Art Museum: Where the Heck is Yucca Fountain?

 

Explore a new immersive exhibition at the UW Art Museum.

 

By Michelle Sunset, Director of Curatorial Affairs

 

“Where the Heck is Yucca Fountain?” — part of the University of Wyoming Art Museum’s exhibition “Sympoiesis: Co-Creating Sense of Place” — invites visitors to step into an immersive installation exploring an atomic-age desertscape, personal obsession and the power of place.

 

In the 1950s, at the edge of the Yucca Flat atomic blast zone was a thriving community diner and soda fountain: Yucca Fountain. Yucca Fountain was a desert watering hole for ranchers, tribal members, scientists, conspiracy theorists and passersby out in the desert of the American Southwest. In 1958, it was destroyed in a suspicious fire and never reopened. Most would have forgotten it entirely — if not for Bert Tuttle.

 

A devoted patron and researcher, Tuttle salvaged remnants of Yucca Fountain, including an original neon sign and the original soda fountain. He stored them in his workshop and his camper-trailer, or “mobile research lab.” He spent years investigating what he believed to be a government miscalculation — that Yucca Fountain was not simply destroyed by fire but by fallout from nuclear testing gone wrong. In 2018, artists Helen Popinchalk and Andrew Bablo recovered Tuttle’s trailer, brimming with ephemera, sketches and speculative documents, and brought his story to life through this interactive and collaborative art installation situated outside the Centennial Complex.

 

Inside the UW Art Museum, visitors can explore Tuttle’s desert workshop. The gallery is a fully immersive experience, transporting visitors to a remote desert at nighttime through audio, lighting and an authentic old building. The workshop is filled with artifacts and archives from the lost diner interpreted through the artists’ lens. The careful inspector is rewarded with atomic-age nostalgia in every drawer and corner of the space.

 

The UW Art Museum has also partnered with Sunshine Coffee in the Laramie Plains Civic Center to install a satellite pop-up exhibition. Sunshine patrons can enjoy their coffee and snacks in a Yucca Fountain diner booth while taking in Tuttle’s story through a cabinet-of-curiosities-style display of curated ephemera.

 

“Where the Heck is Yucca Fountain?” is more than an art installation. It’s a co-created myth that blurs the lines between memory and invention, archive and dreamscape. It reminds us that places — especially the ones we remember most fondly — are made through relationships, stories and shared meaning. “Where the Heck is Yucca Fountain?” is on view at the UW Art Museum through May 23, 2026. Visit the museum to explore the many dimensions of collaborative placemaking.