Painter Nancy Dunlop Cawdrey has fond memories of her first experiences visiting Glacier National Park. “Once or twice we drove across America. I remember the comic books and chewing gum in the backseat of a Chevy Impala, which was no one’s idea of comfort,” she says. “I remember the pine trees and the tamarack, and how if you stuck your nose deep into the grooves of a white pine tree it smelled really good. They say smell is tied strongly to memory, and I believe it.”Forever Glacier: Odocoileus hemionus, dye on silk, 30 x 40”

Cawdrey would return to Glacier Park many times throughout her life, but her trips took on a new importance about five year ago as she decided to paint the many animals living in the park. The works she created are bursting with life. “All the creatures of the ecosystem,” she adds, “sort of like a Where’s Waldo?”

The artwork, 18 pieces in total, is now on view in Forever Glacier: A Legacy Project by Nancy Dunlop Cawdrey, a new exhibition at the C.M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, Montana. The pieces are done using a dye on silk process. The silk is stretched on stretcher bars, and then Cawdrey paints using a permenant dye. She says, “The silk can hold a lot of layers, as many as 30 even. The Chinese have been painting on silk for 4,000-plus years, and I’m one of the only painters working on silk in the Western art world.”Forever Glacier: Small Mammals of the Alpine Meadow, dye on silk, 40 x 30”

Emily Wilson, the senior curator at the C.M. Russell Museum, says she is excited about the show because it presents a contemporary perspective that is unique to the museum. “This is a vibrant and colorful exhibition, and the variety of wildlife is really going to be wonderful for our guests,” she says. “When the show was pitched to us it was always thinking about Glacier and the environmental ecology, and I love that aspect to Nancy’s works. She goes from alpine meadows to prairies and grasslands to old-growth forests…I love the back and forth she does with the animals and their habitats.”Forever Glacier: Ursus americanus, dye on silk, 40 x 30”

Wilson adds that the exhibit will show various animal pelts and skulls, objects from the park and a virtual reality station where guests can don VR goggles and experience areas of the park. Native American words related to the land and the animals will also be taught to guests to show the connection the land has had with Indigenous tribes long before the appearance of white settlers. This thread of language runs throughout the exhibition as the animals are named by their Latin names, their English names and then their Blackfeet names. Forever Glacier: Bison bison, dye on silk, 36 x 36”

The exhibition was conceived as a traveling exhibit and will likely head to another museum following its run at the C.M. Russell Museum. —

Forever Glacier: A Legacy Project by Nancy Dunlop Cawdrey
Through January 11, 2021
C.M. Russell Museum, 400 13th Street North, Great Falls, MT 59401
(406) 727-8787, www.cmrussell.org 

Powered by Froala Editor