University of Wyoming's Neltje Center for Excellence in Creativity and the Arts (Sheridan, WY)

Learn more about the Neltje Center for Excellence in Creativity & the Arts @ University of Wyoming.

Learn more about the "Listening with Water" convening (April 10-13 2025).

More coming ~ Stay Attuned!

Listening with Water also interrelates with site-based, acoustic water-harvests around the country as contemplative exercises in listening. Sourced from varied replenishing sites for Dear Body of Water, each water sampler interlinks nine recorded voices of water (1 minute each) into a 9-minute audio stream to invite contemplative listening, sounding and re-sounding. Even while sitting still at a distance, you can travel across time and place: in this case to Lower Piney Creek flowing through the Neltje Center (sourced July 2024 from the creek, rain, thunderstorm, hail, faucet, and more). Remember that the human body is mostly water, both a body of water and an acoustic chamber, resonating with your pulsing heartbeat and humming nervous system, in or out of sync with the surrounding world. Close listening enhances aural literacy and sensory grounding, attuning and retuning. As a number, nine suggests gestation, so a question: What grows inside your imagination through listening? As you attune, what do you hear within this shifting interstitial space?

From the earlier announcement:

Above: Maps from Wyoming State Water Plan reports here and here. Map below from WyoHistory.

Acknowledgments

There are many people to thank throughout the Sheridan and Laramie communities, among others throughout Wyoming from Casper to Cody, Jackson to Billings, and more. Special thanks to the University of Wyoming's Neltje Center for Excellence in Creativity and the Arts Director Beth Venn, and Assistant Director Kathryn Stevens, Studio Assistant Lucas Watkins, and our invited Knowledge Leaders who generously engaged our group in their respective relationships and stewardship of water and waterways. Learn more about each of the Knowledge Leaders here. Our participants were each knowledge leaders in their own right, as we deepened understandings of water rights and rights of and for water. This convening was almost two years in groundtruthing and planning, and check back with us "upstream/downstream" to see what grows into the flow!

Land Acknowledgment (University of Wyoming): We collectively acknowledge that the University of Wyoming occupies the ancestral and traditional lands of the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow, and Shoshone Indigenous peoples along with other Native tribes who call the Great Basin and Rocky Mountain region home. We recognize, support, and advocate alongside Indigenous individuals and communities who live here now, and with those forcibly removed from their Homelands. -ASUW Senate Bill #2699 (More here.)

WATERSHED

Lower Piney Creek—Clear Creek—Powder River—Yellowstone River—Missouri River—Mississippi River—Gulf of Mexico—Atlantic Ocean

Little and Big Goose Creeks—Tongue River—Yellowstone River—Missouri River—Mississippi River—Gulf of Mexico—Atlantic Ocean