On View June 7, 2024 through January 4, 2025 (Extended)

Exhibition Event: Friday June 7, 2024 at 5:30pm

Opening reception & Book Discussion/Signing with Rick Newby, author of A Regionalism That Travels: Writings on (Mostly) Montana Arts, 1975-2022, released May 2024. Followed by a Q/A about art collecting in Montana with Rick Newby and Liz Gans, along with Nicole Maria Evans, Curator of Exhibitions and Collections. Free & open to the public!

The Square enthusiastically announces new gifts to our permanent collection from the personal collection of Rick Newby and Liz Gans. Newby and Gans are leaders in the Montana arts and humanities community and have contributed significantly to the history of Montana art, culture and literature. Their contributions are noted and important. Gifts from their collection have also been allocated to the collections at The Holter Museum of Art and the Montana Historical Society in Helena, Montana. This outstanding gift to The Square consists of paintings, drawings, and an extensive collection of ceramic works by celebrated Montana artists and significant figures of the world ceramics community. 

This exhibition is curated by Nicole Maria Evans, Curator of Exhibitions and Collection at Paris Gibson Square Museum of Art. Exhibitions at the museum are supported in part by the Montana Arts Council, a state agency funded by the State of Montana, and the National Endowment for the Arts. We are funded in part by coal severance taxes paid based upon coal mined in Montana and deposited in Montana's cultural and aesthetic projects trust fund. Additional funding is provided by museum members and the citizens of Cascade County, Davidson Family Foundation, D.A. Davidson, Horizon Credit Union, an anonymous donor, and Kelly’s Signs & Design.

About Liz Gans and Rick Newby:

Born in Helena, Liz Gans is a fifth-generation Montanan. Educated at Oberlin College (history and art history) and Harvard Business School, she has spent her professional life in both the business and nonprofit sectors. She is a past executive director of the Holter Museum of Art, Helena, where she oversaw major exhibitions by early Montana modernists Frances Senska, Gennie DeWeese, Bill Stockton, and Rudy Autio. She has served on the boards of the Montana Artists Refuge in Basin, and Greenpeace USA.

Rick is a third-generation Montanan educated at the University of Montana. He is an award-winning poet, cultural journalist, independent scholar, and editor. Rick served from 2006-2017 as the Executive Director of Drumlummon Institute and editor of the online journal arts journal Drumlummon Views. He is a past member of the Montana Arts Council and the board of the Montana Center for the Book, and his publishing credits, as author or editor, include more than 30 books and exhibition catalogs. Rick received the Montana Governor’s Award for the Humanities in 2009 and the Montana Governor’s Award for the Arts in 2016. He makes his home in Helena, MT, and San Francisco, with his wife Liz Gans.

The gift and accompanying exhibition provide the perfect platform for Rick Newby’s newest publication A Regionalism That Travels: Writings on (Mostly) Montana Arts, 1975-2022, a substantial volume of essays by Rick Newby published by the Drumlummon Institute. The collection consists of essays, talks, and reviews--spread over more than 40 years--on Montana's writers and visual artists and the state's cultural history.

Newby writes, “I powerfully identify with my home state of Montana. And in the course of my writing life, I’ve only forged a greater appreciation for the people, the communities, and the natural environment that make this place worthy of love and respect. Given my particular tastes and predilections, what’s most important to me are Montana’s literary and visual arts traditions, their diversity, their balance between the local and the universal, their sheer beauty and energy, their refusal to give in to the worst kinds of retrograde mythologies.”  

Books available in the Gift Shop:

A Regionalism That Travels
Writings on (Mostly) Montana Arts, 1975-2022
by Rick Newby
Drumlummon Institute, Helena, MT,
in association with Bar R Books
Softcover, 480 pages

The collection includes:

18 essays and reviews on Montana literature, including Rick’s classic essay, “The Montana-Paris Axis, or Unpacking My Grandfather’s Library: On the Track of a Bookish Tradition”; a talk on the compiling of the critical anthology, Writing Montana; a monographic essay on the poetry of Roger Dunsmore; prefaces to the selected poems of twentieth-century Montana poets Frieda Fligelman and Grace Stone Coates; and a review of Debra Magpie Earling’s poetic version of The Lost Journals of Sacajewea.

A section on the rise of modernism in the visual arts in Montana, including an appreciation of Isabelle Johnson and other early Montana modernists; an essay on the origins of the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts, researched and written with Chere Jiusto; an essay on the history of the Poindexter collections of American modernist paintings at the Montana Historical Society and the Yellowstone Art Museum; and a tribute to Miriam Sample, preeminent collector of contemporary Montana artists.

Profiles of 15 ceramic artists who either live in Montana or have strong ties to the state. They are Chou, Pang-ling, Rudy Autio, Akio Takamori, Adrian Arleo, Robert Harrison, Beth Lo, Bobby Silverman, Jason Walker, Richard Notkin, Tom Rippon, George McCauley, Richard Swanson, Chris Staley, Stephen Braun, & Rebecca Hutchinson.

A section entitled “Ceramic Globalism,” ranging over some pretty diverse terrain: the rise of Funk ceramics in California; the individual genius of Berkeley sculptor Stephen De Staebler; the collision of the earthy ceramic arts with the digital world; the role of perforation in contemporary ceramic practice; two iconoclastic clay artists from Philadelphia and the Bay Area; the remarkable Nigerian-British sculptor Lawson Oyekan; and the impact of teaware traditionally made in Yixing, China, on a wide range of contemporary American ceramists.

And a section on a diverse group of Montana painters, printmakers, and non-ceramic sculptors. These include Anne Appleby, Dale Livezey, Michael Haykin, Doug Turman, Peter Koch, Griff Williams, Paul Harris, Patricia Forsberg, Jim Todd, Gordon McConnell, Sandra Dal Poggetto, Richard Swanson Joseph Baraz, and Barry Hood.