Summer 2
Welcome these 8 artists as part of the Open AIR program!
Christopher Baldwin- Flathead Lake Biological Station
Christopher Baldwin is a cartoonist and graphic novelist. His work has shown at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco, the National Academy of Sciences in 2020, and the Roswell Museum of Art. He also has work in the permanent archive of the the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art. His graphic novel, "Glens Falls," was funded by a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts. He was a regular contributor to MAD Magazine and has graphic novels published by Penguin/Dial books and Simon&Schuster/Margaret K. McElderry Books.
Taylor Clough- Philipsburg
Taylor Clough is an artist living in Missoula, Montana, where she has spent the past year teaching art to youth. Her artwork consists of drawing, painting and printmaking elements; all merged together in both recognizable and abstract ways. She explores repeated symbols of animals, nature and moments depicting life of the people in Western Montana communities—highlighting the stories, emotions and patterns that intertwine these together. Taylor received her BFA from Montserrat College of Art and her MFA from Yale University.
Aaron Cobbett- Missoula Public Library
Aaron Cobbett is a textile artist and image-maker. Beginning his photographic work in the mid-80’s, he created stylizedand color-saturated images of nightlife personas, transgender performers, drag queens, sex workers and porn stars that became an important and immediately recognizable part of the contemporary queer cultural canon. An accomplished costume designer and fabricator, Cobbett often made his own costumes for his shoots, along with creating his own sets, hair and makeup. His body of photographic work blurs and questions boundaries of identity, presaging today’s discussions of race, gender and sexuality in the Queer Art Movement. Cobbett shifted his focus back to fabric and textile art in 2015, creating lens based quilts that use repurposed materials from the sets and costumes he has collected and created for the past three decades. The series of representational quilts examines human social structures with highly personal narratives using text, symbolism and photographic values rendered in hand-me-down and recycled fabrics. Using techniques of hand cutting, fusing, dyeing, quilting, embroidery and appliqué, these “spirit objects” join craft and memory; healing, empowering and creating new life from old. Aaron's work has been the subject of a dozen solo exhibits as well as group shows and galleries world-wide. He has two book publications: AARON COBBETT and Super Eros. His work has been shown internationally at Debs & Co. Gallery , Envoy Enterprises, Wessel O'Connor Gallery, The Leslie-Lohman Museum, The New York Historical Society, Benton Museum at the University of Connecticut and The Louvre, Paris, among others. As a commercial photographer, his work has been featured in Vanity Fair, American Vogue, Glamour and Interview Magazines. Notable subjects include Helen Gurly Brown Justin Vivian Bond, Elvira, John Waters, Linda Blair, Steven Spinella, Nellie Furtado and Alan Cumming. Mr. Cobbett lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Erica Selby- Historic Clark Chateau, Butte
Raised in a ranching family outside of Helena, Montana, Erica Selby has first-hand experiences with the life cycles present in agricultural practices, the borders drawn between the human-made and the natural world, and an interest in Montana history. Erica recently completed her BFA thesis at the University of Montana with a focus on process-based sculptural installation. Her work has recently been seen in the 2021 BFA Exhibit at the Gallery of Visual Arts and has recently won an honorable mention award at the 2021 Annual Juried Student Exhibit at the University of Montana.
Eric Siegel- Selway Bitterroot Frank Church
Eric Siegel is an environmental journalist, poet, and natural history enthusiast who writes about queer environments and landscapes. He recently finished an editorial stint at High Country News magazine, where he reported on landscapes and their politics in the American West. He’s also worked as a field naturalist in the high country of Colorado, an instructor at the Wild Rockies Field Institute in Missoula, a wilderness researcher with the U.S. Forest Service, and is a faculty member at the Colorado School of Mines, where he teaches environmental humanities. When not reading poems (or writing them), he’s usually meditating, cooking, or getting purposefully lost in possibility.
Emily Stark- Home Resource
Emily Stark is an artist who currently resides and works in Western Montana. She received a BA from the University of Montana, a BS from the University of Oregon, and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Stark’s work is rooted in fiber and consists of soft sculptural objects, garments, and woven structures. She engages in a process-focused practice that emphasizes craft and embellished surfaces. Stark explores the ways in which we experience materials both affectively and historically, and how the systems and norms we are entangled in influence our emotions, relationships, and attachments.
Cristina Victor- Visiting Artist in Partnership with Montana Museum of Art & Culture
Cristina Victor is a Cuban-American artist whose making always stems from the hyphen. Her interdisciplinary practice materializes storytelling, meditations on the failure and power of language, auto-ethnography, and critiques the framing of identity by mass media outlets. Using performance, textiles, sculpture, installation, and public engagement she is committed to creating and facilitating generative exchanges about the complexities of our collective and individual human experience. Vexillology, analog graphic design, and archiving act as foundational threads in her translations. Her concern for access balances her formal object-making and public engagement projects.
She received her AA from the New World School of the Arts, Her BA from Sarah Lawrence College, and her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is a transient maker and goes wherever her work takes her.
Maria Ylvisaker- Historical Museum at Fort Missoula
Maria Ylvisaker is a visual artist in Brooklyn, New York. She works in watercolor and printmaking to explore nostalgia and everyday life. Her work has been published by Womanly Magazine and Duplikat Press, and has been shown at Printed Matter’s NY Art Book Fair, David & Schweitzer Contemporary, and A.I.R. Gallery. During 2020 she participated in online exhibitions with GIFC and Vacant Museum. She holds a B.A. in studio art and rhetoric & communications studies from Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa.