), a majestic vision of the snowy peaks framed by trees and green growth.

Like many women artists of her time, Chain’s life left an indelible mark on her community, though her name has long since fallen into obscurity. She is one of seven women artists highlighted in “Women Artists of the American West: Colorado and Utah: 1885–1935,” now on view at History Jackson Hole in Jackson, Wyoming. Curated by Lucia Pesapane and Camille Morineau, co-founders of the Paris nonprofit AWARE (Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions), the show is the second installment of a two-part series. The first, “Trailblazers of the American West,” presented in 2025, focused on five women artists working in Montana and Wyoming, including Evelyn Cameron, Fra Dana, and Lora Webb Nichols. The current iteration presents Chain alongside artists Elisabeth Spalding, Anne Gregory Van Briggle, and Laura Gilpin, and others.

Together, the scope of these women’s works and lives complicate the heroicizing vision of the American West, so often glorified in media and by politicians. Here, one finds artworks that embrace natural beauty, simple moments, elegance, and even humor, and offer glimpses of the women, children, and other artists who lived in the West, but are rarely seen. 

To assemble the exhibition, Morineau traversed Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, and Utah, scouring museum collections and archives. “These women artists were in museum collections, but they were barely shown,” she said.

At the same time, these educated white women artists only told part of the West’s story, and were, in many ways, complicit in the colonial forces that violently drove Indigenous Americans from their homes. But as new exhibitions expand our vision of the changing landscape of the American West, from exhibitions centered on Chinese immigrants to Black Pioneers, these women offer snapshots of a more nuanced world of everyday experiences. 

Helen Anderson Chain, Around Europe with a Camera (1888). Courtesy of the Collection of Princeton University Library.

Women Artists of the American West

A student of Hudson River School artist George Inness, the Indiana-born Chain traveled the country far and wide, settling in Denver in 1871 with her husband, James Albert Chain. There, the couple set up a bookstore that would become a cultural hub for the city, also operating as an art gallery and publishing house. She also established a school for Denver’s Chinese immigrant population. In 1882, she became one of the first women to exhibit at the National Academy of Design in New York, when two of her paintings of New Mexico pueblos were included in the annual juried exhibition. She was an avid mountaineer and ventured all across Europe.  

Joseph Collier, Helen Henderson Chain and her family in woods. Photo: Denver Public Library Special Collections.

Chain’s life ended as vividly as it was lived. On a tour of Asia in 1892, the Chains embarked on a steamship headed from Shanghai to Hong Kong when the ship was engulfed in a typhoon, sinking in the South China Sea. The family drowned along with 200 other passengers on board. 

“Chain’s life is full of incredible stories […] Her life had a kind of romance,” said Pesapane, “She took many self-portraits, which added to it. She captured these images of herself wearing a heavy dress and hat like an Impressionist painter in the mountains.”

Chain’s life and art were revelations to both Morineau and Pesapane, who pored over the few books of Western art they could find to learn about her life and work. “The challenge was to do enough research to find common themes and bring them together. Most of the time, we work like scientists going to the moon and bringing new material back. It’s really about uncovering stories,” said Morineau. 

Installation view of painting by Helen Henderson Chain in “Women Artists of the American West” on view at History Jackson Hole, 2026.

The Landscape as a Mindscape

While Chain was artistically faithful to the romantic and majestic vistas of the Hudson River School, many other women artists of the American West transformed these landscapes into abstracted planes, full of expressive line and evocative colors. 

“These landscapes are more a reflection of their mind, their spirit, and their loneliness—rather than a celebration of nature,” explained Pesapane.

Installation view “Women Artists of the American West” at History Jackson Hole, 2026.

The works of Colorado painter Elisabeth Spalding (1868–1954) can be counted among these. Born in Indiana and raised in Denver, Spalding spent time in New York ​​studying at Cooper Union and later with Childe Hassam at the Art Students League. She exhibited in Philadelphia and Paris. Throughout her career, her works focused on the landscapes and botanicals of Colorado, painted with a modernist sensibility.

In the exhibition, her work Cedar from Rock Subject (Colorado) (1929) exemplifies her approach; a single, sinuous tree emerges from a ground of brilliantly colorful rocks, radiating outwards with visionary intensity. 

​​“Landscape is a construction. You don’t paint reality—you construct an image based on what you feel and want to convey,” said Pesapane of these inventive landscapes.  

Louise Richards Farnsworth, Blue Shadows (ca. 1898-1969). From the Utah Museum of Fine Arts Permanent Collection, Gift of Mrs. Robert B. Mee.

While better known for her Impressionist portraits, the artist Fra Dana (1874–1948) occasionally painted landscapes, which she expressed as reflections of her inner mind. She kept a diary, like many of the women artists of this time. “She said that these horizontal landscapes are more a reflection of her mind, her spirit, and her sense of loneliness, than as a celebration of wild nature being domesticated,” Pesapane said.

Utah-born, Mormon artist Mabel Pearl Frazer (1887-1981) embraced the mountains and deserts of the Southwest, which she painted in vivid colors and undulating lines, in her self-determined quest to define an American aesthetic. 

