DECEMBER

Melissa Bangs was at the Montana Artists Refuge in December. Melissa is a fourth-generation farm girl from Montana. She was born and raised in Missoula on an organic subsistence farm. Melissa has dedicated much of the last decade and a half of her life to social change and activism.

She has worked with immigrant communities as a labor organizer in textile factories. She trained young labor organizers on campaigns in the Flathead Valley through the AFL-CIO’s Union Summer, and as the Development Director of an international human rights and women’s empowerment organization, The SHARE Foundation.

As a painter, Melissa is self-taught. Her works have followed in the same vein as her activism, social change. In 2005, Melissa developed the show VETERAN VOICES. It is a collection of cut-watercolor paper and mixed-assemblage collage portraits made of burnt wood and metal. Each piece is accompanied by the words of an Iraq veteran that returned from a tour of duty and refused to redeploy – some ending up in prison, others with a dishonorable discharge and restriction to base – all of them with something utterly powerful to say about freedom.

Other recent works include: a collection of water-color/cut-paper collages focusing on U.S. Imperialism – shown in Brooklyn, New York at Naidre’s (June 2004); a series of shows at City Art in San Francisco, touching on issues ranging from bio-engineered food to mad cow disease (2000-2002).

In 2005, during the 25th Anniversary Commemoration of the Assassination of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero – Melissa’s original painting of Romero was dedicated to the nuns that care for the humble home that was once his. This painting will hang in Romero’s home in perpetuity. Thousands of people from around the world travel to Romero’s home each year. Once there, they pay homage to his living spirit and to his willingness to speak out against U.S.-backed violence and oppression in El Salvador, even in the face of certain death.

Check out the Events page for information about her exhibit on March 7 in Missoula.

NOVEMBER AND DECEMBER

Janet Christenot was at the Montana Artists Refuge during the months of November and December.

She says: "Drawn to the outdoors and the beauty of the wheat fields at harvest time, I hand gathered stalks of golden grain and found that weaving wheat was a natural creative expression for me.

As an explorer of this ancient art form, my goal is to let the possibilities present themselves whether it is through intricately woven designs or enjoying the challenge and sense of excitement that comes with creating an original and unique work of art.

The remoteness of the expansive prairie provides me with daily inspiration and has helped me as an artist to develop my own style and techniques.

Wheat weaving has origins that have been dated over 8,000 years to the Egyptians. Many ancient cultures believed that a spirit lived in the grain and the weaving provided a trap for the spirit of the field, hoping to ensure a good growing season in the spring.

AUGUST

Nancy Glover was at the Montana Artists Refuge during the month of August. She worked on "bringing together the intuitive, process - oriented abstractions and her interests in the tradition of botanicals." Glover is interested in painting in the presence of her childhood landscape (Montana) rather than in its absence.

Glover received her BA at the University of Montana, Missoula and her MFA from Hunter College, City University of New York. In 2005 she received her certificate in Botanical Illustration from the New York Botanical Gardens. Glover has taught high school and college art classes in New York and Portland, Oregon. She has exhibited her work in several solo and group exhibitions in New York. In 2004 Nancy received the Talas Award. She has participated in several other residency programs.

Angela Zammarelli was at the Montana Artists Refuge for the month of August.  She planned to do a lot of puttering in her studio but mainly focused on work for "When I go Like This, You Will Know it is Time."

Zammarelli's current works focus on exploration through play, mainly in domestic interior spaces. Here she comes into contact with different beings and learns about their lives and functions in regards to each other.    She is interested in the space that one can get to through play and how vivid and "real" it becomes.  She recieved her BFA from UMass Amherst in 2003 and her MFA from Minneapolis College of Art and Design in the spring of 2007.

Casey Charles was at the Montana Artists Refuge during the month of August.  He planned to complete his poetry manuscript and work on new poems.  Casey also plans to revise some previous fiction writing as well.

Charles is Professor of English at the University of Montana, where he teaches law and literature, gay and lesbian studies, and Shakespeare. The Sharon Kowalski Case: Lesbian and Gay Rights on Trial (Kansas 2003) was nominated for a nonfiction Publishing Triangle Award in 2004. His poetry chapbook, Controlled Burn appeared in 2007 (Pudding House Press), and his manuscript, Writing it Out, was a finalist for the May Swenson Prize in 2006.  Most recently Charles is the author of “Our Homo Town” in the Missoula Independent (July, 2007) and “Patricia, la Poeta” a poem in Neo (July, 2007).

