MAY 2008

Magee (Margretta) Nelson Poler is residing at the Montana Artists Refuge during May. She is editing and hopefully finishing her book “puppy tales”: Buddy and Sister’s Adventures on a Montana Ranch.

Now living in New Mexico, Magee lived for 20 years in the Flathead Valley, just south of Glacier National Park on a small ranch with her family and dogs. Her stories are nonfiction chapters of life on the ranch, a coming of age for her children, her dogs and herself. Lessons of the land, the native people, the native plants and the ever-present weather weave a story of love, hardship, discovery and loss. Buddy and Sister are the yellow labs the story revolves around.

“Being able to return to Montana to finish this book, started five years ago, is a gift of time and heart. Just entering the state after ten years away, I was so struck with its beauty I burst into tears. The smells and people and weather and ‘montana-ness’ is re-fueling the stories as I finish this book about my life in Montana.”

Iku Higuchi, a Japanese-born, New York City-based artist is staying at the Montana Artists Refuge for the month of May 2008. Ms. Higuchi draws upon a variety of influences, begun by her family who introduced her to traditional sumi painting as well as to western techniques of oil painting.

She says, "Art is in search of Soul." Fine art painting must be done with “Tamashi” (the native Japanese word meaning “Spirit”), which draws upon and channels forces of nature. Iku Higuchi comes to the mountains of Montana from the canyons of Manhattan and hopes to learn how America’s “first peoples” might have been similarly inspired. Such spiritual and artistic inspiration has allowed her in her career to create abstract and figurative images using a broad range of artistic expression, including painting (which is what she will be doing at MAR), printmaking, and sculpture.

Ms. Higuchi’s formal artistic training began as a child in Japan, and it has taken her to Boston, Massachusetts, where she was awarded the Diploma and Fifth Year Certificate from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she received her Master of Fine Arts Degree from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In addition, she has studied at Harvard University (Radcliffe College), Massachusetts College of Art, and New York University.

Ms. Higuchi has taught college and other courses involving her innovative artistic techniques, and she has exhibited at galleries and museums around the world, including Belgium, France, India, Japan, Sweden, and the United States. Iku’s a big baseball fan. Iku, herself pitched for a softball team at Harvard, and she has several relatives who played in Japan’s national high school baseball tournament. She roots for the New York Yankees, and loves A-Rod and Joba Chamberlain.

Anne Moon (second from left) gets a well-deserved break from nursing at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle WA, in order to explore her drawing and painting, uninterrupted, at the Montana Artist Refuge in May 2008.

Born in 1948 on the East Coast, Moon has been living and working and making art in Seattle since 1981. With parents aging and passing on, and children grown and establishing their own careers, anne has been able to study painting and drawing in greater depth at the gage Academy of Fine Art in Seattle.  She joined the Gallery North in Edmonds, WA in 2003. This is one of the oldest artist co-ops in the state and the gallery allows for permanent venue and continuous interface with the local and tourist public. Her figure work is now life size and these and her landscapes are now in many public and private collections.

Anne will continue to draw and paint figure while at the refuge (anyone want to model?), as well as enjoying plein air in a location very different from the Northwest, in weather, light, vegetation, architecture, and ethnic diversity of peoples. A practicing Buddhist, Anne often chooses a particular teaching to focus on for the day and this can often inform the work made.  But the best gift of this residency is the mystery that unfolds when art itself is given all the time and space it needs to show itself, however it finally emerges in visual understanding, uninterrupted by work, family, politics, and everything else life throws at us.

Jaimie Hays is residing at the Montana Artists Refuge during the last half of May. Hays is an adjunct instructor at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas. K-State is currently the only university in the United States that addresses diversity issues of race, class, and gender in its introductory freshman composition course.

Hays comes from a blue-collar background and is intensely interested in class and privilege; she was the first member on both sides of her family to attend and graduate from a university, where she was also a McNair Scholar. Hays is a third-year student in the Rainier Writers Workshop low-residency MFA program, where she focuses on creative nonfiction and its hybrid forms.

At the refuge, she plans on concentrating on her critical and creative theses as part of her on-going residency requirements. Her critical thesis looks closely at food memoirs through the lens of class, noting how Ruth Reichl, New York food critic, once mentioned in her memoir Tender at the Bone, “[…] if you watched people as they ate, you could find out who they were”. Her creative thesis also mirrors working-class and blue-collar concerns and how inevitable loss occurs in transitioning between white-collar and blue-collar worlds.

APRIL 2008

DOROTHEE KOCKS will reside at the Montana Artists Refuge during the month of April. She will work on her novel. Dorothee is managing editor and fiction editor of the Wasatch Journal, a sister publication of the Big Sky Journal out of Bozeman. She's the author of Dream a Little, a non-fiction book digging for fresh hope in myths of the West.

