EVENT SPONSORS

March 25 – July 18, 2021 The Yellowstone Art Museum is honored to be included in the tour of the Tia Collection’s New Beginnings: An American Story of Romantics and Modernists in the West. This is our second Victor Higgins, Yellow Trees and Adobes; c. 1925; oil on canvas collaboration with the Tia Collection. This exhibition focuses on Taos area artists who began to experiment with interpreting the West through a modern lens. Like the early Montana Modernists, these artists pushed boundaries, adapted new ways of thinking and seeing, and found their own version of place-based Modernism. Many have had national influence and a direct impact on our own region. The exhibition’s artists include Joseph H. Sharp, who set up a studio on the Crow Agency, not far from Billings, Montana. John Marin and John Sloan directly influenced Montana Modernist Isabelle Johnson. Post-Impressionist Jozef Bakos, like Johnson, strove to imbue his paintings with an emotive quality that went beyond pictorial landscape. They expressed the harsh realities of their often hostile environment in a manner that is not only visually stunning, but evokes the feeling of sublime space

John Giarizzo, Grace, 2016, oil on canvas

March 21 – July 12, 2021 Rarely does one in our region find an artist who works from life in a classical process from sketchbook to finished painting as John Giarrizzo. Throughout his life as a professor at Northwest College in Powell, and now as a full-time artist, his days involve quiet observation of the human form. This daily art practice has produced numerous sketchbooks and a refined spread of studies and finished paintings, which give homage to themes that have stood large in his life. But what evokes mystery and depth in contrast to these genre-like themes of children at play, men at work, Italians gossiping from benches, and a studio model, are the ever-present Guardians—Renaissance clad figures, pulled from Caravaggio paintings, largely present, but hiding in shadow. The Guardians evoke mystery, and give a nod to the dichotomous aspects of life at a time when contrast and division are ever present among us.