NEWS & ANNOUNCEMENTS

The YAM welcomes our newest team members!

Marianne Hagstrom, Facility Rental Coordinator, joined the YAM’s Special Events team at the end of 2022. Marianne has worked extensively in special events and wedding coordination. In addition to her work at the YAM, she runs MarianneMade, a hand-crafted event styling company in downtown Billings.

Kimberly Gaitonde, Curatorial Assistant, is the newest member of the Curatorial team. Kimberly previously interned in the YAM Curatorial Department and has worked at the Georgia Museum of Art.

Elaine McClelland, Temporary Finance Director, is currently leading the museum’s Finance and Administration work. Elaine’s expertise comes from more than 50 years in corportate financial work, including the Chief Financial Officer role at Wellington Technologies.

Legacy Gifts to the YAM

Long-term estate planning is an important part of financial planning. Charitable bequests and planned gifts empower individuals and families to support the organizations they value most. A clear and detailed estate plan can also minimize tax and administrative burdens on loved ones. Planned gifts to the YAM allow the museum to continue the important work of arts programming and education in our community.

To learn more about making a bequest or planned gift to the Yellowstone Art Museum, please contact Precious McKenzie, at 406.256.6804 x225 or email development@artmuseum.org. Precious can share valuable information and help you create a plan that secures your legacy. As always, thank you for your support!

Through Her Lens: The Photographs of Barbara Van Cleve

April

13 – June 25, 2023 // Montana Gallery

Sponsors: Sibanye Stillwater, Barb Skelton in honor of Horses Spirits Healing, Inc., Northern Plains Resource Council, Lornel Baker, Mary & David Dobrowsky, Linda Snider, Margit Thorndal, Beverly Ross, Nancy Curriden, John Kennedy, and Anonymous

This exhibition presents fifty black and white photographs selected from the portfolios of Barbara Van Cleve (b. 1935).

Since her first solo photography exhibition in Santa Fe at age 50, Barbara Van Cleve has turned her camera lens to contemporary ranch life–a life she’s lived and loved since she was young. Crediting her father for noticing the beauty surrounding her on the Lazy K Bar Ranch on the eastern slopes of the Crazy Mountains, she recalls one frigid winter morning, helping him move cattle on an empty stomach, “I complained that I was hungry, and he said, ‘Red, I need you to help me here, so you might as well sit up and learn to see the beauty in it.’“

Van Cleve has found beauty in ranching life’s dynamic and quiet moments. A portion of her photographs have unexpected angles and embrace accidental and unstructured framing due to her camera work from horseback. And alongside images of branding, moving cattle, and roping are conversations among ranch hands, grazing horses against the backdrop of the Crazy Mountains, and night scenes, such as a canvas pole tent illuminated by a Coleman lantern under a starlit sky. The authenticity of her work also extends to championing tough, hard-working ranch women, a subject to which she devoted an entire portfolio and exhibition in the 1990s entitled “Hard Twist: Western Ranch Women.”

As a practicing female photographer in the genre, Van Cleve is preceded by Evelyn Cameron (1868-1928), who ranched with her husband near Terry, Montana. Cameron also turned her camera to neighbors, friends, ranch life, and the rugged women who rode horses, worked cattle, and ran households. Yet the posed, more static nature of Cameron’s glass plate photography contrasts with Van Cleve’s silver gelatin prints and digital photographs, where seasonal cycles of work and movement predominate.

Barbara Van Cleve earned an MA in English literature at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois; she has been a Dean of Women at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois; and she taught English Literature, and later photography, for over 25 winters at DePaul University, Loyola University, and Mundelein College, all in the Chicago area. At the same time, photography continued to be an avocation. In her free time, she worked for Rand McNally as a textbook photographer and established her own stock photography agency. The long summers were usually spent on the family ranch in Montana.

The YAM is honored to exhibit Through Her Lens: The Photographs of Barbara Van Cleve on the heels of her 2022 Montana Governors Art Award and the forthcoming documentary, “Barbara Van Cleve’s American West,” by award-winning Director and Cinematographer Cynthia Matty-Huber.

Women in Ranching panel discussion with Barbara Van Cleve, Caroline Nelson, Karen Heyneman, and Monica McDowell Thursday, May 4 // 5 PM reception followed by panel discussion at 6 PM.

Artist Talk with Barbara Van Cleve | Thursday, June 1 // 5 PM reception followed by artist talk at 6 PM.

Christine Joy and Sara Mast: Passage

May 18 – July 16, 2023 // Charles M. Bair Family Gallery & Northwest Projects Gallery

Sponsors: Beverly Ross, Jon Lodge, Aunt Dofe’s Gallery

Passage is an exhibition exploring the mystery of our connection to the Earth. By transforming natural and recycled materials in their work, Christine Joy and Sara Mast introduce forms and paintings that invite the viewer into a contemplative and exploratory space.

