Show Preview | Women Artists of Glacier

Kalispell, MT
Hockaday Museum of Art, August 13-September 10

Sonya Terpening, The Bachelor’s Club, oil, 24 x 30.

This story was featured in the August 2016 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art August 2016 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

Above the noise, the bustle, and the cramp of civilization, one can sometimes hear the call of the wild luring us to seek the quiet of open spaces. For some it beckons more insistently. Almost 30 women who have answered that summons are featured in the second annual exhibition and sale titled A Timeless Legacy: Women Artists of Glacier National Park. The show, presented by the Hockaday Museum of Art, opens on Saturday, August 13, with a ticketed gala reception and sale from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m., which many of the participating artists from nine different states attend.

Carrying on the timeless tradition of painting in Glacier National Park, each artist has been invited to submit up to three works created solely for this show, including a special gallery of miniatures. “The level of talent and diversity of styles in the show is extraordinary,” says Brian Eklund, the museum’s communications director. “The artists capture their love of Glacier, the Swiss Alps of the U.S., with its pure blues and deep greens, its unspoiled nature.”

In the show’s inaugural year, the museum featured works by four contemporary artists—Carole Cooke, Rachel Warner, Linda Tippetts, and Kathryn Stats—juxtaposing their paintings with those by “legacy” artists: women who, despite arduous challenges, painted this dramatically muscular terrain in the ear-ly 20th century. Joining those original four contemporary artists are 23 more nationally known women artists working in a variety of media, all focusing on western themes, wildlife, and this singular landscape. Among them are batik artist Echo Ukrainetz, oil painter Krystii Melaine, portraitist Stephanie Campos, and wildlife painter Sarah Woods.

“I’m a storyteller with paint,” says Texas artist Sonya Terpening. Her skill at unspooling a narrative using color and light is evident in a piece titled THE BACHELOR’S CLUB. The richly rendered piece reinterprets an old photograph from the park’s archives in which three cowboys lean against a hitching rail, with two signs hanging behind them—one reading “Tobacco” and the other “Wives Wanted.” Here Terpening explores the somewhat less familiar story of populating the West: “While men may have explored the region,” she says, “it wasn’t settled until the women and children arrived.”

Heide Presse, Indian Summer, oil, 24 x 24.

Also informed by historical and archival documents, Heide Presse’s luminous painting INDIAN SUMMER features a lone female figure modeled on legacy artist Lucille Van Slyck, who is seated on a chair while she paints the light-dappled shore of the park’s Lake McDonald. The work pays tribute to those pioneering women artists who braved rutted roads and barely blazed trails, not to mention societal conventions of the time. “These women were nearly forgotten,” explains Presse. “They didn’t seek publicity. They were driven to make art and to capture the beauty of that place.”

This year’s show fittingly coincides with the centennial celebration of the National Park Service, which kicks off in August. As Eklund sums up, the show also “dovetails with the mission of the museum itself, which is to enrich the cultural life of our community and region, and preserve the artistic legacy of Montana and Glacier National Park.” —Lynn Dubinsky

contact information
406.755.5268
www.hockadaymuseum.org