Many artists say their work is not meant to be seen, but experienced. For two months in 2001, Powell, Wyoming, residents experienced the overwhelming smell of art.
For two months, the quiet serenity of Powell was shredded by the vision of an avant-garde artist who turned an abandoned Wyoming home into one that would make the Muensters blush with its eccentricity.
Cosimo Cavallaro is an Italian Canadian artist who’s built a career out of “sculpting with perishables.”
“I don’t see it as a career,” he told Cowboy State Daily about his art. “To me, it’s been my life.”
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While he continues making more traditional art pieces, “sculpting with perishables” has become Cavallaro’s trademark.
He’s covered beds with sliced ham and chairs with candy, but Cavallaro’s most common perishable medium is cheese.
It started modestly enough in 1998 when he covered a chair with cheese for an art exhibition in New York City. In 1999, he covered an entire room at The Washington Jefferson Hotel in NYC with Swiss cheese.
But Cavallaro had a more ambitious project in mind. He decided to “trust the voice in (his) heart” and pursue his grandest artistic cheese-centric vision. And he knew where he needed to go to accomplish it.
“I was looking to go deeper into the process of covering things using cheese, and to follow a voice that played in my mind, which kept saying Wyoming,” he said. “Then it came to me that there would be a house there that I could cover in cheese.”
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The result put tiny Powell in the international spotlight and the house Cavallaro covered — inside and out — with more than 6 tons of cheese. Government-surplus pepper jack, because the type of cheese matters.
The Big Cheese
To cover a house with cheese, Cavallaro first had to find a house. Having already selected Wyoming for his pungent piece, he started making calls around the Cowboy State looking for a home sweet home that would soon become a home smelly home.
“I started to look for contractors that had or knew of a house that was going to be demolished,” he said. “l then called the mayor of Powell, and I told him what I wanted to do with the house in question.”
That mayor was James Milburn, who served two terms from 1997 to 2005.
Cavallaro said he braced himself for rejection after explaining his artistic vision to Mayor Milburn.
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“There was a pause,” he said. “I thought he had hung up the phone, which always happened, just before I heard a ‘yes.’ The timing could not have been better. He was retiring, and he couldn’t think of a better way to exit his office of mayor.”
Milburn called Sharon Earhart, director of the Powell Chamber of Commerce at the time, to help Cavallaro realize his vision. Earhart eagerly accepted the cheesy challenge.
“When I was hired, my board asked me to plan activities, events and things that would bring people to town,” Earhart said. “When that one happened at our doorstep, it was like, ‘Well, this sounds like a good idea.’ So, we went with it.”
With the mayor and the Powell City Council’s support, Cavallaro found a soon-to-be-demolished house on North Street that was perfect. The small, single-story house would soon be covered with nearly 13,000 pounds of cheese.
The medium for Cavallaro’s creation was government-surplus pepper jack — and a lot of it.
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Then in October 2001, he set to work covering the Powell home.
Along with all the cheese, he said he needed some other equipment to make it happen, like “a large container to melt the cheese and pumps to pump it out.”
He credits much of his success to the late Jeff McCoy, a Powell resident and unorthodox ally who helped manage the logistics of Cavallaro’s vision.
“Without the help of Jeff, it could not have happened,” he said. “Jeff had to get his church community to accept it, and his son, Treg, helped convince his father to help me — and God. I was getting closer to God and didn’t know it.”
Pungent Powell
Once the home was smothered in cheese — outside and in — people were invited to step inside and experience it for themselves. The finished effect was a modest American home, with furniture and some personal effects, with a layer of foamy cheese on every inch.
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“He had covered the furniture in different parts of the house,” Earhart said. “The inside and the outside. It was just an interesting item to check out.”
Park County Commissioner Scott Mangold took a tour with his family. He recalled a distinctly Western touch Cavallaro included inside the home.
“I was one of many people that went over there to check out cheese house because it had drawn a lot of attention,” he said. “There was a pair of cowboy boots that were covered in cheese that was inside.”
However, the most enduring memory most people have of Cavallaro’s cheese house is the smell. Mangold remembers that more than anything else.
“Once you got inside, the smell was so bad that you had to get out of there,” he said. “I took my young kids there, and they fought to get out of there quickly. That’s one of my fond memories of the cheese house: a very short trip to go inside it.”
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Earhart didn’t think the smell was that bad, but concedes it was probably best that it happened in the cool autumn weather of October. The stink of summer wouldn’t have been very gouda.