Working exclusively with willow, Christine Joy cycles her work with the seasons—cutting and gathering her material in autumn, then sorting, bundling, and storing. Throughout the year, she pulls from her cache, and working branch by branch, she bends and constructs twisted and tied forms as if borne by wind or water. Her largest piece in the exhibition, God’s Ear (2022), expresses a concern for listening to the earth, echoed by Sara Mast, who writes, “We must engage in a more enigmatic and unmediated conversation with the natural world around us. And keep our ear to the ground.”

Sara Mast, a descendant of miners from Cornwall, England, resides on the site of Storrs, Montana, outside of Bozeman, an early Anaconda Company mining town. Today she reclaims her connection with the earth by incorporating PEM (plasma-enhanced melter) glass, a byproduct of plasma gasification, an advanced waste management technology that transforms any trash into inert, non-toxic glass and clean fuels. The result is an obsidian-like rock that she breaks down with mortar and pestle and integrates into her encaustic painting. Mast writes, “PEM glass is not just another art material, but represents a profound paradigm shift in using technology to heal our environmental dilemma by keeping waste out of landfills and greenhouse gases out of the air. My use of PEM glass is one way I am able to reclaim a healthy relationship with the earth.”

The physicality of Joy’s willow forms surrounded by Mast’s tactile, abstract paintings engages the viewer’s senses in the presence and depth of our relationship with the natural world around us.

Christine Joy was born in upstate New York in 1952. She graduated from Rochester Institute of Technology in 1976 with a B.F.A. in Printmaking. In 1980, after completing a master’s program in art therapy at Vermont College, she moved west and settled in Bozeman where she still lives.

Sara Mast received her MFA from Queens College in New York. Her work is in over thirty corporate, private, and museum collections worldwide and is featured in several publications that include: Encaustic Painting: Contemporary Expression in the Ancient Medium of Pigmented Wax (Watson-Guptill, NY, 2001), Art & Science Now (Thames & Hudson, NY, 2010), Encaustic Art in the 21st Century (Schiffer Publishing, PA, 2016) and Launching the Imagination (McGraw Hill, NY, 2017). Mast is a drawing and painting professor in the School of Art at Montana State University. She lives and works in Bozeman, Montana.

ART EVOLVED: INTERTWINEd Studio Art Quilt Associates Global Exhibition

June 30 – October 22, 2023 // Mildred Sandall Scott Galleries

Sponsors: Linda Shelhamer & Stephen Haraden

The Yellowstone Art Museum is honored to be the opening venue for Art Evolved: Intertwined, SAQA’s global exhibition organized in partnership with the National Basketry Organization.

Studio Art Quilt Associates, Inc. (SAQA) is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to promote the art quilt: “a creative visual work that is layered and stitched or that references this form of stitched layered structure.”

Central to the exhibition theme is the continuum where beauty and function blend and diverge in the hands of the contemporary artist. Even when traditional materials such as thread, fabric, wood, reed, and paper are used, these artists combine skill, imagination, and vision to meld their materials into compelling and beautiful art which resonates in today’s world. Following a jury process, twenty-nine artists were invited to participate in this conversation between media to illustrate the continuum between beauty and functionality.

Following the Yellowstone Art Museum, the exhibition will travel to the Pacific Northwest Quilt and Fiber Art Museum in LaConner, Washington, and the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, Massachusetts.

Will James in Magazines

June 2023 – June 2024 // Mildred Sandall Scott Galleries

Sponsor: The Foundation for Montana History

Will James, a French Canadian born as Joseph Ernest Nephtali Dufault, always dreamed of being a cowboy. James was indoctrinated into the world of ranching at a young age and eventually worked as a hand for cattle outfits in Montana, Idaho, and Nevada. However, several injuries and an Army draft into World War I rerouted the cowboy’s career from one who handled horses into one who observed and recorded them instead.

Cows, horses, and bears were just some of the subjects that James portrayed in his drawings and writings, ones which told of the raw and exhilarating force of nature in the West. The artist’s ability to realistically capture these rare moments gained him a successful career in illustrating images for various Western magazines. His work was featured in several venues, from the cheapest pulp magazine to premier titles like Sunset Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post.

Meanwhile, James practiced storytelling of his own, beginning with his 1920 series “Keno the Cow-Horse,” a forerunner to the chronicling of Smoky. Previews of his books appeared in magazine serial form, and many were later published as full books into the collections from Charles Scribner’s Sons. As he began to concentrate on his novels, less and less appeared in short form, ending this phase of his career in 1935. However, these depictions still provide modern viewers with a unique look at the cowboy and the rancher’s West.

