Modernist Shift

Yellowstone Art Museum presents a new show that highlights modernism in Montana.

Now open at the Yellowstone Art Museum in Billings, Montana, is The Montana Modernists: Shifting Perceptions. The exhibition features ceramics, prints, drawings, paintings and mixed-media work dedicated to 20th-century postwar Montana art.Gennie DeWeese (1921-2007), Mountain Road, 1998, oil stick on canvas, 83 x 93”. Museum purchase, 1999.13.The exhibition primarily draws from the extensive collection of the Yellowstone Art Museum and it 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 nascent 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,” the museum notes. Bill Stockton (1921-2002), Blue Formation, 1953, casein on Masonite, 23½ x 34½”. Museum purchase funded by Miriam Sample, 1993.52.Artists represented include Robert DeWeese, Gennie DeWeese, Isabelle Johnson, Bill Stockton and others. “They were all missionaries of modernism who developed an authentic, personal style of expression in response to the land and society of contemporary Montana,” the museum notes.