Email
PrintPainting the Legacy of Pierre’s Hole
Philbin de Got and the courthouse mural
(page 1 of 2)
Philbin de Got’s Teton County Courthouse mural celebrates art as storytelling.
Visitors enter the courthouse on the second floor. Whether you take the stairs or ride the glass elevator, you are drawn immediately into Philbin’s painted chronicling of Teton Valley’s natural history and human story. Descending to the first floor, you’ll inspect art-filled panels saluting Native Americans and mountain men who rendezvoused in Pierre’s Hole early in the nineteenth century. Additional panels honor settlers whose values and hard work forged the valley’s character.
Visitors accessing the third floor enter Philbin’s painted biosphere with their heads tilted back. Three rising mural panels take them from the forest’s understory of columbine and Indian paintbrush, to Teton Creek’s headwaters and upward to the summit of the Grand Teton. Visually they bag the peak not unlike they would outdoors, facing east on the courthouse steps.
Confining history inside a small area is monumental, but beneath vignettes representing Teton County, Idaho’s life story is Philbin de Got’s (“de GO”) personal history—the life experiences enabling her to understand and interpret the community’s soul. A progressive historian, she reveals herself as an artist with the wisdom of a tribal elder, simultaneously looking forward and back.
Drawn here because two of their four sons had moved to the area—Dave to Jackson, and Jim Jr. and family to Victor—Philbin and her husband, Jim Schulz, built lives in Idaho after twenty-five fully engaged years in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. They’ve been year-round residents for seven years now.
Philbin hopes when others look at her mural, “… they see how much I love living here,” she says. “I did this because I love valley people.”
Viewing love dynamically, Philbin and Jim give back to places they love. Both are chaplains at Teton Valley Hospital. Jim works with local Boy Scouts, and Philbin partnered with Kathleen Martin to found the “Great Women of Teton Valley” event series. She also painted Barrels & Bins’ ceiling border, with scenes ranging from early downtown Driggs cutter races to a Hispanic wedding.
