Visual Arts
A celebration of creativity
Sweet Pea Festival of the Arts
It’s Sweet Pea Festival time again, a gala we look forward to every year.
When you scroll down BozemanEvent.net, it becomes overwhelming how many activities are happening at the 30th annual Sweet Pea Festival of the Arts — more than 45 different theatrical, musical and dance performances are listed over three days.
And this doesn’t include the Tater Pigs and other delectables that we look forward to every year served by local non-profits. And perusing the arts & crafts vendors tucked under the trees of the rolling green Lindley Park.
This truly is a homegrown festival that started in 1978 by a group of dedicated Bozemanites to stage a “celebration of creativity.” Over 20,000 people attend Sweet Pea festival, which is almost half the population of Bozeman alone. It’s an annual pilgrimage for folks returning to Bozeman where they once called home, tourists visiting or an ideal time to invite the parents for a visit.
Here are just a few of the creative highlights of the Sweet Pea weekend:
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Western Writers
An Interview with Stephen Trimble
Utah-based writer and photographer Stephen Trimble's Lasting Light: 125 Years of Grand Canyon Photography (Northland Publishing) compiles dozens of the most memorable photographs of the Grand Canyon over the years, and pairs them with the stories of the photographers who took them and the history of photography in the Grand Canyon. The book won the 2007 Western Heritage Award in the photography book category. I recently interviewed Trimble via email about how he selected the photos for Lasting Light, how landscape photographers try to avoid clichés and "eco-porn," and the millions of snapshots of the Grand Canyon in family photo albums across the world.
New West: How did you select the photographers and specific photographs to include in Lasting Light?
Stephen Trimble: Lasting Light began when three people working with Grand Canyon photographers realized that the tales from the field were as compelling as the pictures themselves. Richard Jackson, at Hance Partners in Flagstaff, Arizona, had been making large custom prints for professional Grand Canyon photographers for years. He loved hearing the stories behind the pictures told to him by the photographers. He realized that he even made better prints after he had heard the stories! Richard drove up to Grand Canyon National Park and proposed a major exhibit featuring not just the Canyon, not just photos as fine art—but, rather, an exhibit featuring the passion and dedication and stories of an entire generation of Grand Canyon photographers. The people. The experiences.
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New West Images: In The Loupe
Salt Lake City’s 337 Project: A Temporary Temple of Art
Adam and Dessi Price purchased a run-down building at 337 South 400 East Street in Salt Lake City with plans to destroy it and build green, mixed-use condominiums in its place. But before they let the wrecking ball fly they decided to give the building over to art.
The Price's invited 143 local artists to converge on the building's 42 rooms and transform them as their muses saw fit. The resulting collective monument was opened to the public from May 18 - 20, and will be open again from May 25 - 27. So if you're in the area, hurry down...the building is scheduled for demolition in early June.
If you can't swing a road-trip to Utah this week, several FLICKR photobloggers have done a wonderful job of documenting the project. Check out the big, beautiful photo sets of bigbrownhouse and art enthusiast.
Update: FLICKRer Rich Legg has also created a very nice set from the project. Check it out here.
You can visit the project's website at www.337project.org.
Featured Essay
Montana Love: 18 Stories About Love, Relationships and Sexuality
Back in February, Missoula photographer Brain McDermott gave New West a Valentine's Day present. The present took the form of an audio-visual essay called "Local Poets on Love" which combined photographs of five Missoula poets with audio recordings of each poet reading and discussing love poetry. We were charmed and grateful.
But it turns out McDermott was holding out on us. He has a lot more love to give. His Valentine's Day essay was a spin-off of a much larger project that he has been creating for his master's thesis in journalism at the University of Montana, a project he calls Montana Love. The project combines photography, audio recordings and music to tell 18 stories of love and relationships in big sky country. The stories range from a married military couple dealing with the insecurity of separate deployments, to a couple living and loving through the process of gender reassignment. We visit a lonely Montana farmer once dubiously dubbed "The Loneliest Man in America" and learn how a young woman's quest for sexual health and happiness led her to become Montana's only licensed sexologist. The stories are full of color and variety, span the full emotional gamut, and are told with brevity, care and wit.
The full project can be seen at montanalove.net.
Talkin' about a revolution
Kerouac’s On the Road Lands in Santa Fe
Jack Kerouac may be long dead, but his legacy left an indelible mark on American culture. In a in post-World War II era formerly marked by conformism and conservative social values, Kerouac rejected those norms. Instead, he launched a counter culture revolution through literature, art and music. Kerouac's keystone novel, On the Road celebrates its fiftieth anniversary this year, and it, along with other relics of the Beat movement, are touring the country in a traveling exhibition.
