Susan Moldenhauer exhibit captures intimate live music moments in Laramie

Susan Moldenhauer’s black-and-white portraits of musicians in Laramie bars and theaters will go on view Sunday at SOK Gallery, capturing a live-music scene that nearly disappeared during the pandemic and is building back again.

The exhibit, titled NOCTURNE, pulls 14 framed images from about 15 years of live-music photography. The photographs trace both Moldenhauer’s growth behind the camera and the evolution of southeast Wyoming’s music scene, with scenes from the Mid-Winter Meltdown in Medicine Bow, the Gryphon Theatre in Laramie, the Buckhorn Bar and Parlor, the Cowboy Bar Saloon and Dance Hall, and the Ruffed Up Duck Saloon.

Moldenhauer said she looks for the moments when musicians are not focused on the audience, especially when they step away from the microphone and are fully absorbed in the music. Those are the frames that feel most honest to her, and they are also the hardest to catch in the small, dark rooms that define much of local live music. She prefers intimate indoor venues because they put her close to the performers, but she said the low light and clutter can make the work difficult, sometimes requiring her to watch a musician for two or three songs before she can anticipate the right movement.

That instinct for preserving fleeting moments took on new urgency in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and, in Moldenhauer’s words, the local scene was “just gone.” She said the music community has since come back and is “really blossoming,” a recovery that gives the exhibition added weight in a city where live performance remains part of the social fabric. Laramie is promoted locally as Wyoming’s cultural capital, and the show fits a community that has long tied identity to galleries, public art, small venues and the people who move between them.

Moldenhauer’s background reaches well beyond this exhibit. She earned arts degrees from Penn State University and Northern Illinois University, worked as a curator at the University of Wyoming Art Museum, co-founded the Laramie Artist’s Project, the Laramie Mural Project and the Laramie Public Art Coalition, and received Wyoming Visual Arts Fellowship Awards in 2016 and 2023.

NOCTURNE treats local music as more than entertainment. It records the bars, stages and festival grounds where Albany County’s musicians and audiences have kept gathering, and it preserves the quiet, vulnerable seconds that disappear as soon as the song ends.