Mabel Pearl Frazer, Desert Landscape ( ca. 1925). Courtesy of Brigham Young University Museum of Art, 1981. Art.

Frazer, too, studied at New York’s Art Students League and traveled in Europe, even exhibiting two works at the Uffizi in 1930. But it was the American landscape she prized foremost. “If I had my choice of a trip to Europe to study or a trip to the Southern Utah desert, I’d take the desert trip every time,” Frazer wrote in her journals. “There are things there as vital and as valuable to any artist as he will learn in Europe. I would like to spend the rest of my life in southern Utah, just absorbing its intense, almost unreal beauty, and trying to capture it on canvas.” She joined the faculty at the University of Utah in 1920, where she taught for 33 years.

Women Behind the Lens

Just a few decades after the invention of photography in Europe, by the late 1800s, the medium had swept to even the remote reaches of the American West, and it was women who were often behind the lens.

“Women stormed into photography,” Morineau said, “There were certainly as many women working in photography in the 19th century, if not more.” The appeal of the medium was manifold: it was an affordable and efficient medium that allowed women to maintain an art practice as well as to sell portraits professionally.  

Evelyn Cameron, Buckley sisters roping cow (April 9, 1914). Courtesy of the Montana Historical Society Research Center Photograph Archives

“Photography was also a way to talk about their lives as women,” said Morineau. “It offered an immediate way of representing both themselves and their day-to-day lives.” ​

These photographs often upend stereotypes of life in the West. English-born artist Evelyn Cameron (1868–1928) headed out to the American West, drawn by the appeal of the unshackled life. Her photographs show women on horseback, even hunting. Photographer Lora Webb Nichols (1883–1962) took over 24,000 photographs of life in small-town Wyoming during her life. These snapshots, often of children and women, are playful and lively, offering an intimate vision of the West so often presented as tough and masculine.

Laura Gilpin (1891–1979), a photographer active in Colorado and New Mexico, spent years photographing Navajo and Pueblo people, as well as landscapes of the Southwest. Her works both refused to ignore the lives of those native to the land and presented the landscape distinctly from the crisp majesty emphasized by many male photographers of the era. 

Laura Gilpin, The Ghost Rock. Garden of the Gods (Apr 1919) Collection of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas.

Gilpin’s photograph, The Ghost Rock. Garden of the Gods (1919) is moody and evocative, with steep and rugged cliffs and peaks snapped in a soft focus, so that they appear more like spectral ghosts. 

Gilpin, herself, lived an unconventional life for the times, as a lesbian woman in a long-term relationship. 

Women’s Western Freedom

That freedom was not incidental. “In this pioneer society, women were encouraged to work. They had a certain autonomy,” said Morineau. “In some sense, women could enjoy freedoms beyond those on the East Coast.”

The curators chose to begin the exhibitions in Wyoming, as it was the first state to grant women the vote in 1869, decades before the ratification of the 19th Amendment. In 1920, Jackson Hole, where the exhibition is held, had elected an all-female town council, known, somewhat infamously, as the “Petticoat Rulers.”

Art, in particular, was a profession that enabled women’s autonomy in the West, and many of the women represented across both exhibitions hosted salons, earned incomes, and held influential roles in society as patrons, museum founders, and philanthropists in the cultural world.  

Artist Anne Gregory Van Briggle founded Van Briggle Pottery with her husband, Artus Van Briggle, in 1899, and would exhibit pottery at the Paris Salon and the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, continuing the operation long after her husband’s death. Laura Nichols, meanwhile, established the Rocky Mountain Studio, a photography and photofinishing service, to financially support her family; the studio became a touchstone of her community throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Helen Henderson Chain established Denver’s first art school in 1877.  Elisabeth Spalding founded Denver’s first all-female arts club, the Le Brun Art Club, named for French portrait painter Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, which would become the foundation of the Denver Art Museum. 

Just as importantly, these women achieved freedom of movement, and many of them traveled extensively and not always in the company of men. “Some photographers traveled for months alone, far from home. They were completely free to do it because they were taking pictures,” said Pesapane.

Laura Gilpin, Landscape Class, Broadmoor Art Academy (Garden of the Gods); Aug. 1920; Platinum print. Collection of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Ft Worth, Texas.

An Unfolding Story

The revelations about these artists’ lives continue to surface. During her research, Morineau discovered that Frazer had denounced a colleague’s sexist behavior toward women students and had lost some of her position in the university for doing so.

Recently, after finalizing the exhibition, Morineau learned that Frazer had also painted a large-scale female nude, a painting that would have been shocking given the time and place in a heavily Mormon society and her position as a woman artist. The painting is now in the collection of the Utah Museum of Art.

“A colleague at the museum pulled out this immense nude, the only nude in the corpus of the artist that we know of,” said Morineau, “It’s a magnificent work. I thought, how amazing to paint a nude at that moment.” Morineau said she was flabbergasted. “We discovered another wonderful woman.”

“Women Artists of the American West: Colorado and Utah: 1885–1935,” is on view at History Jackson Hole, 175 East Broadway Avenue, Jackson, Wyoming, February 9–July 4, 2026. 

As the U.S. marks 250 years, we’re diving into the early American art world—and the figures the spotlight missed—who are finally getting their due.