Paris Gibson Square Museum of Art presents an inspired selection of works created by The Last Glacier collaborative artist group. Through their work the artists honor and bring attention to areas of environmental concern. The Last Glacier Project and Sentinels are two special exhibitions that are shown in contiguity with one another, both offer insightful, noteworthy, and moving images, accompanied with scientific research, that highlight and comment on the changing environment.

“The Last Glacier is an ongoing project-based initiative that creatively documents the effects of global warming. This enterprise unites visual artists, scientists, and literary figures who create convergent research on specific wilderness environments that are experiencing tangible and dramatic ecological changes. For the last several years the project teams have focused on areas of the world affected by glacial retreat.

The Anthropocene suggests the arrival of an uncertain future. Snowpack melts and is no longer replenished; ecological collapse is imminent. We must progress our understandings of nature.

The Last Glacier books, artworks and exhibitions share emotive-analytical visions of the twenty-first century that are real and true. Climate change is categorical yet beauty, however temporal, remains. As real time passes, The Last Glacier projects transform into multi-generational artifacts that share stories of mortality and resiliency in the face of a changing planet.

The Last Glacier is overseen by three visual artists: Todd Anderson, Bruce Crownover, and Ian van Coller. Past, present, and future project collaborators and contributors include Jeff Rennicke, Gary Machlis, and Nancy Mahoney.” -Project Statement

This presentation of The Last Glacier Project at Paris Gibson Square Museum of Art will feature a selection of works that honor this insightful, noteworthy, and moving project. Detailed and focused photographs by Ian Van Coller, are shown alongside the richly layered and textured reductive woodcut prints by Todd Anderson and Bruce Crownover. Included in this special exhibition of the work will be two featured artist books, The Last Glacier and ROMO. These books are limited in number and found only in special collections, they are the culmination of the projects work and are exquisitely bound.

The Last Glacier artworks and artist books can be seen at a variety of locations such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, US Library of Congress, Yale University, Stanford University, the Davis Museum of Art at Wellesley College, the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation Collection, Clemson University, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

As a collective The Last Glacier works have been exhibited at Old Main Gallery, Bozeman, Montana in 2020. First exhibition of the works at a museum, alongside The Last Glacier book, was titled The Last Glacier: Images of the Changing Landscape and occurred in 2021 at The Hockaday Museum of Art in Kalispell, Montana; organized by Curator, Pat Roath, in association with EXTRACTION: Art on The Edge of the Abyss. Recently the project has been exhibited at the James Watrous Gallery at the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, and will continue to be exhibited throughout various museums, galleries, and universities across the United States.

These concurrent exhibitions, The Last Glacier Project and Sentinels, were curated by Nicole Maria Evans, Curator of Exhibitions and Collections. Exhibitions presented by The Square are supported in part by the Montana Arts Council a state agency funded by the State of Montana, Humanities Montana, National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor, and National Endowment for the Arts. Additional funding is provided by museum members and the citizens of Cascade County, and generous support from Davidson Family Foundation, First Interstate Bank, and D.A. Davidson. Special support from Montana Woman Magazine and Printing Center USA.