“It wasn’t really bad because it was cooler weather,” she said. “Some guy wrote to me and said it was the worst smell he’d ever smelled. I guess it’s everybody to their own likes and dislikes.”
An abandoned house in Powell, Wyoming, was covered in nearly 13,000 pounds of pepper jack cheese by artist Cosimo Cavallero in October 2001. (Courtesy Cosimo Cavallaro)
An abandoned house in Powell, Wyoming, was covered in nearly 13,000 pounds of pepper jack cheese by artist Cosimo Cavallero in October 2001. (Courtesy Cosimo Cavallaro)
How It Began
Cavallaro worked as a traditional painter and director for television commercials before he had a life-changing experience on the streets of New York City. He said he was “born again” as an artist after an old man entered his painting studio and offered a hands-on critique of his work.
“The man, with a full head of white hair, looks at the painting and then at me and says, ‘What are you doing?’ ‘Painting,’ I answer. He clamps his hands around my neck and squeezes, choking me, and says, ‘This is what it’s supposed to do.’ He lets go and exits my studio. I understood perfectly what he meant. I scraped the painting,” Cavallaro said.
Heeding the old man’s artistic advice, Cavallaro covered his naked body with white and black paint and rolled across a canvas. Once he “stopped myself from making it look good,” he found a new perspective for his career.
Powell Gets Cheesy
When there’s a cheese-covered house in your community, you capitalize on it. Earhart promptly did just that.
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“We incorporated a Cheese Fest at the same time we do Oktoberfest,” she said. “We had a parade where we crowned the King and Queen of Cheese Fest.”
In its mission to collect and chronicle the strange and unusual, Ripley’s Believe It Or Not visited Powell and included Cheese Fest in its feature on the cheese house. It was one of several national media outlets that came to Powell to cover the cheese-covered house.
Earhart’s cheesy memories are pungently positive, but not everyone shares those fond feelings for the quirky creation. Many asked, “O queso, what’s the point?”
“There were some people that thought it was kind of foolish,” she said. “Some people didn’t understand the significance of it. And I possibly didn’t either. But we got a little bit of national attention, and so I found that it turned out OK.”
Mangold recalls some community controversy once Powell residents learned more about Cavallaro’s artistic career.
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“It was very controversial artwork that he had put together,” he said. “People were just not happy with some of the visuals they got when they saw some of his other artwork.”
The One And Only
The Powell Cheese House remains a one-of-a-kind piece of art. But it only stood briefly.
“It took a lifetime,” Cavallaro said, adding that it only stood for a short time.
The house selected for Cavallaro’s use was already slated for demolition before it was covered in pepper jack, and the locals weren’t sorry to see it go when it was demolished after a few weeks.
“I think the people who lived in that area were glad when they tore the house down,” Mangold said. “It was the smell that caught your attention, not as much the artwork.”
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There is nothing in Powell today referencing the brief existence of the cheese house for visitors. That’s a natural consequence of sculpting with perishables. Eventually, they perish.
Earhart has no regrets. She still remembers the moment fondly and always with a cheesy chuckle.
“At Mayor Milburn’s funeral, they asked us if we had any comments we wanted to make,” she said. “I stood up and said how I enjoyed working on (the cheese house) with him. We decided to take a chance on something that turned out pretty good.”
If there was ever a goal in mind by allowing the art project, Earhart thinks they accomplished it. For those weeks, Powell became a national destination for curious cheeseheads.
“People would stop in at the chamber office and ask us to point them in the direction of the cheese house,” she said. “One lady said she liked to take odd vacations. And when you bring people to town, they spend money in your community.”
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It remains the cheesiest thing in the careers of everyone associated with it. And if that smell of success has stuck around more than 20 years later, nobody’s complaining about it. Earhart certainly isn’t.
“We went with it,” she said. “And we’re glad we did.”
As for Cavallaro, he continues to make a permanent mark on the artistic community with his perishable sculptures. The cheese house was as much an experience for him as it was for Powell, and he doesn’t trouble himself over how well-aged its story has become.
“It’s the only cheese house in the world,” he said. “As for its legacy, only time will tell.”
From the perspective of those who had to briefly live with it, the Powell Cheese House is aging much better as local folklore than it did for those pungent weeks in 2001.
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Andrew Rossi can be reached at: ARossi@CowboyStateDaily.com
As a plaintiff in the 2022 lawsuit that kicked off years of legal sparring over Wyoming abortion rights, Dr. Giovannina Anthony had waited a long time for Tuesday’s Supreme Court decision on the state’s abortion bans.
