- There's really no such thing as an official Wyoming poster for the America 250 commemoration, but if there were, this would probably be it.

It was created by the State Historic Preservation Office as this year's entry in the annual Archeological Awareness Poster Contest nationwide.

I'm Steve Peck of Wyoming PBS.

This is Wyoming Chronicle.

It's Archeology Awareness Month in Wyoming, an annual September slate of public events, education initiatives, and examinations of shared cultural heritage, coinciding with similar September observances in all 50 US states.

There's also a nationwide contest tied to Archeology Awareness Week.

2026 marks the 30th anniversary of the National Archeology Celebration Poster Contest, sponsored by the Society for American Archeology.

It's a 50-state contest, but one state, Wyoming, has dominated.

A lot goes into producing these prize-winning posters, different people, different ideas, different execution, but the one constant at the top of the creative ladder is Gwendolyn Kristy.

This year, her new creation also serves as Wyoming's semi-official poster for America 250.

The poster contest also has a very practical sort of utilitarian purpose that's part of your charter, so to speak, with what your office, your agency has to do.

What is that?

- To educate the public about archeology and cultural heritage in Wyoming.

If people don't know about it, then why would they care about it?

And so this poster program endeavors to help people learn about archeology here.

- And there are lots of ways you might say we're educating the public, but this is a particularly good one for one thing.

I'll say that my wife was an elementary school teacher for years and she had got the poster and put it up on the wall and every year the next was done.

So 30 years later, it's an impressive thing to see.

It's fun to look at.

- I hung a lot of posters on my wall as a kid, so we hope kids are still doing that with these posters today.

- And it has some differences related to the funding of it, the look of it, how you went about it, what you were able to do this year that you weren't in other years, partly because it's one of these grants bestowed by the governor's office for Wyoming's participation in the America 250 observances.

We've done a handful of shows about that on Wyoming Chronicle.

I was really looking forward to doing this one when I saw the poster.

What does your role comprise anything from this to this and all in between?

What might you do for a poster from year to year?

- I'm the state coordinator - For - Wyoming Archeology Awareness Month.

So I coordinate the entire process of coming up with the idea for the poster all the way to the execution of getting it printed, distributed and entered into the contest.

So I don't necessarily create any of the artwork featured on the poster, but I do all the coordinating and fundraising.

- You've been the designer of it in some years, correct?

- Yes.

Yeah.

- In some years you haven't.

In some years you're assembling elements from outside and creating the look and because of you that the poster gets made.

You're an archeologist by training and profession and experience, not an artist, not a graphic artist.

- Correct.

- How did this particular type of project come to interest you?

- I had seen the posters all over the state while I was working as an archeologist for the Forest Service.

And so when the job opened, I wanted the job because I personally feel so connected to the posters and I wanted to be part of that.

The same goes for the archeology fair.

That's one of the reasons I wanted to apply for this job was to be in charge of the archeology - Fair.

Your job is what by definition here?

- I'm the chief of planning and historic context for the state historic preservation office.

- You're not the only one working on the posters?

- No.

We have a big team of people who make it happen.

Judy Wolf is my predecessor in this position and she ran the poster program for many years.

The vision that you see in 25 or more of our posters is Judy's vision.

She is the one who decided the posters should not just be educational but should also be art.

We should be making a poster that's worthy of framing and putting up in someone's house and that's sort of the guiding principle behind it and that all comes from Judy.

- You mentioned the format or the look and several of these that we'll see during the show have a particular format to them.

They're not identical, but they're, what would we say?

They're instantly recognizable.

The one we're seeing now, I'm not going to say it's more artistic than most, but it's more overtly a piece of art, I guess, than some of the others have been.

What are we looking at in this poster this year?

- So it is a real commissioned artwork featured on the poster this year.

And I was able to do that because I got a 250th grant to commission an artist.

So we went through the open call process through the Wyoming Arts Council and artists could apply to do the commission.

And the artist that was selected is whose art you're seeing on the poster is Robert Martinez of Riverton.

And so it is a photograph of the original artwork featured on the poster that Robert used some of my ideas to develop the - Artwork.

That's how commissioned art typically works.

I have an idea for something.

I'm not capable of doing it the way you could.

Could we work with you on it?

He agreed to do that.

When we met you at the archeological fair last year, he was there actually, and I think we got a little bit of video of his demonstration he was doing.

You said at that time you were already talking about this year's poster with him then.

What was going on?

