2024
Living Monument to Labor
Core creative team member and collaborative ethnographer
HIGH IRON // Wyoming’s first monument to railroad labor
In the state of Wyoming, there is a single monument dedicated to the transcontinental railroad: the monolithic Ames monument that celebrates the two men who financed—and swindled—the Union Pacific Railroad. There is no monument to the immigrant laborers who built the transcontinental railroad, and in doing so built the economy and infrastructure of the west. High Iron honors and celebrates the labor that built the state of Wyoming.
High Iron is a moving piece of public art—a modified train car— presently in Laramie, Wyoming until summer 2025. It will then travel westward connecting former rail towns along the Interstate 80 corridor. It houses an interactive labor exhibit, an oral history collection station, and will be the center of accompanying community programming in each city it visits. High Iron will travel stories of ancestors who constructed the transcontinental railroad, multigenerational laborers who built the economy of Wyoming, and contemporary rail workers and their unions. High iron will shine light on buried narratives of: crucial labor, an incredibly diverse state, a culture of care, and immigrant contribution. www.highiron.org
High Iron is a proud member of Monument Labs Re:Generation cohort of 2024. Re:Generation supports a cohort of ten teams working to create new or to expand existing public art, public history, or public humanities projects. As a central part of Monument Lab’s commitment to expanding the American commemorative landscape, Re:Generation emphasizes the selection of projects with creative representation and interpretation of erased, suppressed, or threatened stories and histories, particularly in states which have passed legislation limiting the teaching of accurate and diverse American history.
On a snowy May Day 2024, our boxcar arrived via semi and crane from a field in Rigby, Idaho to its present home in a city parking lot in Laramie, Wyoming. Our collaborative team of descendant artists and descendant storytellers transformed this car over five months before we opened it to our community on September 27th
High Iron will transform as it travels through Wyoming communities impacted by the transcontinental railroad. The core creative team is Aubrey Edwards, Conor Mullen, and Laura McDermit.
In Laramie, six additional artists contributed to the boxcar: Michael Chavez, Anjel Garcia, Eirini Linardaki, Amanda Pittman, Karen Vaughan, and John Wilhelm. Each artwork explores a personal connection to labor or is informed by the communities and land impacted by the rail. Inside the boxcar, three family histories connected to Wyoming through rail labor are highlighted: The Sanchez & Vigil families, the Matsamura & Sunada families, and the Angeli & Englert families.
High Iron is supported by Monument Lab with funding from the Mellon Foundation, event support made possible through a grant from Wyoming Humanities. Additional support from: ArtsHERE, an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with South Arts and in collaboration with the other five U.S. Regional Arts Organizations, Laramie Public Art Coalition, and the City of Laramie.