New York City-born Neltje Doubleday Kings moved to Wyoming in the mid 1960s. She set up her artist studio in Banner where she produced many abstract expressionist paintings, a style with sweeping brush strokes popularized by artists like Jackson Pollock.
Whitney Western Art Museum Assistant Curator Ashlea Espinal said the museum acquired her painting “My Heart Tumbles” in 2022.
“Even though you can’t necessarily see an exact landscape or a mountain form or something like that, when you look at it, it feels like Wyoming. It feels like you’re standing on the prairie during a windy day,” Espinal said
Neltje has previously talked about how the Wyoming scenery served as a constant source of inspiration.
“I came to Wyoming and I found home, and I am a Wyoming artist,” Neltje said. “Yes, my art is sophisticated. It is not wildlife. It is not a landscape that can be read as a landscape in the terms of photographic vision. But my passion is Wyoming. I will live nowhere else. I come down on the plain and my heart goes, ‘Ah, I’m home.’ All these works are drawn from nature and my love of nature, and that’s nature with a capital N. It’s the wide open spaces. It’s the air we breathe.”
Neltje’s painting “My Heart Tumbles” is currently on display at the Whitney Western Art Museum in Cody. The museum also has two of her prints.