- So we had already commissioned and entered into contract with Robert at that point and he actually brought me a proof of an idea to the archeology fair for me to look at.

And I did - Look at it.

You offered feedback as we - Said.

Yes, yes.

And we went through the sort of feedback process and further refined the idea after seeing that.

- What were some of the things you wanted it to show based on what you knew his artistic sensibilities were?

- Originally, I knew I wanted it to be on a historic map because Robert works using graphite on maps or ledgers, historic documents.

So I knew I wanted a map of Wyoming since we're commemorating the 250th anniversary of the country here in Wyoming.

So I definitely wanted it to be a map.

I knew I wanted elements of the relationship between Native Americans and the horse in 1776.

In Wyoming, in 1776, it had not yet been colonized.

And so I wanted to reflect that the accuracy of the time period.

I specifically wanted technological elements that a horse might be used for because that's often what's reflected in the archeological record is the remnants of technology.

- When people think of the word technology today because of this huge role that current technology plays for everybody, you might not understand what you're talking about.

What's technology in that painting?

- So I'm specifically talking about the contraption on the horse that's pulling some blankets.

It's a travois or travoy.

Prior to the use of horses, tribes would have used dogs to pull things on their travoy or travoise.

So that's the bit of technology that's showing.

- And it's every bit as technological as things are today in the context.

Someone though of that design and perfected it.

What else?

- I wanted a Plains Indian woman to be represented in the artwork because women are often underrepresented in the archeological record.

And I wanted to sort of draw attention to the role that women obviously have played in society throughout the millennia.

And then I wanted to tie it even more directly to archeology in Wyoming.

And so that's the petroglyphs that are represented in the background of the image.

In the upper left of the image is a petroglyph of a horse from Hot Springs County, and that image is particularly salient over the last couple years because the rock art was being damaged by cattle.

- What were they doing to it?

- Rubbing up against the formation that the art is on.

And an archeologist local to the area brought it to the attention of some archeological organizations in the state who helped fund a fence to protect the artwork so the cattle would stop rubbing on it.

It was important to me when I was thinking about what's going on in Wyoming in 1776.

At that point, tribes, Plains tribes had the horse for probably about 150 years.

And so what did that mean for them to have the horse again after nearly 10,000 years of the horse not being in North America?

And I didn't want the horse to only represent a beast of burden.

And that was important to Robert as well, that the horse represent a spiritual and emotional relationship with the human figure in the art as well.

- It's a painting, right?

- Yeah.

So it's the horse and the woman is graphite and then the color is airbrush.

So yes, paint.

- Graphite we're talking about is like a pencil essentially.

Pencil.

You mentioned that you'd received a grant through the governor's program that's funding so many interesting and very divergent types of projects related to America to 50 around Wyoming.

Do you mind telling us how much it was?

- I received a grant for $14,000.

- Some of the grants were, or many of them were, the maximum was 25,000.

Yeah.

Not everybody got that.

Here's an example of someone who didn't and some were less than that, just didn't need it.

What did that enable you to do with this year's poster that you might not have been able to do with last year or 10 years ago?

- So I was able to do two things differently because I got the grant.

I was able to do a call for artists and pay an artist an appropriate amount of money for original artwork on the poster.

And then it also allowed me to utilize my fundraising for the archeology fair instead of having to split fundraising on the poster.

So it paid for almost the entire production, the art and printing and distributing the posters.

- And you have to fundraise every time.

There's not a state budget for this or a departmental budget, anything like that.

It's what you can come up with.

- Yeah.

- Big part of your job, isn't it?

- Yeah.

So the first step in the process of the poster every year is getting money to do it.

And then I can start to think about ideas and what I want to explore.

But yeah, I don't have an appropriated budget to run the poster program or any archeology month activities.

So it's all fundraised.

- This was an original painting.

You're going to frame it and put it up in your office after this is done?

- I wish.

- What's going to happen to it?

- So we're going to have an event to close out archeology month, which is always in September.

We are going to have an auction and a public lecture in the new Capitol Auditorium on the evening of September 25th where we'll auction off the framed artwork to help fundraise for 2027's poster.

- We should note though that people who want the posters, not the original artwork in this case, but the posters can and do get them as their personal possessions.

I was astounded, I don't mind saying, we arrived here today and you mentioned how many of the posters typically are printed and given away free every year.

You tell me the number.

- So when Judy Wolf was in running the program, she was printing about 5,000, I believe, a year.

We have stepped back on that because of funding.

I print 2,000 posters and usually there's only 25 left and I keep 25.