“It has been a long road,” she said. One with ups and downs, drawbacks and delays. And even though the high court ruled against the state’s abortion bans, she’s not under the illusion that the fight for abortion access is over.
“But at least today, we can claim a victory and say, it was really worth it,” said Anthony, a Jackson obstetrician. “It was worth it to go four years and keep it up and keep raising money and keep the awareness going. I’m really proud of our team. I’m really proud of what we accomplished.”
In reading the Supreme Court’s decision siding with plaintiffs, Anthony said, “Clearly, this is a court that holds a lot of respect for our constitution.”
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That’s because much of the decision hinged on constitutional language.
Anthony and other plaintiffs argued that abortion is enshrined in the “right of health care access” in Article 1, Section 38 of the Wyoming Constitution. The clause states, “Each competent adult shall have the right to make his or her own health care decisions.”
The state’s attorneys, meanwhile, countered that abortion isn’t health care.
But in deciding what that language means in this case, “all five Wyoming Supreme Court justices agreed that the decision whether to terminate or continue a pregnancy is a woman’s own health care decision protected by Article 1, Section 38,” the court’s summary stated.
As abortion rights activists in Wyoming and beyond celebrated the decision, the anti-abortion camp decried it and called for legislative action.
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“This ruling is profoundly unfortunate and sadly serves to only prolong the ultimate proper resolution of this issue,” Gov. Mark Gordon said in a statement. While the ruling may settle a legal question for the time being, Gordon said, “it does not settle the moral one, nor does it reflect where many Wyoming citizens stand, including myself.”
Anti-abortion activists in the silent March for Life in Cheyenne in January 2020. (Nadav Soroker, Wyoming Tribune Eagle/Wyoming News Exchange)
Gordon asked the Attorney General’s office to file a petition for rehearing the decision, which it will file within 15 days.
The voters of Wyoming should settle the matter once and for all, Gordon argued. “A constitutional amendment taken to the people of Wyoming would trump any and all judicial decisions.”
He called on the Legislature to pass such an amendment during the upcoming session and deliver it to his desk. A constitutional amendment requires a two-thirds vote in both the House and Senate to appear on the ballot in the following general election.
Gordon may get his wish during the Legislature’s 2026 budget session, which convenes Feb. 9.
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State lawmakers are already preparing a bill to modify the Wyoming Constitution and clear a path for another attempted abortion ban. Speaker of the House Chip Neiman, a Republican from Hulett, said that he’s been workshopping language with Torrington Republican Sen. Cheri Steinmetz.
“I’ve got to run it by a lot of other people,” Neiman said.
Reps. Rachel Rodriguez-Williams and Chip Neiman listen during a 2023 hearing on their request to defend Wyoming’s abortion ban. (Brad Boner/Jackson Hole News&Guide/Pool)
Ideally, he added, a single constitutional amendment would be considered, although the legislative strategy is still up for discussion.
“We’ve got a little over a month before we have to be in session,” Neiman said. “That’ll give us time to kind of see which is maybe the best plan of action.”
A constitutional amendment would have to navigate the legislative process in a 20-day session geared toward passing Wyoming’s budget. Then, in the 2026 general election, more than half of Wyoming voters who cast a ballot would have to agree to the constitutional change.
Neiman struck an optimistic tone about an amendment’s prospects of passing the first hurdle during the session in Cheyenne.
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“I can’t speak for the other chamber,” he said, “but in my chamber I’ve got a lot of phone calls and a lot of texts from a lot of my legislators who are just beside themselves at what happened.”
Senate President Bo Biteman did not return a phone call before this story published.
Victorious
Chelsea’s Fund, an organization that helps pay for abortion services, was another of the plaintiffs that challenged Wyoming’s abortion bans. Executive Director Janean Forsyth said Tuesday’s decision affirms what her organization has long known: “that abortion is essential health care, and Wyoming women have a constitutional right and the freedom to make their own health care decisions, and that should be without government interference.”
Forsyth was flooded with messages and calls Tuesday, she said, especially from the community of reproductive rights organizations.
“I think that [the news is] a beacon of hope for, not only Wyoming communities and families, but also nationwide,” she said.
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Christine Lichtenfels was Chelsea’s Fund executive director when the original suit was filed and throughout much of the legal battle. Relief wasn’t quite the word to describe how she felt Tuesday, she said.
“In reading the decision, there is just a sense that, ‘Oh, there is reason in the world,” she said. “It makes me think that, yes, Wyoming is the Equality State. We can say that now without cringing.”
(Disclosure: Lichtenfels is currently working with WyoFile on an unrelated legal matter.)