Activating the Surface: Paul Harris

August 3 – October 1, 2023 // Charles M. Bair Family Gallery & Northwest Projects Gallery

Sponsor: Diane Boyer Jerhoff

Through the years, Paul Harris returned to his wax and pigment drawings with subjects ranging from still lifes to abstracts, from figures to landscapes and many more in between. Although known as a sculptor, his go-to medium remained the art crayon.

Harris’s drawings pulsate with energy as the movement he puts into the pieces, etched into the composition, can be felt as much today as the moment they were created. The lines, nearly frantic with color, keep the eye traveling, yes, but they also keep the mind engaged in the images, searching, reaching, in continuous dialogue with the viewer. Harris, always concerned with pattern and texture, understands the spatial relationship inherent in a finite drawing. These pieces, intimate and compelling, relay an accessible, inspirational narrative.

Harris said about his use of crayons, “I remember in sixth grade the teacher wanted a lot of things made that she would use the next year and the next, I didn’t do much work in her class except make these big drawings. I became very accustomed to crayons, and I’ve never been able to let them go. Crayons are still my best friends in making drawings. I don’t think it will ever end.”

This exhibition will also feature bronze sculptures on loan from the Paul Harris and Marguerite Kirk Gallery and an example of Harris’s most known life-size stuffed and upholstered female figures from the permanent collection.

This exhibition is sponsored by the Montana Art Gallery Directors Association (MAGDA), a state-wide service organization for non-profit museums & galleries, and supported in part by grants from the Montana Arts Council, a state agency funded by the State of Montana; coal severance taxes paid based upon coal mined in Montana and deposited in Montana’s Cultural and Aesthetic Projects Trust Fund; and the National Endowment for the Arts.

The Montana Modernists: Shifting Perspectives

November 10, 2022 – June 11, 2023 // Mildred Sandall Scott Galleries

Sponsors: Charles M. Bair Family Trust, Linda Shelhamer and Stephen Haraden, Gordon McConnell and Betty Loos, and Dr. Ralph and Sheryl Costanzo

The Montana Modernists exhibition opened on November 10th following the investigation of twentieth-century postwar Montana art in guest curator Dr. Michele Corriel’s new book Montana Modernists: Shifting Perspectives on Western Art. Examining the emergence of an avant-garde movement in the state, Dr. Corriel profiles the pioneers of this movement, Jessie Wilber, Frances Senska, Bill Stockton, Isabelle Johnson, Robert DeWeese, and Gennie DeWeese. Together, these artists implemented an aesthetic philosophy and a modern understanding of form, color, and abstraction that expanded the way Western art in Montana is defined.

Drawing primarily from the extensive collection of the Yellowstone Art Museum, the exhibition explores the first-generation modernists in Montana through the themes of Place, Artistic Lineage, and Community—all crucial elements in the lives and works of these artists. As the early movement grew and took hold across the state, it not only affected artmaking but allowed Montanans access to new ways of viewing themselves, society, and nature, and a way of seeing that had lasting effects on the struggle for a broader, more authentic Montana narrative.

This wave of postwar artists found the need to express themselves differently from the Western illustrative work permeating the state. Their experiences, their point of view, and the changing world they found themselves in required something more. As Robert DeWeese noted, “The art students in 1949 were a completely different lot. They’d been in the war worldwide, and they were hungry for all of it.” It is not a leap to suggest that so many veterans who saw the world, the war, the dropping of the atomic bomb, the devastation of Europe, and the reckoning with fascism needed a new way to communicate.

Isabelle Johnson and Bill Stockton were native-born Montana ranchers, and Wilber, Senska, and the DeWeeses came from elsewhere to teach at Montana State in Bozeman. They were all missionaries of modernism who developed an authentic, personal style of expression in response to the land and society of contemporary Montana. Showing the works of all six of these artists together in one place demonstrates what these artists did and how in their interactions with one another, in their teaching, and, most of all, in the works they left behind, created an art movement that still resonates today.

Michele Corriel researched these artists for years before writing her book, and this show reflects her deep consideration for each of them. “This project, culminating in a show at the Yellowstone Art Museum, validates the last five years of my academic life. I am thrilled to work with the YAM and to fulfill my personal promise to these amazing artists. I hope to keep their work in the eyes of the public for years to come.”

Corriel is a well-published art writer and has covered the region for the last 15 years. Her Ph.D. in American Art helped to guide her work through the rich history of Montana and to bring light to the largely untold story of modernism in the state. Her book Montana Modernists, published by Washington State University Press, is available for sale in the YAM store.

Montana Modernists Reception and Curator’s Talk featuring guest curator Dr. Michele Corriel May 13, 2023 // 2 PM exhibition preview followed by curator talk and book signing.