JULY

Mulderry is a scholar of U.S. history who is currently working as a lecturer and assistant director of the Social Studies undergraduate program at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  She holds a Ph.D. (’06) in American History from Brandeis University.  What unites Darra’s teaching and writing is her passion for telling life stories and her interest in revealing changing ideas of “the good” as expressed in political thought, literature, theology, psychology, and education in the 19th and 20th centuries.  Prior to her graduate studies, Darra worked as a Jesuit volunteer in Great Falls, Montana (1981-82); taught secondary school in Albany, New York; led intercultural adult education programs on nonviolent conflict resolution in India; worked as a program evaluator for the New York City Board of Education; and taught in a G.E.D. program for women on public assistance in Boston.

Daniele Lambrechts was at the Montana Artists Refuge during the month of July.  She planned to “absorb and paint the great western landscape, its broadness and particular drama as opposed to the tightness and closeness of the Eastern landscape.” Through her landscape work she explores shapes and colors.

Lambrechts was born and educated in France. She has lived in California and New England.  Daniele attended classes at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, Massachusetts; Maine College of Art in Portland, Maine and Art Student League of New York City.  She has also studied with a number of Maine artists.  Lambrechts worked 25 years in the museum world before she came to live in Maine, settling in Bath, on the Kennebec River.  She started painting seriously 7 years ago.

Eric Moe resided at the Montana Artists Refuge during the months of June and July with his wife Barbara Weissberger.  Eric planned to spend this time composing a Concerto for Percussionist Robert Schultz and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project.

Eric, composer of what the NY Times calls "music of winning exuberance," has received numerous grants and awards for his work, including the Lakond Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim Fellowship; commissions from the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Fromm Foundation, the Koussevitzky Foundation, and Meet-the-Composer USA; fellowships from the Wellesley Composer's Conference and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts; and residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Bellagio, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Millay Colony, the Ragdale Foundation, the Montana Artists Refuge, the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians, and the American Dance Festival.

His sit-trag/one-woman opera Tri-Stan was hailed by the New York Times in 2005 as “a blockbuster” and “a tour de force,” a work of “inspired weight” that “subversively inscribe[s] classical music into pop culture,” In its review of the piece, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette concluded, “For an audience, it is one of those rare works that transcends the cultural divide while still being rooted in both sides.” The work will soon be available on a Koch International Classics compact disc. Other all-Moe CDs are available on Albany Records (Kicking and Screaming, Up & At ‘Em), Koch (Sonnets to Orpheus and Siren Songs), and Centaur (On the Tip of My Tongue).

Also a pianist and keyboard player, Moe has performed works by hundreds of composers, from Anthony Davis to Stefan Wolpe. His playing can be heard on the Koch, CRI, Mode, and AK/Coburg labels in the music of John Cage, Roger Zahab, Marc-Antonio Consoli, Mathew Rosenblum, and Felix Draeseke. His solo recording The Waltz Project Revisited - New Waltzes for Piano, a CD of waltzes for piano by two generations of American composers, was recently released on Albany. Gramophone magazine says in its review of the CD, “Moe’s command of the varied styles is nothing short of remarkable.” A founding member of the San Francisco-based EARPLAY ensemble, he currently co-directs the Music on the Edge new music concert series in Pittsburgh.

Moe was educated at the University of California at Berkeley (M.A., Ph.D.) and at Princeton University (A.B.) He is currently Professor of Composition and Theory at the University of Pittsburgh, where he directs the graduate program in composition and the department's electroacoustic music studio. More information is available at his website, <www.ericmoe.net>.

Barbara Weissberger resided at the Montana Artists Refuge in June and July with her husband Eric Moe.  She worked on drawings that explore the themes of “consumption and the body, and how these intersect with ‘supersize me’ America.”

Weissberger  investigates the continuum between nature and culture by constructing images from fragments of muscle magazines and her own photographs of hamburgers, crocheted blankets, butterflies and other natural and artificial imagery. Each work is based on a preliminary collage and takes its final form as a watercolor drawing. Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore’s Dilemma have both informed her muscle-meaty inventions. Recent shows include PCA, Pittsburgh, PA (solo April/May 2007); Capsule Gallery, NYC (solo); SPACES Gallery, Cleveland, OH; the Mattress Factory Museum, Pittsburgh, PA; and the traveling exhibition Figures of Thinking. Numerous residencies include MacDowell, Yaddo, VCCA and MAR. Weissberger is the recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2007!

