The porch at the Murie Ranch has hosted some of the most consequential conversations in American conservation history. On an evening in mid-October, it will host a different kind of gathering: a watercolorist talking about light.
On October 15, 2026, at 6 p.m., Teton Science Schools will welcome Sarah Yeoman to the Murie Ranch for a free "Front Porch Out & About" event. Yeoman, an award-winning watercolorist and signature member of the American Watercolor Society, has been in residence at the ranch, and the evening is a chance to see what she has made there. She will discuss her creative process, show the pieces she has produced during her stay, and talk about seeing the ranch through an artist's eyes. Her work will be for sale, with a portion of each sale supporting the Murie Ranch.
The setting is not incidental. The Murie Ranch sits inside Grand Teton National Park, just west of Moose, Wyoming, in a meadow of sage and sticky geranium. It is also, in a real sense, where the modern American wilderness movement was written into law.
The story begins with two married couples. Olaus and Margaret "Mardy" Murie and Adolph and Louise Murie bought the old STS Dude Ranch in 1945. Olaus was a wildlife biologist who published studies about Jackson Hole wildlife; Adolph was a biologist too, and his studies of wolves and coyotes were among the first to argue against the National Park Service's predator eradication programs, showing that predators play essential ecological roles. The two men's research helped move wildlife science toward managing whole ecosystems rather than single species.
Once the Muries moved in, they took down the ranch's fences so wildlife could pass freely. For Olaus, who directed the Wilderness Society, the ranch became the heart of American wilderness — a base camp for conservation leaders. The property served as the setting for the writing of the Wilderness Act, passed in 1964, which defined wilderness as a place "untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor and does not remain." Mardy outlived Olaus, who died in 1963, by four decades; she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998 and lived at the ranch until her death in 2003.
What is less widely known is how much art ran through all of it. Olaus filled notebooks with sketches and watercolors of the animals he studied and the specimens he collected, and many of those drawings and paintings are preserved by Teton Science Schools. "Everybody knows him as wildlife biologist and conservationist," John Gallagher, program manager of the Murie Ranch, once told the Jackson Hole News & Guide, "but maybe don't appreciate him as much as they should for his artistic abilities and how his art helped his science." The ranch has since made art part of its programming, including a Murie Ranch Art Festival that featured Yeoman as artist-in-residence, painting in Olaus's own studio while visitors watched and asked questions.
Yeoman brings a long and varied career to that studio. She spent an early chapter as a singer-songwriter before discovering watercolor, and has now been painting in the medium for roughly 35 years. Her work is known for the strength of its storytelling and for her ability to catch the fleeting qualities of light and the way light shapes form — a skill that suits a valley famous for the way its mountains change color by the hour. Her musical past, she has said, flows through her process in the melodious, lyrical quality of her paintings.
Her resume reaches well beyond the studio. She is a signature member of the American Watercolor Society, showed with the North American Watercolor Association at the Colombian watercolor tricentennial in South America, and was a faculty member at the 2018 Plein Air Convention in Santa Fe. She collaborated with the Harlem-based Elisa Monte Dance company, which choreographed an original dance based on her painting "I'll Fly Away," and her painting "Flight" was featured in the Elie Saab Paris Haute Couture runway catalog. She has taught plein air workshops in Tuscany for years, along with classes across the United States and Canada and a decade of teaching from her Delaware studio. Her subjects range from a Crows and Ravens series to Brandywine Valley landscapes to the Adirondacks of upstate New York, where her family has kept a hundred-year-old off-the-grid cabin. She is, by her own account, most at home in the woods and on the water.
That sensibility is likely to resonate at the Murie Ranch, where the connection between close observation of nature and the impulse to protect it has always been the point. The Muries' own work was rooted in the same habit of looking carefully — at an elk herd, at a wolf's tracks, at the way light fell across a meadow — and then turning what they saw into arguments for keeping such places intact.
The October event is part of the Front Porch Out & About series, an extension of the ranch's long-running Front Porch Concerts & Conversations. Where the original series gathered people on Mardy's porch in summer, Out & About carries the same spirit across the valley and across the seasons — fall, winter, and spring — with music, storytelling, and conversation in settings as varied as the weather. The series is built on the Murie legacy of conservation, curiosity, and place.
For anyone who has driven past the ranch's unpaved driveway just southwest of the park headquarters and wondered what happens behind those cabins, the evening offers an unusually open door. It is free, it is inside a national park, and it is a chance to hear an artist explain how she translates a place like the Tetons onto paper — in the same rooms where the Wilderness Act took shape.