Imagine you are an artist standing in a room, surrounded by your life’s work. More than four decades of effort are displayed carefully in ornate frames and mounted on pedestals, gathered in an institution that’s lauded the best artists in your field. Each piece represents hours...
Charles M. Russell was not the only artist who illustrated his letters to friends, but he had a special gift. Writing, as he readily admitted, was work for him, but he found his own inimitable voice by thinking of his letters as “paper talk;” not...
Smooth bands of soft light, in the language of landscape, whisper calmly against the unembellished contrasts of a dark subtext. Richard Pence’s watercolors speak to the inevitability of nature, as well as to the medium itself, exploring the boundaries of color and form. With stark...
When Mark McKenna was in second grade, his teacher assigned the class to make scarecrows out of construction paper. McKenna remembers the teacher complimenting the roundness of his scarecrow’s head. “Looking back on that experience, it really made me feel good, and it kindled my...
Dana Boussard’s work balances the personal and political, as evidenced by her subject matter, which broaches topics of women’s issues and the environment through a deeply intimate lens; and her method of working, which ranges from solitary studio time to large public artworks installed in...
Western Art Week in Great Falls has become something of an artistic haven for Montanans. Each March, the town of 58,000 is converted into a miniature Santa Fe, New Mexico, with hotel rooms serving as open studios, prominent Western artists exhibiting work at the town’s...
Try this one on for size: One measure of an artist can be found in how well he or she teaches us to see, how well their particular vision informs our own. Van Gogh’s starry skies. Modigliani’s nudes. Hokusai’s wave. Just try to look at...
Halfway between the tiny, Central Montana agricultural towns of Hobson and Windham, along a lonely stretch of rural highway, sits the Oxen Yoke Inn, which isn’t an inn at all. More aptly, it’s a watering hole, an oasis in the prairie. It is, in fact,...
When the old Royce Applegate Ranch, southeast of the small community of Square Butte in Central Montana, changed hands in November 2013, the new owner had his ranch manager build some new barbed wire fence. At the entrance to the ranch, a laser-cut sheet metal...
In 1907 an Irish boy traveled alone from Europe to Canada by sea, then from Canada to Montana by train. Exactly why he made the journey is a mystery. But he wore a big brass immigration I.D. badge suspended from a chain around his neck...