- An undersung aspect of the development of the Transcontinental Railroad across the United States in the 19th century was the grueling physical labor that went into it and the workers who performed it.

Correcting that is the goal of a new art and history installation project, innovative and unorthodox, called high iron.

It's housed in a boxcar.

I'm Steve Peck of Wyoming PBS.

This is Wyoming Chronicle.

Monuments abound to the Union Pacific Railroad, but they tend to be of the big imposing permanent type.

A project called High Iron, a tribute not to the money and machinery of the railroad, but to the laborers who built it, is a new kind of monument, movable, evolving, and housed in a railroad boxcar.

Laura Zorch McDermit is part of the three person team that created it.

Wyoming Chronicle met her in Rawlins.

Did you go to the used boxcar store to get this?

Where did you find this one that you now own, right?

You bought it?

- We bought it.

Yeah.

So we own a boxcar, which put that on the resume.

Actually, we found the boxcar on Facebook Marketplace.

- Really?

- You can find anything on Facebook Marketplace, apparently.

But yeah, Facebook Marketplace.

It was on a field in Idaho.

- Really?

- Yep.

And we arranged my colleague, Connor, who is on the team, he went to Idaho, check it out, said, "Yep, it looks great."

We got a truck, brought it down to Wyoming.

- She's referring to Conor Mullen, who not only first checked out the old boxcar in that Idaho field, but serves as both an artist and artist liaison for High Iron.

- I'd say I serve as a liaison for the artists.

Yeah.

Work to support their projects within High Iron.

- How, once the boxcar was acquired, you had the idea, the concept for the show or that had been established too.

How do you get in touch?

How do you make it known, "Hey artists, we have this unique thing and we need art for it."

It's an internet function, I presume?

Yeah.

There's a place where artists look to see what's coming up?

- Yeah.

Yeah.

There's a number of places online where artists can go and apply for these opportunities.

We use one that's called Cafe, but also just used our networks within the state and the region to sort of put that call out.

So other local art organizations and regional ones too.

- It's a different kind of a project, obviously.

It's not the same as, "Hey, we have a new gallery on Main Street."

What was the response to it?

Instant enthusiasm or take some salesmanship?

- It took a little bit of effort to get it out there.

We also were hoping to find artists who had some sort of particular relationship either hopefully to Wyoming's history around railroad labor, but we got people applying and showing interests from all over the nation.

Even one of our artists works internationally, so pretty far and wide in terms of where our artists came to the project from.

- How specific were you in what you wanted?

You know you wanted something on the outside of the car.

There are smaller pieces that are inside.

How did that evolve and develop?

- We weren't very specific at all in terms of what kinds of artwork we wanted, what types of mediums.

And to be honest, our initial artist team came from all different levels of skills and depths, I guess, or they were all at different stages in their professional career.

So some of them, this was their very first public art project.

Others, they had had a lot of that experience beforehand.

- Those artists and their work contribute to the research vision of a PhD student for whom the high iron project is the centerpiece of the degree program.

Her name is Aubrey Edwards.

- So I have the joy of working with descendant storytellers and of designing and curating the inside of the boxcar.

It's a gathering space.

It's a storytelling space.

And the installations we have in here, they are created by community members.

The goal here is for descendant storytellers to share their family history, to share the stories of their ancestors, and then for visitors in the audience and other community members to come in and also make connections.

It's a space of connectivity for them to see their own ancestors, their own family members, their own histories on the walls here.

It's kind of like a museum.

I think museums have very particular connotations and museums are not something that all of our community members are comfortable going into or where they see themselves represented on the walls.

- High iron is not a typical exhibit of a typical collection in a typical gallery.

It's different and the team faced the challenge of getting noticed.

Laura, I'm thinking in terms of someone setting up an art gallery, say, "Hey, there's an empty storefront.

Let's rent that building and bring some paintings in."

Or maybe let's get some artists together for an exhibit we're going to have in a museum or even a big art installation somewhere.

The first thing you need, got to attract attention somehow.

And here I think we've got a master stroke.

- We thought that this is something that has to be grand, right?

The original sort of thinking was remember when circuses used to come to town on the railroad, right?

And then it's like, oh, here's all the elephants coming out.

Here's this - - The - Elephants in town.

Yeah.

Right.

I mean, who was not paying attention to that, right?

And so when we were thinking through how, again, how we travel these stories, we knew number one, it had to travel.

We had to create something that would move, that would be able to be in community with community and then go to another community and continue to build and tell the stories.

- If you were a guest and I was stewarding the car, I would start this conversation or this welcome by saying, "Welcome to High Iron."

We tell the stories of the courage of our ancestors who left their homes to immigrate across sea and land to the new world, to build our infrastructures, our community and our economies.

