Join us for a day of art and culture in Butte!
Registration is required and space is limited:
Register at https://form.jotform.com/241635020758151
About: Open AIR presents our first Butte Arts Conference, a day-long event celebrating art and the environment at the Historic Clark Chateau. This Conference will feature Open AIR Arists-in-Residence from sites in Butte, Philipsburg, and Deer Lodge. The artists will lead sessions with presentations, hands-on activities, demonstrations, and art-making that engage audiences in conversations about place, art, and the environment.
This event is part of the Summer II Open AIR Artist-in-Residence program, which is in partnership with The Historic Clarck Chateau, Imagine Butte Resource Center, Clark Fork Coalition, and the Philipsburg Arts Fund.
Cost: The conference is free, suitable for ages 14+, and open to the public. Lunch will be provided.
Schedule:
10:00 am Welcome
10:15 am Lane Chapman and Eric Jensen -Collaborative Waters, presentation
11:00 am Jessica Jones - How to Write Narrative Poetry, writing activity
12:00 pm Lunch
12:45 pm Melliot - Ghost Story: A New Musical, performance
1:30 pm Tea and snack break
1:45 pm Manette Bradford - Cut It Up, art activity
3:00 pm Closing
About the artists:
Lane Chapman:
Hailing from small town Arkansas, Lane Chapman started as a painter and illustrator until she transitioned into clay in college. She received her BFA in Ceramics from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock in 2017. After graduating, she moved to Rochester, NY, for a two-year residency at the Flower City Arts Center. She then moved to Missoula, MT, for a residency at The Clay Studio of Missoula for two years from 2019-2021 and then a resident at Wildfire Ceramic Studio from 2021-2022. Lane is currently a MFA candidate at the University of Montana in Missoula.
Eric Jensen:
Eric Jensen is an abstract landscape painter with an interest in unifying different modes of understanding our world. Combining unlike methodologies like science and spirituality, he hopes to empower ecological preservation efforts and establish new cultural values through art. His practice is built from a contemporary art education, a critical perspective of religion in the west, and a passion for being close to nature. He has formed a landscape painting practice that looks critically at how our society perceives the land and is working to unify his practice with environmental conservation efforts. Born in Utah, raised and educated in Virginia, Eric now lives outside of Missoula, MT, after finishing an MFA in painting at the University of Montana.
Manette Bradford:
Manette Rene Bradford (b. 1978, St. Paul, MN) was raised in a family of visual artists. This early exposure to art allowed her to develop an understanding of craftsmanship and the creative process and to develop a lifelong relationship with her own practice. Manette earned a BFA in 2001 from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2022, she was awarded the Montana Art Gallery Director's Association Exhibition Sponsorship for Unsettled Lands, which will tour Montana from 2024-2026. She will exhibit at the Montana Museum of Art and Culture, Paris Gibson Square Museum of Art, C.M. Russell Museum, Hockaday Museum of Art, Schoolhouse History and Art Center, and MonDak Heritage Center, and has exhibited in both solo and group shows in San Francisco and Chicago. Manette was interviewed as the subject of an episode of Resounds: Arts and Culture on the High Plains, which aired on May 22, 2023. She has lived and worked in Chicago, the Bay Area, and lives and works in Red Lodge and Billings, Montana.
Jessica Jones:
Jessica Jones holds a Masters in English from the University of Montana, with licensure for K-12 and training in Indian Education for All. She is on full-time faculty at Kent State University, where she teaches place-based composition, Native literature, travel writing, and poetry. She has also taught middle school on the Flathead Reservation, and often teaches with Upward Bound, serving students from the Blackfeet Reservation and Missoula County Public Schools. Jones’ creative work centers on place (both Northern Appalachia and rural Montana, as well as some travels.) Her chapbook, Bitterroot (2018), can be found at Finishing Line Press. Her work has also appeared in journals and book anthologies like Poems Across the Big Sky, Bright Bones, and Dear Vaccine. She has served as Writer-in-Residence for Calcutta Mercy Hospital in India, and Poet-in-Residence for the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. When not in the classroom she enjoys hiking, paddle boarding, and spending time with loved ones and her cat Magnolia.
Melliot:
Mel Hornyak (Book/Lyrics) and Elliot Valentine (Book/Lyrics/Music) are New York-based musical theater writers who work under the artist name Melliot. Their musicals use horror, fantasy, and sci-fi to defamiliarize power, narrative and identity through psychological explorations of love and desire. They both hold B.A.s from Princeton University and currently attend the Graduate Musical Theater Writing Program at NYU Tisch and the Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism Program at Yale, respectively. Selected Awards and Performance Credits: O'Neill NMTC Semifinalist (Adamandi), American Musical Theater Project Semifinalists (Ghost Story), Ring of Keys Queering the Gala commission at Joe's Pub. When the two of them are not writing, they like to cook spicy food, go on hikes, and play Dungeons & Dragons.