Most Gallery Titles at the UW Art Museum This Fall Tell You How the Art Got to Laramie

"Presented as part of the museum's collection framework." The University of Wyoming used that phrase in its May 2026 announcement of the Hung Liu installation, and it explains most of the building this fall. Six of the shows at the Centennial Complex on Willett Drive are drawn from the museum's own collection, and each one is labeled by how its work arrived.

The galleries say so in their names. Walk from the lobby to the back galleries and you pass shows titled Founding Collection, Gifted Collection, Donor Collection, Exhibition Collection, Global Collection and Artist & Museum. Each prefix names a different way a painting, print or photograph ends up in Laramie for good. Read together, they explain how a university museum in a town of this size came to hold Warhol, Remington and Moran.

Six Ways In, Spelled Out on the Walls

Here is what each prefix means, based on the museum's own exhibition pages:

• Founding Collection: WPA Art. These are Depression-era prints, drawings and paintings made under the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project. They came into the UW Art Department's teaching collection in 1968, four years before the Art Museum was founded in 1972.
• Gifted Collection: Brett Weston Archive. Twenty-six photographs chosen from a recent gift of fifty Brett Weston prints.
• Donor Collection: E.G. Meyer Family Collection. Western American art that a longtime UW professor and his family pledged in 2012.
• Exhibition Collection: Contemporary Works. Pieces acquired after artists showed at the museum, some given by the artists themselves and others bought through donor-established funds.
• Global Collection: Masks of the World. Drawn from more than seventy-five masks donated over the past fifty years.
• Artist & Museum: Hung Liu. Work tied to one painter's long relationship with this specific museum.

The Warhol shows fit the same pattern even though their titles don't say so. They are the only part of the building with a deadline coming up.

The Warhols Come Down December 23

Andy Warhol: 99 Photos fills the James Boyle Gallery through December 23, 2026. According to the exhibition page, it brings together 99 photographs from the 1970s and 1980s, a mix of candid shots and staged portraits, from the collections of UW and Colorado State University's Gregory Allicar Museum of Art. The exhibition also marks major gifts from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts in 2008 and 2014, which are how the photographs reached both campuses.

So UW's share of the fall's headline show came into its collection through a gift, the same way the Brett Weston prints did, only with a more famous name attached.

The companion piece is Andy Warhol: 10 Clips in the Wyoming Gallery Theater. It also closes December 23. In 1981 Warhol went to Fort Collins for the opening of an exhibition of his prints, and a video team recorded the visit. The ten short segments include a roundtable with collectors and CSU administrators, an interview at the opening, and Warhol's reactions to the agriculture department's bull semen collection. The museum's description says the footage shows him uninterested in talking about his own art and enthusiastic about new gadgets and high-end watches. Lynn Boland, PhD, curated both Warhol shows, and the video is courtesy of Colorado State University Libraries.

Plan on seeing the photographs and the clips on the same trip. The photographs show the people Warhol pointed his camera at, and the clips show Warhol himself on a trip to a western college town about an hour south of Laramie.

The Route That Runs Through Laramie Itself

The Exhibition Collection and the Hung Liu installation tell the most local story in the building. In both cases the art stayed because an artist came here first.

Hung Liu, a Chinese-born American painter who lived from 1948 to 2021, had two exhibitions at the UW Art Museum. The first was The Vanishing: Re-presenting the Chinese in the American West in 2006, and the second was Hung Liu: American Exodus in 2017. She came to Laramie several times to give lectures and workshops and to talk with students, faculty and community members.

For the 2006 show she worked from vintage photographs in UW's American Heritage Center showing Chinese railroad workers in Wyoming. One of those photographs became China Mary II, which places Indian Paintbrush and the Western Meadowlark alongside Chinese imagery. After the 2017 exhibition, built on Dorothea Lange's Dust Bowl photographs, the museum acquired Not in Kansas and Cotton Hoer, 1936. The installation sits in the lobby, so it is the first thing you see when you walk in. The Patricia R. Guthrie Special Exhibitions Gallery Endowment funds it.

Exhibition Collection: Contemporary Works follows the same path across more than twenty-five years of shows. The museum names three examples:

1. Wanxin Zhang's exhibition Warriors, Pit #5, Laramie 2006, which has the town's name in its title.
2. Acquisitions from Jon Lodge's Interface in 2018, which came to the collection as gifts.
3. A major painting acquired after Michiko Itatani's Infinite Hope/High-Point Contact in 2023, given in honor of the museum staff.

The museum's page sets this kind of collecting apart from collections built by "a single donor, geographic region, or historical period." Put another way, many of the works now in the collection began as shows that Laramie audiences came to see.

The Newest Show Is a Professor's Western Art Collection

The E.G. Meyer Family Collection opened October 6 and runs through December 23, 2027. It is the newest show in the building and the one with the longest run.

Professor Emeritus E.G. "Gerry" Meyer spent more than fifty years at UW as a scientist, educator, administrator and researcher, and built a Western art collection on the side. The collection began with his grandmother, Anna Ilfeld, an early patron of the Taos artists of New Mexico. In 2012 Meyer and his family pledged a significant portion of it to the museum, including works by Frederic Remington, Charles M. Russell, Joseph Henry Sharp, Thomas Moran and Nicolai Fechin.

The donor shows round out the building:

• The Brett Weston photographs span several decades of the photographer's career. Only about half of the fifty-print gift is hanging.
• The masks in the Rotunda come from a part of the collection the museum calls "seldom-exhibited." Masks are one sub-collection within its global holdings, which also include paintings, textiles and sculpture.
• The WPA works come from a Federal Art Project that, according to the museum, employed thousands of artists nationwide between 1935 and 1943. Those works were teaching UW art students before the museum existed.

What Closes When

The shows don't all rotate out together. Each one runs on its own schedule. Here is the order they close in, based on the museum's exhibition pages:

If you can only make one trip before the holidays, go before December 23 so you see both Warhol shows. If you can make two, a second visit after January 16 would show the WPA gallery after it changes over, while most of the rest is still hanging.

Getting There and Getting In

The museum is in the Centennial Complex at 2111 East Willett Drive, and admission is free for everyone. UW's May announcement gives the hours as Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. The museum's visit page also lists Thursdays until 7 p.m. and says the museum is closed Sundays and Mondays. Check that page before planning a weekday evening visit.

Parking in the lot next to the museum is free. Sign in at the Visitor Services desk when you arrive, because the museum says that is how you avoid a parking ticket. The full schedule is on the exhibitions page.

It's easy to forget how much is on view right here in Laramie, all of it free, and it's a big part of why I love living and working in this town. If out-of-town guests are coming in before the Warhols come down, or you're thinking about where you'd like to put down roots near campus, Kelly Cooksey is happy to talk it over. Let's Connect.