Joel Ostlind Art Exhibit

An art exhibit featuring Joel Ostlind will be showing at the Basin City Arts Center now through mid-December.

Joel Ostlind is a Wyoming born and self-taught artist whose etchings are on display at the Basin City Arts Center through the courtesy of the University of Wyoming Art Museum’s Touring Exhibition Service. In this 17 piece exhibition the subject is one that Joel Ostlind knows well: cowboys, horses, and cattle in the open lands of the western landscape. Following in the footsteps of Wyoming's earlier cowboy-turned-artists Hans Kleiber and Bill Gollings, Ostlind draws on his cowboy life experience as the subject of his images. Joel Ostlind says, "I was raised in Wyoming and have chosen . . . to live in this region and work to interpret the things I value here: the light, the land, and the people who move through it."

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Ostlind is a master printmaker who moves fluidly between the intaglio printmaking processes of etching, drypoint, aquatint, sugar lift, and lithography. All of these processes are represented in this exhibition in addition to that of monoprint, a process of applying ink to a flat surface that results in a single, unique print.

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"I am working through my slice of life savoring the atmospheric volume, watching the light change by the hour, the seasons shift day by day. The fun for me is trying to catch, in two dimensions, enough of what refuses to be caught so that as you stand looking at these images you will remember how the light really is, where the mountains are blue like that, why the songbird sings . . . " says Joel Ostlind about his art.

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Ostlind was born in Casper and lives near Big Horn, Wyoming. He has degrees in Soil Science and Ranch Management, and worked the cow camps in Texas, Wyoming, and Montana. Today, he is a full-time artist. Ostlind was the featured artist of the Coors Western Art Show in 2002 and 2005, and had a solo exhibition at the Bradford Brinton Museum in 2004.

"I have a real appreciation of this region - a lot of people do,” Ostlind said of Wyoming and of the Big Horn Mountains. "I try to convey that but I also try and do it in an open enough manner so that the viewer, when they are look at something, can sort of inject their own emotions and complete some of the imagery to their own satisfaction. If the imagery is left a little open to interpretation, it lives longer."

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The University of Wyoming Art Museum located in the dramatic Centennial Complex on the University Campus in Laramie, Wyoming, is an educational institution that was founded in 1962 on the principle of bringing the diversity of American art and the art from other countries and cultures to the people of Wyoming. Supported by public and private funds, admission is always free including spacious free parking for visitors. The University of Wyoming Art Museum offers a year-round source of education and entertainment for the entire family.

The University of Wyoming Art Museum's outreach program, Art Express, is comprised of two distinct programs, the Ann Simpson Artmobile and the Touring Exhibition Service. The Touring Exhibition Service offers exhibitions at no charge to Wyoming organizations such as libraries, schools, community centers, galleries, and museums.

To view this free exhibit visit the Basin City Arts Center the first three weeks in December every Thursday-Saturday 4-8 p.m. A sign will be out on the sidewalk indicating that the exhibit is open.

To schedule a group visit at a different time, contact Wendy Taylor at 568-2915.

The Basin City Arts Center is a nonprofit organization developing and supporting the arts in the Big Horn Basin.