A former professor, a current journalist, a sometimes musician, and always a lover of fiction, Dorothee's here to complete a novel manuscript. Called The Glass Harmonica, or, The Sensualist's Tale, the novel tells the story of a Corsican musician, Chjara Valle, who believes that following the instinct for pleasure leads people toward virtue instead of toward vice. This idea gets Chjara into lots of trouble when she travels to the new United States in the early 1800s, where she becomes America's first musical celebrity.

Dorothee lives in Salt Lake City with her partner Mark Etheridge and their two dogs. She's originally from lots of places but loves being out here in the West. She has a bad habit of playing her accordion loudly and with feeling, so stay away unless you want to join in.

YVONNE KUNZ will reside at the Montana Artists Refuge in April. She will research the history of Montana’s mining industry, and explore the stories of immigrants and mining; relating them to the myths of her own large Irish/German Catholic family from Butte in the 1950s.From this research she plans to begin a series of mixed media drawings and paintings.

Kunz was born in Great Falls, MT in 1978. The daughter of a U.S. Navy servicewoman, she spent most of her childhood and early adulthood frequently moving. The nomadic nature of her early life pushed Yvonne to question the influences of her own identity, a topic she now explores within her art.

Kunz’s work is primarily figurative, even when a figure is not present. Navigating the elements of identity such as familial history, gender, environment, memory, and religion, her work explores the intimacy and ultimately the universal within identity. She combines drawing/painting with wax, found objects and images, and various cloths, such as silk, felted wool, and clothing. She also incorporates embroidery and text, such as prayer and poems.

Kunz earned her B.A. in Visual Arts from the University of Washington in 2005. She resides in Seattle with her husband and young son.

JANUARY THROUGH MARCH 2008

T.K. DALTON will reside at the refuge from January through March 2008. At the refuge, he will complete work on his novel-in-progress, Understudy, and hopes to also draft two short stories.

His fiction and nonfiction appears in Red Rock Review, High Country News, Bent Pin Quarterly, The L Magazine, Eyes of Desire 2: A Deaf GLBT Anthology, Thereby Hangs a Tale, The Local Writer, Rain Taxi, A Gathering of the Tribes, NewPages, California Literary Review, Peeks & Valleys, The FSTOP, Disability Studies Quarterly, and other magazines.

Dalton earned an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Oregon and a self-designed B.A. in Creative Writing and Deaf Studies at the University of Massachusetts. Before returning to graduate school, he worked as a journalist, first in public radio and later at a newspaper most notable for being the place Bob Woodward quit to write for The Washington Post. Dalton is the recipient of the Logsdon Fiction Prize, a grant from the Lane County Arts Council, and a scholarship from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Foundation.

Currently, he lives in Brooklyn, NY with his partner Seema, a sixth-grade language arts teacher in the neighborhood of East Flatbush. They will travel to India during her well-earned, too-short summer vacation.

One of our local artists, MAUREEN SULLIVAN (Mo), will be residing at the Montana Artists Refuge during the months of January through March.  She will be working on some of her short stories and a series of collage postcards.

Before moving to Basin in 2002 and after residing in Helena for 10 years, Sullivan and her outspoken dog, Adeline Mo Sullivan, spent 6 months walking along the Appalachian Trail, beginning at Springer Mountain, Georgia.  They ran out of steam at the Maine/New Hampshire state line, with 500 miles to go before reaching the terminus at Mount Katahdin in Maine.  Instead, Mo and Adeline switched directions and finished their journey in Basin.

When the opportunity recently arose and space became unexpectedly available for a winter residency at the Montana Artists Refuge, Sullivan and dog applied.  During their valuable time here, Adeline hopes to settle in by the gas heater, when not exploring the downtown area. Sullivan’s goal as a low-tech writer (no computer), is to work on a few short stories, try her hand at poetry, and construct 100 original and unique postcard collages.

STEPHANY VOGEL is residing at the Montana Artists Refuge through the months of February and March.  She plans to create two handmade books. The contents will be inspired by her stay in Basin.

Vogel studied art at the San Francisco Art Institute and Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, where she graduated in 1993.  Stephany lives and works in Washington State, in Coupeville, a small coastal town on Whidbey Island with her husband and children. Whidbey Island is between Seattle, WA and Vancouver, B.C.  This environment and landscape has deeply influenced Vogel’s work and outlook.

Having grown up in California,Vogel finds the palette and mood of the Northwest very different; not better, not worse, but different. The Northwest light, colors and reserved manner has changed her in ways she did not expect. Vogel is a multi-media artist, though she thinks of herself most often as a painter. She paints in acrylic, on canvas. She also makes books, which will be a focus of her work during her residency at MAR.  Writing is also an interest of hers and Vogel hopes to have a chance to read poetry locally. Vogel shows her visual art work, teaches and reads poetry wherever she is, whenever she can.

