Green River Publications

Art projects ︎︎︎ Green River Publications

From 2012 to 2016, I visted the small rural desert town of Green River, Utah once a year to create socially engaged projects. Three publications emerged from this repeat visiting—The Green River Newspaper, The Green River Magazine, and Interstate Works—each made in collaboration with town residents.

Collaborator: Sarah Baugh
Part of Epicenter’s Frontier Fellowship

The Green River Newspaper is made up of contributions from middle- and high-school students, generated during workshops we taught in Language Arts classes. We also ran an afterschool program. Epicenter staff contributed reporting, we visited the town’s archives in the basement of the history museum every day, and we convinced the mayor to contribute.

We translated parts of the publication into Spanish. We delivered a paper to every house in town. We took a group of students to Salt Lake City to visit the papers printed at the Salt Lake Tribune, talk to a journalist. The release party was the most successful art event the Epicenter had ever had.

This project was funded by the City of Green River.

The Green River Magazine embraced long-form content and expanded to include out-of-town contributors from Epicenter’s artist network, in addition to local contributors. We reported on the annual Melon Days, and the monthly meeting of the Planning and Zoning Committee.
We included an entire Power Point presentation about a proposed nearby nuclear power plant. We featured a visiting artist’s years-long photography project. We interviewed the town elders: an historian, a librarian, and a melon family matriarch.

This project was funded by a Sappi: Ideas that Matter grant.

Interstate Works is a meditation on the cross-county Interstate 80, which runs right through town. It features an interview with a female truck driver, youth meditations on country music, and portraits of people with their cars taken at the local gas station as part of the arts festival High Desert Test Sites. With newsprint guts and a glossy cover, it was designed to evoke those free tractors-for-sale classified publications you pick up at the truckstop restaurant.

This project was funded by an ArtPlace America grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

This work was foundational to my art practice. Green River began my interest in the complexity of visiting and stirred a dedication to creating layered “deep maps” (William Least Heat-Moon) as a way to understand the complexity of place.

Hello! I’m Nicole Lavelle and I’m an artist, designer, and writer working on social, cultural, and community projects.

Green River Publications