So the work that we do in High Iron is we tell the stories of immigrant contribution through stories of our ancestors, of how immigrants built the place that we call home.

So we use the railroad as that through line, right?

So yes, and you mentioned earlier, Steve, can you believe that the ingenuity and the innovation of building that railroad across the state?

Well, the immigrants, right?

They also held that ingenuity.

- This boxcar is, I mean, so emblematic of what people see in these spaces already, right?

We're about one block away from the railroad right now, and all day long the train is coming through.

And then this boxcar is here sitting on its own with all of this incredible artwork all over it that is here to tell a story.

So there is this very familiar thing that people already see on their landscape, but then that is inviting them in to just dig in a little bit deeper.

- When we talk about monuments, which I define monument as something that holds power and presence on a landscape, right?

So when we talk about a monument, it is typically something that is a grandiose or a granite slab or bronze.

Let me - Just say while we're talking, an earlier installment of Wyoming Chronicle, we were at the Ames Monument.

Another very, very different kind of monument involving the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad.

And a piece of a phrase that you used that stuck with me when I was learning about you was that is a monument to capital, you said, and this is a monument to labor.

Two important parts of the process, but you haven't built a 60 foot pyramid that 150 years later is standing on the prairie.

- Sure.

And Steve, when you went to see that monument, what did you have to do to view it?

- The most we had to do was - - Look up.

- That.

Yeah.

- Right?

Over something towering over you, which is capital.

And so here with high iron, our monument is open.

It welcomes you.

You are meant to be inside.

We tell stories of immigrant and migrant labor contributions to our state through public artworks, through the storytelling installations by descendants, and also through our activations and community programming.

- And it goes from place to place - To place.

It does.

And so we are the people who come to this space, and people take so many different things away from what they experience here, right?

This is their monument.

So to go back to a monument that holds power and presence, right?

Well, the AIMS holds power and presence.

Sure does.

And you travel to get there and you look up and it's ferroic as if a great king was, Egyptian king was buried there, right?

But this comes to the people, it changes, it listens, right?

And so we travel this to the communities that it does hold power and presence on this landscape, but I believe it holds collective power.

- That sense of shared impact carries through to the art of high iron, both inside and outside of the boxcar.

- One thing that I've appreciated most about the artist team was this sort of vision that they created at the start of the project where we all wanted our individual artist voices to sort of show up in the project, but wanted those voices to lend to something more collective, something more unified in telling the story.

- Let's just say boxcars have been discovered as a sort of a blank canvas, so to speak, for a certain kind of art for a long, long time.

I don't know if the G word graffiti is a dirty word anymore or not.

There certainly are tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of examples of where artists, and I'm happy to use that word, have applied their work to railroad cars and it's been left alone.

And now you speaking as an artist, I think would agree, it's pretty awesome when we look at someone and realize what's been done.

And I think maybe equally safe to say more and more people are at least realizing that.

- Certainly.

There's a relationship between public artwork and street artwork or graffiti.

This artist in particular right behind me, Leland Bryan, would consider himself a street artist and he's very skilled with the paint.

So yeah, I think there's definitely a dynamic or a relationship between say Leland's artwork, especially the train car and public artwork.

Leland was one of those artists that we'd come to know through our network of artists and creatives.

So we reached out to Leland individually, kind of talked to him about the project, mentioned that we had at the time what was a blank wall here and said, "We'd love to have a mural of yours if you'd like to work with us."

From there, the conversation moves towards what would you like your mural, what kind of concept would you like to work with?

And we liked the direction that Leland wanted to take.

And from there it's scheduling when can you be in Laramie or Cheyenne, wherever the train car's going to be.

When can you be there to install the artwork?

- So what's the medium here?

It's paint.

Yeah.

How is it applied, for example?

- So Leland works with a number of different mediums, but this one in particular is spray paint.

- Spray paint.

- Yeah.

- So he's a magician with a rattle can.

- Absolutely.

Yeah, that's a great word for it.

Yeah.

- And how long did it take him to, to use your word, to install this in the way that we see it now?

- Between rainstorms, I think he probably had a full day's work over the course of maybe two days.

So he's pretty quick.

- I don't mind saying I'm astounded to hear that.

Yeah.

I would have thought you said, "Well, in six short weeks it was getting pretty close."

But he comes in and gets it done.

- Oh yeah.

- I'm impressive.

- Yeah.

- It really is.

Now, there's no way you were going to have some art on every exterior side.

The ones maybe a winding kind of a waterway, something like that.

What's the origin, the history of that one?

- Yeah.

So the artwork that's featured on the front of the train car is by a Laramie based artist, Amanda Pittman.

And the inspiration for her mural relates to water generally.

So building the railroad, the tracks had to follow natural resources, which were needed for construction.