She writes, “For me making art is a vital part of my life, a form of meaning, and a way of working out thoughts and ideas I may have.  It is also a positive channel for my mental energy, a way of focusing my life force. I believe art making opens avenues to healing, learning, making amends and creating diplomacy.”

CLARISSA SLIGH will reside at the Montana Artists Refuge during the last half of February and all of March. Her work is included inthe Holter Art Museum’s “Speaking Volumes, Transforming Hate” exhibit. She is giving classes and lectures to the public at the Holter about her work. See the Holter Art Museum website for further information and scheduling.

One’s life sometimes collides with moments in history, causing it to be altered dramatically by external change. Certainly this was so for Clarissa Thompson Sligh. When she was 15 years old she became the lead plaintiff in the 1955 school desegregation case in Virginia (Clarissa Thompson et. al. vs. Arlington County School Board). From that moment forward, her work as a student and as a professional – first in math/science working for NASA, later in business, and finally, in the arts – has taken into account change, transformation, and complication: themes that related to her experiences fostering social justice.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s Sligh wove together the personal and the political in text-based installations, alternative photographs and artists’ books. She has combined photographs, drawings, text, personal stories and social justice issues to open up conversations on contestable themes.

Stuart Hall writes in Different: A Historical Context: “…Reading the family album is represented by the complex, in many ways extraordinary, body of work by Clarissa Sligh… In returning to re-investigate and re-evaluate her family experiences, she chose to adopt the eye, the language, the texts and formal ‘naivety’ of childhood.”

According to Debra Singer, “Reading Dick and Jane With Me contains at least three levels of signification that run throughout the work, the typed text and sketch drawings, the hand-written words, and then the ‘loosely-rendered figure of a young girl’, as a ‘witness figure’.”

Sligh’s early work, in the 1980s, gained her recognition as an artist who unflinchingly explored ideas that often challenged traditional values. In 2004, she completed a limited edition artist book, Wrongly Bodied Two, during an artist residency fellowship at the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, New York. In the book’s narrative, Deborah’s transformation to Jake runs parallel to the story of William and Ellen Craft, two slaves that journeyed to freedom while Ellen passed as a white male. The texts and images contemplate the relationships between liberation, transformation, perception, authenticity, performance and truth. Of this work that began as “Jake in Transition”, Carla Williams wrote in Contact Sheet, “What the viewer ultimately discovers through Sligh’s work is that the photographs aren’t so much about the process of changing genders…but of coming to terms with difference. His and ours.”

In the visitor’s handout for the Second Woodmere Triennial of Contemporary Photography in 2006, curator W. Douglas Paschall writes: Sometimes art tackles subjects we as a community or culture need to address, subjects that can find no comparable expression through any other means, subjects that might disturb us but that we have to understand more fully if we are to move forward …one series was chosen [of Clarissa Sligh’s work] for the depth of its inquiry and for the insightfulness of that inquiry’s pursuit and evocation. Jake in Transition treats a difficult subject, a controversial subject, a subject we all might benefit from comprehending better in all its dimensions. [Sligh] asks us to have compassion, simple human compassion, for an… epic journey to a personal freedom.” Sligh’s work continues to illustrate the power of art to transform a life.

A recipient of awards and fellowships including the Leeway Foundation’s Art and Change Grant (2006), Anonymous Was a Woman (2001), Andrea Frank Foundation (2000), and National Endowment for the Arts (1988), Sligh has also received multiple grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She was the recipient of the Annual Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography in1995 for the use of photography with other media, and the Annual President’s Award from the National Women’s Caucus for Art in 1994.

Additional artists’ books include Voyage(r): A Tourist Map to Japan, Reading Dick and Jane With Me, and What's Happening With Momma?. In 2001, Sligh’s installation of photographs and video, Jake In Transition From Female to Male first opened at Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, New York, and later traveled to the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point and Woodland Pattern, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The project continues to travel to universities throughout the United States.

Her most recent work will show at the Holter Museum of Art in Helena, Montana as part of an exhibition entitled Speaking Volumes: Transforming Hate opening January 25, 2008. Montana Human Rights Network initiated the project, and asked Sligh to respond to hate literature donated by a defecting member of a white supremacist group. The resulting piece transforms the pages of these books into a monument of peace and reconciliation in the form of over 700 hand-folded cranes. Hope is a hanging mobile strung between glass beads and measuring 5 feet in length.

Sligh was born in Washington, D.C., raised in Arlington, Virginia, lived in Manhattan for 30 years and now resides in Philadelphia. She is currently a faculty member at New York University and the University of Pennsylvania.