Susan Rushing Adams was at the Montana Artists Refuge with her family during the months of June and July.  She planned to complete and revise her short stories, take photos of places around the Basin area, and work on her novel.

Susan is working on her PhD in literary studies at the University of Texas at Dallas, where she is editor of Sojourn, A Journal of the Arts.  Her interests include creative writing, contemporary American fiction and poetry, and medical humanities.  Her writing experiments with blending poetry with prose, text with image.  Adams most loves being in mountains and forests, so Basin is now one of her favorite places.

Tim Willey resided at the Montana Artists Refuge in June.  He spent his time writing poems and stories.

Born 1955 in Bird Island, Minnesota, and raised on the family farm, Tim is the eldest of nine children.  He received his BAA (applied arts) in education, with majors in Theatre, English, and Communications, from the University of Minnesota, Duluth, in 1978.  Willey earned his MFA in Theatre (directing) from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 1986.

As a teacher, Tim has survived two states, four high schools, nine principals, and 25 years in the classroom.  In theatre, a life-long passion, he has designed, built, directed, and managed stage productions (occasionally even performing) for three decades.  Venues range from high school to university, community to semi-professional (he was paid).

In writing, a relatively recent pursuit, Tim is working on a collection of poetry and autobiographical tales based upon a five-generation tradition of family gatherings and heritage entitled Making Sausage.  He is also writing The English Teacher’s Guide to Survival in an NCLB Era (or Passive Resistance in the Active Voice).  Tim currently resides in Great Falls, Montana, teaching at C.M. Russell High School.

Josh Goldman was at the Montana Artists Refuge during the months of April and May.  He composed a few electroacoustic sound works for computer/CD generated playback and for computer/CD generated playback with guitar.  He will submit these pieces to competitions and festivals and as part of various PhD applications.

Barbara Mehlman was at the Montana Artists Refuge during the months of April, May and June.  She worked on the “contemporary portrait”; a combination of traditional and digital media, sculpture, painting, digital painting , and video.  She will explore “how one could keep with the structure and idea of a painting but still have it move”.

Mehlman received her M.F.A from Claremont Graduate School in Painting and Installation Art.  She continues to teach at the college and university level in both the Digital and Art Divisions. Barbara is inventive in her ability to work with multiple mediums including traditional paint materials, sculpture (plaster, wire, paper) and digital media (painting, photography, animation). She leverages one medium with another to create a work that integrates live action and imagery together with her strong painting style.  Mehlman founded VIA/Visual Intelligence Artists to develop the technology and process for creating Artitorials, (Art + Editorial) or the ability to go on-site to an event and create digital short stories in real time.  She received a grant (titled Random Portraits) to create Artitorials of the people of Sicily, Italy. Barbara is looking forward to creating new work at the Montana Artists Refuge this year. She continues to maintain an active studio, invent new combinations of media, and seek out new adventures in teaching, traveling and painting.

Eliza Martin spent the month of April at the Montana Artists Refuge.  Martin writes, “Human interactions are what make life worth living”.  She plans to create an art installation which highlights her study of people “who do not fit into the normal description of success.”  This installation will include:  photographs, sound bytes, large scale oil paintings and books, all developed to invite the viewer’s interest in a person’s story.

Martin was born in Los Angeles, California and raised in the mountains of rural Virginia.  She focused on black and white photography in high school.  She began painting in The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  Eliza transferred to the University of Virginia to study at the Curry School of Education.  She graduated with a Bachelors degree in Studio Art with a concentration in Painting and Photography and a Masters degree in Education.  Since graduating Eliza taught middle school art for two years and then left to pursue her art fulltime.  She currently lives and paints in Scottsville, Virginia.

In her art, Martin draws inspiration from the natural world, and the stories and faces of the people around her.  Her main focus in painting is to create a feeling or emotion to connect with the viewer.  There is a look in the eyes of the subject, or a feeling conveyed by the mood of the painting that seems familiar.  The idea is to find those universal human truths that create a connective tissue that draws all people together.