POWELL, WYOMING – The 2025 Northwest College Juried Student Art & Design Exhibit opens in the Northwest Gallery on Tuesday, April 22, with an official opening reception scheduled for Thursday, April 24 from 5-7 p.m. The event is free and open to the public, and the artwork will remain on display through NWC’s commencement on May 10. The gallery is located inside the front entrance of the Cabre Building.

The artworks on display are created by 2024-25 NWC art and graphic design students working in a variety of 2D and 3D media. A small selection from the exhibition will be presented with Purchase Awards funded by the Northwest College Board of Trustees. The selected artworks will then become part of the college's permanent collection.

This year’s juror is Tawni Shuler, a 2002 graduate of Northwest College with an A.A. with an emphasis in painting, and 2005 graduate of the University of Montana where she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts with an emphasis in painting and drawing. She later earned a Master of Fine Arts with an emphasis in painting and drawing from Arizona State University in 2008.

Shuler has been featured in numerous group and solo exhibitions across the country, from the Deep South to New England, the Midwest, and nearly every western state in the U.S. Among those locations are Plaza Diane in Powell in August of 2014, and the Yellowstone Art Museum in Billings in 2016 and ’19. Her public art has also been featured multiple times in Taos, New Mexico. Shuler was nominated for the Joan Mitchell Fellowship Award in 2023.

A Wyoming native, Shuler has served as the Red Lodge Clay Center Programming Director, an Assistant Professor in Watermedia at Utah Valley University, and Instructor of Art at Sheridan College. She has held positions with the Arizona Natural History Association and Crystal Publishing as well.

Shuler currently serves as the Program Director for the Ucross Foundation in northeastern Wyoming. She specializes in large scale fable-based black and white drawings that express universal themes such as joy, heartbreak, jealousy, pride, and aggression. The works take shape as visual stories of animals in a variety of imaginary settings that serve as metaphors for the human experience.