In the Know

Tammy Christel has a finger on the pulse of Jackson Hole through her long-running art blog.

Now in its 15th year, Tammy Christel’s hit online space, Jackson Hole Art Blog, is continuing to track the art market in a Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Christel, who was a former tour guide around Jackson, says her guiding principle is exposing people to art.

“I’ve always been very comfortable with art, but when I was giving tours I would run across people who were standing outside a gallery looking in through the windows, and you could see they were debating with themselves whether to go in or not. And they usually didn’t go in,” Christel says. “The art world can be very intimidating, so my goal has been to expose people to art and show them that everyone is welcome in the galleries.”

Jackson Hole Art Blog can be viewed at www.jacksonholeartblog.com.

Before starting the blog, where she regularly writes about artists and gallery events, Christel was a newspaper columnist and then she worked for a brief period at the National Museum of Wildlife Art before she started giving tours of Jackson Hole in 1995. The blog came later, in 2005, as a response to a need she saw in the city.

Tammy Christel, the author of the Jackson Hole Art Blog.

Prior to her professional career, she was exposed to art through her grandparents and great grandparents, one of whom was Harris Whittemore, who was an early collector of Claude Monet. The Whittemore Collection included more than 30 paintings by Monet, 35 works from Edgar Degas, 75 works by Mary Cassatt and more than 600 works by James Abbott McNeill Whistler. The collection, although loaned out frequently, was largely a family secret that was not discussed publically. Christel remembers seeing Monet’s haystack paintings in her grandparents home. “There were 20 of us grandchildren running all around, so it was wise we didn’t know what they were,” she remembers. In recent decades the collection has been sold and written about. Christel says being exposed to art at an early age helped her overcome some of those intimidating factors.

Mary Roberson, America Shadows, mixed media on wood panel, 48 x 96”

Now she wants to share those lessons with visitors to Jackson Hole. “I really enjoy sharing my love of the arts with others. And the way social media is these days, it’s so easy to be connected to all the artists and galleries,” she says. “I try to post something frequently because people are out there exploring the art and the trends.”

To read Christel’s blog, visit www.jacksonholeartblog.com.