The One Defined to Be No One

Sean Chandler

On View January 19 - March 5, 2024

Baucus Gallery

“Chaotic and unanswered as a painting may seem, it confirms the disorder and grim questions created by complicated relationships between two worldviews—Indigenous and non-Indigenous. Maybe it’s peace that is sought out for balance.”

Sean Chandler (Aaniiih), grew up in Glendive, Montana, and his family was among the only Native family in the community. He received his BA in Art and MA in Native Studies at Montana State University in Bozeman. He later earned an Ed.D. in Educational Leadership from the University of Montana while employed as Director of American Indian Studies at Aaniiih Nakoda College on Fort Belknap Agency in Harlem, Montana. Recently, he was promoted to President of the College in August 2020. After a long hiatus, Chandler returned to creating art in 2014 and later joined the artist collective Paintallica. His pieces range from oil, acrylic, paint stick, and charcoal on large canvases to drypoint prints and drawings. He cites Blackfeet artist Ernie Pepion (1943–2005), Salish Kootenai artist Corwin Clairmont, and Bozeman-based artist Jay Schmidt as mentors. He has received awards and exhibited

at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, and the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis, Indiana, with work collected by the Museum of Natural History in Paris and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts Museum, Minnesota.

This exhibition is sponsored by the Montana Art Gallery Directors Association (MAGDA), a state-wide service organization for non-profit museums & galleries, and supported in part by grants from the Montana Arts Council, a state agency funded by the State of Montana; coal severance taxes paid based upon coal mined in Montana and deposited in Montana’s Cultural and Aesthetic Projects Trust Fund; and the National Endowment for the Arts.

“Once in the mode to create, I just let the work take me where I’m supposed to go… But very often, parts of the painting that seemed to be the best expressions turn out to be better by covering them up. Maybe that is partly due to me covering myself, layer by layer. More likely, however, it is a line formed by my own contemporary experiences in mainstream society connected to the years endured by ancestral experiences of dehumanization, racism, and cultural genocide.”

Co-Flourish

Over 30 artists from Montana & beyond, offered by Open AIR Montana

On View January 19 - March 14, 2024

Bair Gallery

In the year 2020, humanity faced great challenges – from the COVID-19 pandemic to worldwide protests against racialized violence, environmental vulnerabilities, and growing disparities between the wealthy and the poor. 2020 upended ‘business as usual’ and prompted important considerations and questions – about the nature and importance of communication, contact, technology, the growing importance of local communities the impact of global actions, the ramifications of institutional narratives, and beyond.

CoFlourish was born from the challenges of 2020. Featuring over 30 artists from Montana and beyond, this exhibition is a wedding of two initiatives: place-based artist-in-residency sessions and an inter-artist collaborative project. The initiatives focused on opportunities for artists to connect, examine, and ultimately create with one another and place during a disorienting time.

The Last Glacier



Ian van Coller, Bruce Crownover & Todd Anderson

On View January 19 - February 14, 2024

Millikan, Nicholson & Held Galleries

The Holter Museum of Art welcomes The Last Glacier: Images of Our Changing Landscape, an exhibition highlighting the collaborative documentary project, The Last Glacier lead by visual artists Todd Anderson, Bruce Crownover and Ian van Coller. This arts and science initiative–begun in 2009 when the three friends and artists hiked together in Glacier National Park–documents the effects of climate change on Glaciers throughout the world and unites visual artists, scientists, and writers who create convergent research on specific wilderness environments that are experiencing tangible and dramatic ecological changes.

The Last Glacier includes 34 original artworks including: color photographs of glacier by Montana artist Ian van Coller; colorful woodcut prints of glaciers using traditional Japanese style printmaking techniques by South Carolina artist Todd Anderson; and woodcut prints and watercolors by Wisconsin artist and master printer Bruce Crownover.

This arts and science initiative began in 2009 when the three friends and artists hiked together in Glacier National Park, and documents the effects of climate change on Glaciers throughout the world and unites visual artists, scientists, and writers who create convergent research on specific wilderness environments that are experiencing tangible and dramatic ecological changes.