And of course the rivers going across Wyoming were used for getting the ties down from the forest and the tie hack camps to the railroad.

So - And - You had to cross the rivers too when you're in construction.

Absolutely.

Some of the most incredible engineering feats ever pulled off were with the Transcontinental Railroad.

- And it also kind of rhymes with what might look like a steam trail coming out of one of those early engines.

On the opposite side of the train car is a couple of different artworks.

Along the bottom is sort of the tail end of an artist's mural by the name of Ernie Leonardaki.

But then right over the top of that, I have what I would call an assemblage titled Remember and Respond.

It uses an old 1906 Joseph Stimson photograph from the Wyoming State Archives.

And I refashioned it to sort of mimic the look and feel of a stereograph card, only about a 10th of the size that it's seen at high iron here.

I'm going to - Interrupt just for a moment.

Yeah.

When you say you fashion it, this is your work.

- Yeah.

So I'm the other artist on that other, on the far end of the train car, I'm the second artist there.

- The other wide side has what?

- The mural by Ernie Leonardaki.

She splits her time between Greece and New York.

She's a really well known, successful public artist and her approach to making work involves borrowing different patterns and fabrics from communities where she's working and then fashioning those fabrics to mimic the look of the landscapes.

So the rock formation that's in that mural there might remind some viewers of the Reynolds complex up near Vidavu.

- Our descendant collaborators are enthusiastic because they get to see ordinary people, their ancestors, their communities celebrated and revered in a public space.

One of our previous descendants in Laramie, Rubal Vigil, he spoke at our opening and he said, "You know that picture of the Golden Spike?

Well, who's in that picture?"

- There's several pictures of that day with different groups of people.

- So let's think about the one that we can envision, right?

- Stanford and maybe, I don't know if Ames was in one of those - Or not.

Sure, but the managers, the money people, right?

Yeah.

And so Rubal gestured to that photo that is itself kind of a monument, right?

We can think about that and see it in our mind, right?

That helps.

That's a mechanism of memory, right?

- That is remembered.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

And Rubal said, "We all know that photo.

Well, now we get our monument, right?

There's not a single black, brown, or indigenous worker or immigrant worker in that picture.

This is our monument now."

- In the piece on the front of the car, remember and respond, I used an old Joseph Stimson photo from 1906 and it's a photo of a Japanese steel crew about 20 miles south of Laramie re-situating the tracks.

And I wanted to use that photo because I thought it was an important image that tells us that people came from all over the world to work in Wyoming and build the railroad.

Growing up in Wyoming, I only remember being taught that there were Irish and Chinese immigrants who built it.

And so I though, here's a group that isn't included in the narrative and it's a beautiful photo.

Those Stimson photos in the state archives are awesome.

So I was glad to get to work with that image.

I wanted to fashion it in the look of that stereograph card because around the time that the railroad, railroad was getting built, we also had these advances happening in photography.

So the stereograph card played a role to sort of communicate that advancement in technology.

And then the other piece that I want to tell you about that's in that artwork is along the tracks, you'll see that there's some fabric sort of collaged on top of the tracks.

That comes from a quilt that belongs to one of our descendant storytellers, Lena Newlin.

She's a fourth generation Wyomingite.

Her family came to Wyoming from Japan, helped to build the railroad, worked in the mines, helped make the state what it is today.

- When I first became aware of this project, I think I, like a lot of people assumed for some reason that you would be, it would be pulled as on the rail as part of a train.

You told me, we're not going to get into too much detail, but you told me that was certainly your idea as well at the beginning.

You thought about it.

Yeah.

Turned out this not to be practical.

It wasn't going to be possible.

- Sure.

Right.

We originally were like, again, sort of going back to that idea of the circus coming through town.

We're like, yeah, we'll get, have it on the rail line, right?

And it comes through.

- Easier said than done.

- Easier said than done, right?

This is not also easy to move this.

No.

But it's, you know, I think what's so fun is when you get a group of people together that are artists, right, who have this ability to think about what's possible is then you start from a place and then you can see as you go through sort of the logistics of it, it's like what is possible and how then can we make it possible too.

- Everything starts with what's possible.

- Yes.

- Even the best idea.

- Right.

- You've got to go there first.

- What we also came to find out is it needed to be pretty specific in terms of also size.

This is a 1950s boxcar, which is a shorter boxcar than a modern day boxcar.

- Things you learn.

- Yeah.

So a modern day boxcar is between like 53 and 63 feet.

This is 42.

- Which helps us immensely when we do have to move it.

So that's, that's one thing.

This one also had no wheels, which honestly, some of this is serendipitous because we had never also owned a train, right?

And this not having wheels means it weighs less.

Sure.

It sits lower, which again, contributes to how we're actually able to move this through the state.

