Shelley Hull was chosen to be the Canyon Country Artist-in-Residence (AIR) in the fall of 2023. The BLM in Utah hosts this residency. She visited Bears Ears National Monument for two weeks in late September and early October of 2023. Situated east of Natural Bridges National Monument, north of Monument Valley, and south of Moab, the 1.3 million-acre Monument is isolated and largely underdeveloped. She explored, sketched, painted, and took pictures while spending the residence in the park, cut off from most of the outside world.

Two buttes known as the Bears Ears rise two thousand feet above the mesa. Sometimes they appear as distant little promontories, and other times they loom big. Every tribe that has lived on this land makes reference to them as the Bears Ears and hold them sacred. Quite a few of the paintings show the ears at different times of the day, from different vantage points within the monument.