Artworks Gallery

Now Showing:

From the Spirit: Paintings by Kevin Red Star

Artworks Gallery
Jan 19-March 7, 2010
Artist Reception: Jan 29, 2010

Kevin Red Star was born on the Crow Indian Reservation in Lodge Grass, Montana. He was raised in a family that values art and culture, where he developed an early love of drawing and music. This exposure and encouragement sustained him during his years in grade school during the time when Crow students were denied association with their language and cultural heritage. Later, when he was one of 150 students chosen to attend the newly established Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, he was encouraged to explore his history and culture through modern art techniques.

Upon graduation, Red Star and several other Native students received scholarships to the San Francisco Art Institute. Here he was exposed to the avant garde and political and social concerns of post-modern art. Since embarking on his professional artistic journey, the acknowledged master artist is considered a visual historian and ambassador for his Native Crow culture. In 1997, Kevin Red Star received an Honorary Doctorate Degree in Fine Art from the Rocky Mountain College in Billings, Montana.

Red Star’s works are the focal point of several important museum collections, including The Smithsonian Institution – National Museum of the American Indian, CM Russell Museum, Heard Museum, Denver Art Museum, Eiteljorg Museum, Southwest Museum, Whitney Museum of Western Art, Institute of American Indian Arts Museum, United States Department of State and scores of others. Pursuing a successful career spanning three decades, over 100 large scale exhibitions have featured the celebrated artist’s works on canvas and paper.

Coming Soon:

Wild West Shirt Company: Photographs by Marta Madden

Mar 9-April 11
Reception: March 12

In the summer of 2009, I worked as a “folder” at the Wild West Shirt Company. This rather repetitive and mindless job coincided with the disintegration of the romantic expectations I held for the summer. As I dealt with this disappointment, I found myself trapped in my own negative thoughts and feelings, and began to wonder how the other employees dealt with the gloom and boredom, which had set in for me after only a few weeks. How did they contend, year after year with the same people, place, and shirt designs?

These questions provided me with a new lens as I interacted with the people and physical environment at Wild West and helped me to take notice of how employees visually and somewhat unconsciously expressed their feelings and thoughts in and on their physical work environment. What I began to explore, and worked to capture in my photographs, was this rich and colorful canvass created by Wild West workers.

My intent for this collection of photographs is to illustrate how we as humans shape and impact our built environments, sometimes with careful thought and intension, but often in an unconscious or unknowing manner. These afterthoughts of our labors have the ability to generate unique, interesting and visually aesthetic qualities.

While my photographs lack human subjects, the human element is always present and credited with the creation of the landscape. The images in these photographs are clean, sharp, and straight, capturing the fine detail and subtle nuances of this physical environment.

Steve Lee

April 13-May 16
Reception: April 15

“The objects I create often refer to the form, decoration, color, and materials of historical ceramics, yet ask viewers to confront their contemporary context. These parallels can exist in my work through decorative motifs or traditional visual surfaces on forms of various origins.

My work investigates the process of recognition — how as individuals, we draw realities based on experiences and environment. I enjoy examining various cultural systems to question what is inherent and what is learned. ”

Steven Young Lee is the Resident Artist Director of the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, Montana. Lee is a Chicago native. He received his MFA in Ceramics from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 2004. In 2004-5, he lectured and taught at numerous universities throughout China. While there, he created a new body of work as part of a one-year cultural and educational exchange fellowship in Jingdezhen, Jianxi Province. A former Bray resident, Steven also spent a year teaching at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, B.C. in 2005-6.

In the United States, he has taught classes at Alfred University in New York, Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan, the Clay Art Center in New York and the Lill Street Studio in Chicago. He has also managed a ceramics supply business in Chicago.
His work has been exhibited in China, Canada and throughout the United States, and is held in private collections in New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Montana.

Lee maintains an active studio practice rooted in both functional and sculptural ceramics. His current work examines the process of recognition-how individuals draw realities based on experiences and environment. Through functional pottery and sculpture, he challenges pre-conceptions of style, form, symbolism, superstitions and identity.

Poo Putsch

May 18-June 13
Reception: May 21

I credit my mother for instilling in me the love of nature and art. She gave me my first oil paints at the age of six. We would go out together to do plein air painting in the New England countryside. From her I learned the basics of color and composition. From that point on art became my passion: studying, teaching and creating.

While at Yale Graduate School of Art I was privileged to study under Josef Albers and his successor Sewell Sillman. The hours spent studying Albers “Interaction of Color” profoundly changed how I interact with color. It is the foremost element of art that effects me on many levels.

These “Studies” reflect the investigation of color we had to do at Yale. The small watercolors force me to reduce broad scenes into simple color compositions. The challenge then becomes to make large paintings that capture the sense of Montana’s wide open spaces while remaining intimately connected to nature and its seductive array of colors.

I am fortunate to live in a rural area that blesses me daily with amazing combinations of colors. Although the scene may be the same, the drama played out by Mother Nature is an ever changing palette.

I will never run out of color studies or inspiration!

DD Dowden

May 18-June 13
Reception: May 21

Landscape has an extraordinary place the heart of Montanans. We value Montana for her raw beauty, the splendor of her many moods, and multiplicity of her landscapes. We feel wonder and reverence in Nature–it teaches us, makes us saner, and more confident. We now, however, also feel a disturbed uneasiness when we walk through the browning forests or when we note the change in weather patterns. More and more artists are turning back to the landscape to capture what we are loosing and to lessen their feelings of disconnect and discomfort in a rapidly changing world. Artist Mike Glier says, “Landscape has become an urgent subject.” When I am out painting, I take in the colors, the compositions, the textures and I feel no alienation, no separation.

“…I go to Nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in tune once more.” [John Burroughs] My hope is that through sharing the intimacy of my experience, we all become more motivated to protect the land we love.

DD Dowden was born in Arkansas and has been expatriated from the South for 35 years. Her BFA in art led to a couple of tries at graduate and architecture school, before abandoning higher education to work in the woods of Southeast Alaska. A resident of Montana for nearly 30 years, her work is compelled by Montana’s landscape and the immediacy of the medium of watercolor.

One-woman shows at the Hockaday Museum, Kalispell; Holter Museum of Art, Helena (x2); The University of Arkansas Museum Gallery. Various collections and galleries, auctions, and invitationals.