If it had wheels, we'd be in a different scenario, right?

It maybe wouldn't be able to move the way that it moves now.

Not - Just transporting it, but setting it up when you got to a new place too.

Right, right.

This place you can just boom.

Yeah.

It's, I mean, I made that sound a lot simpler than I know it is.

Yeah.

But yeah, simpler than it would have been.

Yeah.

On top of everything else you're doing in this artist creative way, there's a lot of logistics involved in moving a box car from town to town.

A good part of that falls to you, right?

- Right.

Yeah.

So what's really exciting about being an arts administrator and particularly one that works in public space is you often are solving problems that you didn't even know existed, right?

Until you're doing the work.

And I always say, I've been in public art for a really long time and no art project in public space is ever the same.

There's always something new that you have to encounter because you're never in the same space.

So you're adapting to the space that you're in for sure, but then you're also having to figure out all of the kind of little things that go along with getting something to a space, having it be there.

So sometimes you make a few mistakes.

We bought a trailer because we though we could put it on a trailer and it could stay, right, and be pulled.

We learned a lot about what, what equipment we actually needed, right?

Yeah.

What we actually need is an incredibly low trailer.

So, and we've had people tell us it's a, it's a unique load, right?

- Yeah.

It's, it's - Truck, trucking term.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I've talked to a lot of people in the, the, you know, the trucking logistics industry, the crane, so rigging.

We've developed really great partners.

And again, a beautiful part of this project is how wide our circle, our team gets when we do this work.

And when we unloaded this yesterday, it was this incredible moment of here's, there's so many people working on this.

This is a project about labor and the amount of labor that goes in to making sure that this can be in a space is incredible.

So there's so many humans that we get to work with who are the best at what they do, right?

- They aren't art people.

- Yeah.

- They are their people.

- Yeah.

You know, we've moved it now three times and it's worked every time, right?

Because they know what they're doing.

We're, we're hiring the experts.

And, and again, bringing them in to be partners with us as well.

We've used the same crane company every time out of Cheyenne.

They're amazing.

They now know, right?

They understand what this is.

So I think that's really important.

- And in this small way, they become art people at least for those couple of hours, - Don't they?

- Yes.

You found enthusiasm, I take it, from people who have connections to what you're trying to do once they realize there is this opportunity.

How do you find them?

- When we first started this project, right, of, okay, I'm going to find some folks that have ancestral ties to the railroad, to that labor and to that labor ecosystem.

And I had descendants say, well, that won't be hard.

You could swing a cat and hit somebody whose family worked for the railroad.

So right there, this monument, right, this space is representative of so many people, right?

And so then how do I find them, right?

So in each community, I work with three descendants.

I use a methodology, it's called snowballing, right?

So who should I talk to?

I start with people I know.

Who's got a story they're proud of?

Who has been wanting to talk about their ancestors?

Who maybe just walked that track doing hard labor for decades and wants to reflect on that, right?

So I start with somebody I know, right?

And then we move outward.

Who should I talk to?

Well, I'll go talk to them.

There's a lot of lunches, a lot of coffee, a lot of going out for pie.

And part of this process is those stories belong to the descendants.

I work with them every step of the way of what they want to share, who they want to share, what they want to present.

And I'm not the researcher.

They're the researchers.

And so yes, I'm in PhD school as I call it, right?

But the framework I work in in this research is our community members are the knowledge makers here.

They're going out and they're doing their own research of their family, going through archives, doing mapping, doing sound recording, right?

These methods that they're the researchers.

And then I have the pleasure of taking their research and helping them design their installations to tell these - Stories.

We did a Wyoming Chronicle show in Laramie with someone you know, Dr.

Nancy Small.

Oh - Yes.

- And she's initiated what at that time was a novel thing for the University of Wyoming.

The PhD in what she would have called the humanities field, not the STEM science field based on a word you've used again and again here today.

Stories and storytelling.

Sure.

The PhD element of it, as she said, and as you're obviously talking about, involves a research component.

- Totally.

- And that research, humanities-based research, not test tube microscope research, help the university get its R1, tier one research status among all the greater universities of the nation.

Yeah.

You're part of that.

- So I'm part of the inaugural cohort.

Right.

Right?

Of a PhD.

It's housed in the English department.

Yeah.

And it's in public humanities.

What's really important, what this does is it expands in communities, right?

People's ideas of what's possible.

So I would love for folks to engage with this and say, "You know what?

Let's do a project like this in my community.

You know what?

We're going to listen to our, you know, our neighbors and we're going to record some histories with them and we're going to do a public art project."

So this moves through and it holds the work and it does the work and it inspires others, right?

And we're breaking that idea that a monument should be grandiose and to an individual, right?

And you have to travel to it.

No, right?

We can create monuments in our own communities.