"Beautiful art made slowly,” reads the tagline that Katy Ann Fox uses to describe both her artistic process as well as the vision for Foxtrot Fine Art, her new gallery in Driggs, Idaho.

The art is certainly beautiful, and if not slowly, it is absolutely made carefully and with a significant sprinkling of love. The gallery represents many things for its founder, but overall she feels it is a “happy little light that can now be visited whenever.”

Katy opened the gallery after a myriad of artistic ventures landed her on the Idaho side of the Tetons. The gallery is an embodiment of many artists’ dreams: tall ceilings, vast white walls to cover in art, and an undeniable infusion of “energy, calmness, time, masterful skill and beloved relationships” from its one and only employee: Katy herself.

Katy’s appearance embodies the vision of “artist.” With self-patched denim sporting happy splotches of paint that polka dot her from nearly the neck down, her wide smile is catching as she explains, “I just love people.” Love, care and positivity are emotions that Katy attempts to infuse into all of her adventures: artistic and otherwise. She even opened her gallery on Valentine’s Day, she says, because, “Yeah, man! I’m doing this for love!”

“I wanted to create an intellectual space as well as an artistic one,” Katy explains. “It’s just fun to stir things up and have conversations that are smart and vibrant and not just about how fast you can go over there or how tight your abs are.” Katy prioritizes having speakers in her gallery in addition to the regular art shows that she curates, because she feels like the art that she hangs in the gallery transcends the physical and visual. “We can talk about the weather and we can talk about sports, but it turns out that there’s a great depth to this community and so many ridiculously talented and interesting people.”

This community of interesting and artistic folks is what first drew Katy to the area and is ultimately what has also convinced her to stay. Born in Grangeville, Idaho, she received her Master’s in Fine Arts in San Francisco and attended a plein-air festival in Driggs that eventually drew her out of the city and into the warm, rural embrace of Jackson. She always maintained the dream of “making it” as an artist, and in 2022 she was able to leap further into this dream and open her gallery to support other creatives along with herself.

“I love curating art, and I love hanging shows to make stories and then watching people try to figure out what the artist was thinking and why it’s hung that way,” she says. “It’s amazing because art galleries aren’t predictable. It isn’t a grocery store that you go into for 10 minutes and you know what you’re going to get and then you leave. You come in and you have a little extra time and you have no idea what you’re going to say or feel when you go in there.”

Katy remarks that her gallery is very literally a physical manifestation of her art community here in Teton County. “The space I’ve created ... I’m really hoping that it’s this bright, open, beautiful space, and I try to make the art that I hang really colorful and well done and people come in and they feel good and I can just see that when they walk in,” she explains, putting a hand over her heart and giving herself a small hug. “That’s just the biggest treat of all.”