WE NEVER FORGET// The Assasination of Frank Little

They said Frank Little was half white, half Indian, and all IWW. They said the Copper Trust murdered him — six masked men forcing their way into his boarding house on North Wyoming Street in the dead of night, dragging him behind a car to the railroad trestle at the edge of town and stringing him up. They pinned a note to his chest: first and last warning. No one was ever charged.

They said his funeral procession was followed by thousands — pretty extraordinary for a man who had only been in town thirteen days. He had come straight from the Speculator Mine disaster, where 168 miners died in a fire the previous June, to stand on street corners and ask the passing copper miners to imagine — and build — a new world.

To make this work was to sit with that violence — and with the century of silence that followed. The piece belongs to a tradition of labor mourning: the vigil, the procession, the objects kept by grieving hands. It is also a descendant work — made in the belief that artists carry an obligation to the suppressed histories that live in the landscape beneath our feet, in the infrastructure we move through without thinking, in the names that never made it into textbooks. Frank Little's name is one of them. This work refuses to let it stay there.

This installation has been exhibted in Missoula at Your Uncle Bob’s Gallery (2025) and in Laramie at the Gorgon Gallery (2026).