The Palace of the Governor’s Museum in Santa Fe recently held the opening of the “Jack Kerouac and the Writer's Life.” The original On the Road manuscript, said to be Kerouac’s defining novel of the Beat Generation, is one of the many literary treasures on display. In its 120-ft. glory, the scroll was typed on a series of 12-ft. rolls of tracing paper that were taped together. He preferred this method to feeding page after page into his typewriter, which would have interrupted his muse.
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Honey! look! an animation festival... better lock up the kids
Spike and Mike’s Twisted Animation Festival Visits Missoula
Spike and Mike’s Twisted Animation Festival is not for the weak of heart (or stomach). After I finished the 90-straight minutes of animation I was desensitized to everything around me. Some one could have come up and kicked me right it the groin and I wouldn’t have noticed. I can’t remember in what part of the movie I stopped having feeling. Was it the part when the little chicken ate the magic mushrooms and had sex with a horse? Or was it the 11-minute-long street fight with zombie mothers' stomachs exploding and little zombies jumping out only to get kicked in the face and explode into a pool of blood? I just can’t remember anymore.
If you are a fan of Adult Swim on the Cartoon Network then this festival is for you. Imagine Adult Swim but with lots of nudity and more gore. I’m a fan of animation and I actually really liked this movie but it really is hard to take at times. The festival started in 1990 as a place for showcasing short animated pieces that were just too naughty for the mainstream. Animation giants like South Park, Beavis and Butthead, Powerpuff Girls and Celebrity Death Match all got their start at this festival.
Spike and Mike’s Twisted Animation Festival will be at the Crystal Theater in Missoula from March 27th to April 1st. It will cost you a couple bucks but for me, it's totally worth it. Does that make me a bad person?
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Alternative Art in the West
jRODaRT Breaks Bozeman’s Boundaries
Painting alternative art with colorful, quirky characters in a Western town may not seem easy. But local Bozeman artist jROD proves otherwise.
“This community is looking for alternative art, not just cowboy and western themes,” he said. “It’s filling a niche, particularly with the younger population.”
JRODaRT is enticing, taking the imagination on an excursion. His style is entertaining while refreshing the viewer’s mental picture of a mundane world we often perceive ourselves in.
In only his second year as a full-time artist, Jarrod Eastman is currently prepping for shows spanning from Los Angeles and Boston to Atlanta and Arizona. But he continues to encourage Bozeman’s culture and arts by showcasing his work at the Bozeman High School’s DeWeese Gallery and donating art to local non-profit organizations.
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Featured Photographer
Bob McGowan’s “Transitions” Graces the New West Office
The New West home office is fortunate to host the photography of Bob McGowan this month. Bob's show, Transitions, captures the comings and goings of travelers in Seattle's Sea-Tac airport. These little slices of life in transit, lit by moody afternoon light, are printed on a metallic paper perfectly suited to the steely sheen of the airport decor. The show will hang at the New West offices (just off of N. Higgins, in the alley behind Worden's and the Old Post) for the month of March, so please swing by during business hours to see the show. For those of you unable to make it here, we've posted the show in the New West Photo Gallery. Enjoy!
Click [read more] for Bob's statement about this show, or click the image to go directly to the online gallery.
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Interactive Public Art
Pulling Paper Towel Poetry
Some believe the simple text of poetry has a fading presence in a world of flashy television and colorful magazines.
For that reason, Michele Corriel created the Paper Towel Poetry dispenser.
Standing 5 feet tall on a leg of its own, a simple paper towel dispenser awaits to dab a taker with poetry after lured by the words, “Poetry Dispenser. Please Take One.”
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Western Artists
Hal Gould Photography Retrospective
This Friday, a retrospective of the photography of Hal Gould opens at The Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins. Gould, who was born in 1920, has led an eventful life, from his childhood in New Mexico, to his service in World War II, to various jobs (boxer, railroad worker, aviator), to his education at the Art Institute of Chicago, and the opening of his photography gallery, the Camera Obscura, in Denver. The Camera Obscura is a wonderful gallery across the street from the Denver Art Museum, packed with interesting prints that Gould has assembled through lifelong cultivation of friendships with photographers.
According to the Wikipedia article on Gould, "Early in his gallery career, Gould staged a show selling prints by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston for $25 apiece. There were no takers. Today, Weston's Green Pepper sells for $100,000 to $200,000 at auction." But while Gould's most visible role has been as the friendly, bolo-tie wearing proprietor of his gallery, he's also put together a distinguished and adventurous career as a photographer, traveling all over the world to capture amazing images. Age has never slowed him down: the year he turned 80, Gould traveled to Antarctica and came back with some wonderful photographs, and he visited Africa in 2004.
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