Close encounters with Montana Landscapes
Published: June 27, 2010
By Caroline Patterson
Biggest. Greatest. Most Beautiful. The striking natural beauty of Montana can often only be described in superlatives. And why not? Stop anywhere and turn around. Mountain ridges tooth the sky. Shifting weather plays tricks with light. Sky arcs from horizon to horizon. Landscape enfolds, restricts, inspires and challenges us.
The Holter Museum of Art in 2010, the centennial year of Glacier National Park, is taking a new look at Montanan’s relationships to landscape. Yvonne Seng, the Holter’s curator of art, has designed a new exhibition, “Montana Landscape: The Eye of the Beholder,” featuring more than 70 contemporary Montana painters whose work ranges from watercolor to photo montage, from artists Monte Dolack to Sandra dal Pogetto, from Elizabeth Bass to Ted Waddell.
Displayed salon-style in the Holter’s Sherman Gallery from July 1-Oct. 17, the sweeping range of work is an attempt to engage the viewer in a discussion about the diversity of Montana. How are we affected by our surroundings? How are we part of our landscape? How is our vision of that landscape changing?
What interests Seng in the contemporary landscape paintings is that the newer work “portrays a closer, more intimate scale” in contrast to the more traditional portrayal of “huge, wide open spaces.”
In September, the landscape discussion rolls on at the Holter, as several writers and critics speak about their work and the choices they have made when depicting landscape in words or movement. Painters will examine the western legacy of landscape in traditional and modernist paintings.
Finally, in a unique discussion format titled “From the Ground Up,” Native Americans, ranchers, farmers, environmentalists, and natural resources workers will discuss their perspectives about landscape at the Holter.
Part of the Holter’s “Montana: Earth, Wood, Fire and Ice” series, the landscape exhibition is one of five overlapping exhibitions that celebrate Montana. The others include:
• “Richard Buswell: Traces, Montana’s Frontier Re-visited,” May 7-Aug. 8 in the Bair Gallery, featuring detailed, abstract close-ups of frontier images – old cash registers, grilles, radiators – that bring together elements of time, memory and Montana history.
• “Glacier: Losing a Legacy,” May 7-Oct. 17 in the Millikan Gallery, pairing historic photos of Glacier national Park with USGS geologists Lisa McKeon and Dan Fagre’s images of the park’s shrinking glaciers.
• “Out of the Box: The Art of Wood,” July 1-Oct. 15 in the High Gallery, a major exhibition of Montana studio furniture makers combined with the works of 30 international, national and local woodturners. The artists draw attention to the beauty of wood—whether in the form of a rocking chair or teapot.
• “Barry Hood: Flow,” Aug. 12-Oct. 17 in the Bair Gallery, featuring sculptor Barry Hood’s dramatic cast glass panels and glass casts of the “hearts” of wood.
“All around us, artists are taking a new look at the Montana landscape and reflecting that back at us – whether it is using the hidden core of trees as a mold for glass or reinterpreting the old arts of woodworking,” says Seng. “It is very exciting.”
For more information on the museum’s exhibits, visit www.holtermuseum.org.