- Some - Go to the state archive and just to have some - Forever.You've mentioned that the educational aspect for the public is a part of it and it's a good way to do it.

So you try hard on these and they've been very successful in the contest, which is nationwide, correct?

How have we done?

- So the contest has existed since 1996, and I think Wyoming has not received a top three award only six or seven times.

And I believe we've received first prize 13 times now.

13 - Times.

And you take nothing for granted, but there's now an expectation I'm sure within your office that we're going to do well in this.

There's motivation to continue to do well.

A decision that you made was to begin to change the standard format of the poster from the way that Judy Wolfe did it.

She tended to have an outer white frame on the paper and a strong central photographic image with a big headline under it and then some text under that.

It looks beautiful.

As an old newspaper page designer, always I thought whoever was doing it was doing a great job.

And the foil, gold foil primary headline there in some sort of ornamental kind of typeface, you're beginning to move away from some of that, but you're also want to be honoring the tradition of it as well.

What's your approach starting to be?

I - Want to slowly, and I think we see it with this 2026 poster, have the art consume more of the physical poster and sort of take away the border that was on it.

And that's not because I don't care for that style.

It's simply because I think many of us have 30 archeology month posters hanging up in our houses and given to friends and families and just to sort of freshen it up a little bit and try and see if a different approach to the graphic design is still successful.

So it's a little bit of an experiment to see if changing it up remains successful at the national level.

Judy was always able to come up with generally these sort of catchy titles for it with alliteration and a lot of local meaning, a lot of Wyoming meaning in them.

- Where does the art tend to come from?

The actual artistic ingredients that come together to make the poster?

- The majority of the posters over the last 30 or so years are photographs.

For a long time, the state had a state photographer, Richard Collier, and many of his photographs are featured on the posters.

The 2023 poster, the Aspen poster, the Amanda who had the job, she took that image.

With the needle poster, the little images I took, but the blown up image a professional photographer took.

- You said this particular portion here was not a lot easy to do.

- No, it was incredibly challenging.

The needle is just under two centimeters in length.

So - This is more like it here.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

But that's still - Bigger.That's still bigger than it actually was.

Than it - Really is.

Obviously the quarter, so it's smaller - Than a quarter.

That's the scale.

There we go.

- Yeah.

And so to get it at that resolution, at a high enough resolution to be blown up to that size was very challenging for.

I tried to do it on my own first.

Didn't work.

I had to recruit a professional to help me with that photograph and he ended up building a gigantic shadow box for it and photographing it inside of the shadow box.

It took a lot.

And the concept for this poster actually came from Todd Servel, a professor in the department who was the principal investigator at the site it was found at.

And he really wanted a stark blown up image of the needle to sort of emphasize how rare it is.

- How about this one called headline People and Plants?

What was some of the story behind it?

- So that was Amanda who had the job for about a year, I think, between Judy and myself.

It was Amanda's concept.

She wanted to focus on not just stones and bones.

She wanted to focus on the ethnobotanical record, so how plants were being utilized and what we know about plants from the archeological record.

Some of the items on that poster are artifacts and some are replicas of things that are possibly artifacts and all have some sort of relationship with plants, whether they're made from plants or they're used to process plants.

- And then there's the layout, the positioning of each item.

And I'm assuming that must come from considerable trial and error.

- Yeah.

And I don't know how many photographs of the assemblage.

We have a lot, maybe a thousand.

Yeah.

So the University of Wyoming's photographer took the pictures and it was really tough to pick which one had the best lighting and the least shadowing and sort of exemplified what we were trying to talk about, what the specialist who prepared the brochure was trying to talk about.

So yeah, there was a lot of photographs to choose from and figuring out which one is best for the poster was a challenge.

- In the end, who had to decide?

- Me.

We have the associated educational brochure that goes along with the poster that provides the archeological context for what we're trying to say with the poster.

And those are prepared by a specialist.

This year's brochure is prepared by Dr.

William Taylor, who is a professor at CU Boulder, who was first author on a seminal paper coming out about the Blacks four horse, which is an archeological horse from Wyoming that his research and his colleagues' research dates it to about 1640.

So almost as soon as Europeans were in the new world, horses somehow got to Wyoming.

- You had to rule out some very, very good stuff, I presume.

- Yeah, it was a real challenge.

So we did a juried panel.

We had representatives from the Arts Council, from the Office of the State Archeologist, and then from the SHPO.

And we had to review all of the submissions.

We used a rubric and had to keep track of everything we thought to make sure it was a fair process.