Image: David Spencer

Just The Antidote For A World All Too Preoccupied With Wars & Rumors of Wars

(Not Your Ordinary Book Review)

The focus this month will be to share my enthusiasm for the comparatively lesser-known but truly great Irish Bard/Druid/Poet/Seer & Visionary John O'Donohue, specifically a posthumorous volume aptly titled "Walking In Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World" (Convergent Bks., NYC, 2018), that was published 10 years after the author's death at the age of 52; in other words, about the same age as the more widely known kindred spirit & Trappist monk Thomas Merton, yet another of my favorite writers over roughly the past century. By way of a foretaste of O'Donohue as a wise soul with access to the Shamanic, in the above-referenced compendium O'Donohue insists that there is a world, maybe an Infinite or Dream World hidden at the HeArt of a Mountain, & that pArt of the duty of the Artist is in a certain sense to eXcavate the Secret Dream World of the Mountain in an Imaginary Way . . . for Mountains are the noble guardians of the Memory (aka the 'Mother of the Muses'). In other words, in O'Donohue's opinion literally everything is Alive & Interconnected . . . In fact, to eXperience Deep Silence is to come into the Presence of the DiVine. 

For the uninitiated, O'Donohue's other books include -- but are in no way narrowly delimited to -- the following :: "Anam Cara" (Irish Gaelic for 'Soul Friend'); "Beauty: The Invisible Embrace;" "Eternal Echoes;" & "To Bless the Space Between Us." Having read all of these titles, I was 'gobsmacked' when J. O'D's "Walking In Wonder" turned up 2nd-hand at Aunt Bonnie's about 10 days ago, allowing me to delve deeper into a polymathic genius who died in January 2008.

Another core-curricular fact about O'Donohue is that he was an authority on the life & work of the great medieval German Mystic Meister EckhArt, to whom a remarkable 15-pp. essay is devoted in "Walking In Wonder."

For what it's worth in this conTeXt, at the end of his life O'Donohue was working on Post-Doctoral Eckh'Art'ian Philosophical Theology Studies at the University of Tubingen in Germany, commuting back & forth from his beloved Conamara (also spelled 'Connemara'), one of his volumes of poetry being titled -- fittingly eNuf -- "Conamara Blues." Being firmly in the Apophatic{about which one cannot speak} tradition of mysticism -- be it Christian or other -- here are a couple of quotes from two Sufi Masters, both of whom eXpress InSights very much in the Spirit of Meister EckhArt :: "Ah, one spark flew / And burned down the house of my HeArt" (Rumi) & "I have made the journey into Emptiness {NagArjuna's 'Sunyata'} / I have become the Flame that needs no fuel" (Hafiz). For, Verily, as O'Donohue writes in his "Conamara Blues," "The Mind is an old crow . . . / Between the branches of the parent tree . . . / Entwining them around the Emptiness / With Silence & unfailing Patience / Until what was fallen, withered & lost / Is now set to fill with Dreams as a Nest."

As a Celtic Bard/Druid/Priest of Nature of uncommon sensibilities, O'Donohue believes it possible to communicate with old-strata geology &/or rocks, a natural corollary to his conviction that literally nothing in the MultiVerse we inhabit is, strictly speaking, inanimate. You'll find the same notion among such traditions as the Ancient Egyptian, Tibetan Buddhist, the Orphic, the Pythagorean, the NeoPlaTonic, Sufism, the Kabbalah, etc., there being little that is new under the ever-living Sun. This is the multifaceted realm that Dreamers, Seers & Visionaries tap into, due to their being what you might call more subtly wired, & therefore better equipped to go into the {seeming} Silence & to harmonize/resonate with the Music of the Spheres, as the great poets have done time out of mind. This devoutly-to-be-wished state has also been characterized as entering into the Flame {of Enlightenment}. Consider, for st'art'ers, the testimony of such Luminaries as Hildegard of Bingen, Isaac Luria, St. John of the Cross, Jacob Boehme, Blaise Pascal, Angelus Silesius, & even the T. S. Eliot of the "Four Qu'Art'ets," among no lack of Others . . . One could do worse for a capstone than these few lines cited by O'Donohue from Octavio Paz's "Eagle or Sun?" :: "With great difficulty, / I carved a road out of the rock . . . / I have spent the latter pArt of my life / breaking the stones, drilling the walls, smashing the doors, / removing the obstacles I placed between the Light & myself / in the first pArt of my life." 

-David Spencer