The Wellspring Health Access clinic in Casper is pictured in December 2022, and shows signs of May 2022 arson, including boarded up windows. (Dustin Bleizeffer/WyoFile)
Wyoming’s only abortion clinic, Wellspring Health Access in Casper, was also a plaintiff in the lawsuit. Knowing the decision would directly impact the facility’s fate, Clinic President Julie Burkhart was nervous when she opened it. Reading quickly dispelled her fears, she said, as it dawned on her that the justices sided with the plaintiffs’ legal team.
“We are delighted,” she told WyoFile.
Many people questioned her 2021 decision to open an abortion clinic in such a conservative state, she said. The court decision solidifies an intuition she felt back then about Wyoming residents’ sense of what’s fair and right.
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Burkhart and colleagues expect future challenges to arise, however.
“While we celebrate today’s ruling, we know that anti-abortion politicians will continue their push to restrict access to health care in Wyoming with new, harmful proposals in the state legislature,” Burkart said in a statement. “Patients should not have to live in fear that their health care decisions will be suddenly upended at the whim of a judge or lawmaker.”
Across the state in Jackson, Dr. Anthony anticipates the Wyoming Freedom Caucus will attempt to pass laws that impose targeted restrictions against abortion providers — such as forcing patients to hear a fetal heartbeat or wait a certain time period before the procedure.
“Unfortunately, the fight’s not over,” Anthony said, “but this is a great moment for us.”
Heartache
Abortion opponents expressed sadness Tuesday and vehemently disagreed with the court’s opinion.
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State Rep. Rachel Rodriguez Williams was lead sponsor of one of the abortion bans. The Cody Republican and chair of the Wyoming Freedom Caucus did not respond to a request for comment, but posted about the decision on X.
“My heart aches for Wyoming today,” Rodriguez Williams posted. “Thanks to the decision of four unelected, unchecked attorneys, it’s open season in Wyoming for innocent, preborn babies. Make no mistake: courts can get things wrong, and they sure did get this wrong. I’ll never stop fighting to protect life.”
Anti-abortion billboards can be seen along some Wyoming highways. (Tennessee Watson/WyoFile)
Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray also protested the decision, which he called “outrageously wrong” and “a leftwing activist decision totally out of touch with the Wyoming Constitution.”
Natrona County anti-abortion activist Bob Brechtel, a former Wyoming House member, also expressed frustration with the courts, criticizing the nearly two-year-long wait for a decision and saying he was “ashamed” of the outcome from the high court.
In 2011, Brechtel co-sponsored the bill authorizing a later-successful constitutional amendment ballot measure that now protects individuals’ rights to make their own health care decisions. Born out of opposition to the Obama-era Affordable Care Act, what became Article 1, Section 38 caused some lawmakers to worry about potential unintended consequences.
Fifteen years later, one unintended consequence came to fruition. Reached Tuesday, Brechtel confirmed that he did not intend to protect women’s right to have an abortion in Wyoming.
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“There was nothing in the legislation about killing innocent human beings,” he said. “This whole thing has been completely regenerated into something that it was never intended to be.”
It is Week 4 in the 2026 Wyoming High School boys’ swimming and diving season. It features several medium-sized competitions. After a dual in Douglas on Tuesday, Friday and Saturday are packed with meets. Jackson hosts its two-day invitational with four teams heading to Teton County. There are three-team events in Casper, Gillette, and Sheridan on Friday, plus two five-team meets at Cody and Rock Springs.
WYOPREPS BOYS SWIMMING AND DIVING WEEK 4 SCHEDULE 2026
Saturday also has swim invites at Evanston, Powell, and Sheridan. The schedule for Week 4 of the prep boys’ swimming and diving season in the Cowboy State is below. The schedule is subject to change.
RAWLINS AT DOUGLAS – dual
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CASPER TRI at NCHS – Cheyenne East, Kelly Walsh, Natrona County.
CHEYENNE, Wyo. — A Wyoming man died Dec. 22 in a motorcycle-versus-truck collision in Laramie County.
According to a recently released incident report from the Wyoming Highway Patrol, 24-year-old Wyoming man Kyle Pandullo was headed west on a motorcycle as a van approached from the opposite direction. The WHP reports that the van attempted to turn left into a business entrance, forcing Pandullo to brake in an effort to avoid a crash. His bike tipped over onto its side, sliding into the van.
The WHP lists driver inattention as a possible contributing factor in the wreck.
This story contains preliminary information as provided by the Wyoming Highway Patrol. The agency advises that information may be subject to change.