And there were some incredible submissions.

I mean, it was almost heartbreaking to have to choose one.

And I wish I always had $14,000 to commission an artwork every year because I mean, some of the submissions were incredibly impactful and extraordinary art was being submitted, extraordinary talent.

Well, - It's good to know at least that that happened.

Is there Wyoming people, - Wyoming artists?

Some were Wyoming artists.

So we opened up the call to Western states.

It included definitely Montana, Colorado, Wyoming, I believe Montana, Utah, Idaho.

A handful of Western states were allowed to participate.

- Well, I don't think anyone could argue with the one that you chose, but I appreciate you talking about how hard it was after all these panelists, these experts, the archeology experts, the art experts, the historians, whoever they were, still you had to decide.

- Yeah.

- Sometimes it's easier than others, I presume.

- Yeah.

When we get to.

So typically I don't have money to commission work.

I have a couple hundred dollars I could pay a photographer maybe, maybe.

And so it's either an archeologist taking the photograph, previously it was a staff person, and that makes it easier to pick because typically everything is in one style.

The submissions for the commission, that was so varied.

There was just a great breadth of styles of art and that's part of what made it difficult.

But typically it's a little easier to pick.

- Didn't you say as well, I think that sometimes it's been just sort of a hobbyist photographer who's said, "Hey, what do you think of this?"

And sometimes that works beautifully as well.

- Yes.

Yeah.

So if anyone ever takes a picture of an archeological site and they find that picture compelling, I'd love to look at it and think about putting it on a poster.

- I made a point related to what you just said when we interviewed you before to tell us what you mean by archeology and an archeology site.

What qualifies and what doesn't?

- So it's a little complicated.

In the United States, typically, if something is 50 years or older, you would document it and determine whether or not it's important.

It could be a building, in which case then it's not archeology, it's a structure.

Typically, we think of archeology as something being buried or there is a small surface manifestation, for example, a stone circle, a teepee ring.

You could see that on the surface.

There might be more cultural material buried, so something modified by humans.

- By humans, that's the key point that separates archeology from some of the other ologies.

- Indeed.

- This is the record of past human life.

- Yes.

- Well, I want a copy of this.

Where do I buy it and what does it cost?

- So the posters are free.

You can pick one up here in Laramie in the anthropology building on campus.

Our sister office in Cheyenne in the Barrett building, they also have them.

We have them out front of the State Museum.

We do a temporary museum exhibit each year in coordination with the state museum that utilizes the theme of the poster.

So piles of posters are in front of that exhibit that are just free and available for taking.

Most of the state parks that have a visitor center around the state will have a package of posters that they can distribute to the public.

The Forest Service offices around the state will have them as well.

And if you can't find a place near you, I can mail you a poster.

So if people reach out to me, I can mail them the poster, but then we have to ask folks to cover the cost of mailing, and that's 18 bucks.

- Yeah, they can be had.

The idea being you want these posters to be seen, you've worked hard on them, you think they're good, they are good, representative of some important work, and you want it to be out there.

So I hope next year you get $14,000 to spend.

But working with what you have each year, clearly you've done beautifully with it very successfully.

And you mentioned as well that it's this big collaborative process.

You wouldn't want anyone to think that it's you sitting alone in the room waiting for lightning to strike.

Sometimes that's happened.

You have ideas, of course, but other people do too.

You want them all, you like them all, you use them, and that's what makes it better.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

It's more fun to work with the team than to work alone.

So the idea for this poster was mine, but the last two posters, those were not my ideas.

Someone gave me the idea and then I worked to implement it.

And so I'm always looking for ideas if anyone ever wants to work with me on this.

- We happen to be here at the end of May coming into Memorial Day weekend, 2026.

The poster's been out for a couple of months at least, right?.

You already know what the next poster's going to be?

- I do.

- You do?

- Yeah.

Yeah.

We'll be doing the - I'll - Ask you to tell me, but - I won't.

Yeah.

But you know what's going to happen.

- Yeah.

I tried to keep a couple ideas in the roster and then see what ends up panning out.

- Waiting for inspiration to strike while on a deadline sometimes doesn't work so well.

No.

So you're staying ahead of it.

You're an old pro at this now is what you're saying.

You know what works best.

Wish you well with it.

Thanks for doing it.

Thanks for keeping on doing it.

I'll be watching for that awards announcement here before much longer.

Gwendolyn Kristy again, thanks for participating in Wyoming Chronicle.

- Thanks, Steve.