Master Printer: Robert Blackburn (1920–2003)

November 10, 2022 – June 11, 2023

// Mildred Sandall Scott Galleries

Thirteen compositions of bold color and form by influential artist, master printmaker, and modernist Robert Blackburn are now on view in the firstfloor gallery, coinciding with the long-running exhibition, The Montana Modernists: Shifting Perspectives. Blackburn, an internationally known artist, exhibited throughout the United States and worldwide. His work is held in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Howard University, and many others.

Blackburn grew up during the Harlem Renaissance, becoming involved with several art programs funded by the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Most notably, the Harlem Art Center (1937 – 1942) was a meeting place for artists, writers, and dancers. There, he befriended fellow artists Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, and was first introduced to lithography. This was a rich period of cross-disciplinary artistic and cultural activity, where Blackburn was mentored by a collaborative and innovative community.

In 1941, Blackburn received scholarships to the Art Students’ League, where he studied painting and apprenticed in Will Barnet’s printmaking studio. In 1948, with Barnet’s help, he started the Printmaking Workshop located on 114 West 17th Street in New York City. The workshop welcomed artists worldwide, and became a lively communal space nurtured by Blackburn’s philosophy that “artists of all ages, colors and backgrounds could flourish together while developing themselves and the creative potential of the printmaking medium.” In 1949 he was designated a Master Printer by the National Academy of Design.

When the Abstract Expressionist Movement captured the imagination of the commercial gallery world in the 1950’s and ‘60s, printmakers had few real exhibition opportunities. The lithographic medium was so strongly associated with the social realist style of American art of the 1930’s and ‘40s that few galleries conceived of its potential as an expressive medium for this new movement. However, by following the formal boundaries of Cubism, Blackburn found incredible flexibility in printmaking, leading him to discoveries about form, color, surface, ground, and figure. His still-lives and engraved collage compositions, created out of geometric forms, became translucent and opaque surfaces of color and shape.

Between a fellowship in Paris (1953 – 54) and working as a master printer at Universal Limited Editions (ULAE), Blackburn became a significant force. He introduced American artists, often for the first time, to the potential of the lithographic medium and printed editions for Larry Rivers, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Motherwell, and Helen Frankenthaler.

In 1962 Blackburn returned to the Printmaking Workshop full-time. His innovative, masterful expertise helped to define the overall aesthetic of the American “graphics boom.” Among his many awards are Skowhegan Governor’s Arts Award and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Award in 1992.

This exhibition is generously on loan from the Nelson/Dunks Collection.

Gallery Talk by Richard Nelson | Friday, May 5 // 5 PM reception followed by artist talk at 6 PM.

Recent Acquisition

The Yellowstone Art Museum is continuously growing the permanent collection through generous gifts and museum purchases. All acquisitions build the museum’s collection of modern and contemporary art from the Mountain West region.

Adjusting for Parallax, 2021, by Keeara Rhoades is the newest artwork in the Yellowstone Art Museum’s permanent collection. This work was included in the 2022 exhibition Keeara Rhoades: Shape of a Corner. In the photograph (seen above and below), Rhoades explores boundaries, which join, disrupt, or give pause, activated by moments of intersection. The scene is Sheridan, Wyoming, on a morning when the fog bank enveloped the town and settled upon the foothills of the Big Horn Mountain range and joined with the fog-frosted tree along I-90 en route from Gillette, Wyoming, to Billings, Montana.

Keeara Rhoades

Adjusting for Parallax, 2021, Archival pigment print, 15 x 208 inches (image) 17 x 210 inches (paper). 30-frames (video stills) extracted from motion video and stitched into a 1:14 ratio panorama, for reanimation as a scrolling horizon in the animated film, “The Shape of a Corner.”

Adjusting for Parallax

Driving along a highway this pavement decides my lines confining my eyes to the scrolling view as light finds time and line and shine fog-frosted trees freeze a moment still impressed by this space i press my face beside the lens and film these all white trees frozen against the horizon showing and hiding the landscape within feeding my shutter a constant speed scene through wyoming and montana i finally see a y-shaped tree along the panorama beyond the storm the “y” transforms panning 75 miles per hour sight shifts and slides as one view hides while aligned with another that grew behind the branch line a new point-of-view reveals not two but three branches forming an upside-down peace sign fork or spoon true or untrue the sign delivers me to a time when i was possibly three memory disputes but i was alive seeing a porcupine nested in the “y” of a tree thinking about quills in the skin of a villain i remind my devouring eyes that sight can often deceive still, the smell of turpentine transports me to the “y” pine tree beyond the highway line i maintain my gaze locking into this shape torquing my head behind to identify the third branch was so perfectly aligned to hide a neighboring tree much larger indeed to reach her trunk so vertically in hindsight these separate trees free me to see perception is perspective a point-of-view; and the past a fleeting memory true