News and Events | Montana Museum of Art & Culture | July 2014 

 
In This Issue
Through July 5, 2014
Opening July 17, 2014
Out To Lunch Sponsorship
The Art of the State
Artwork of the Month

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SUMMER GALLERY HOURS

Wed., Thurs., Sat. 12 - 3pm
Fri. 12 - 6pm
  

ACADEMIC YEAR GALLERY HOURS

Tues., Wed., Sat. 12 - 3pm
Thurs. and Fri. 12 - 6pm
 

THROUGH JULY 5, 2014

 

This is Not A Silent Movie: Four Contemporary Alaska Native Artists

 

Meloy and Paxson Galleries

 

The exhibition title comes from author Sherman Alexie, who encourages audiences to shift their notions of Native peoples away from narrow, stereotypical views. He states, "This is not a silent movie, our voices will save our lives."

 
Featured are works by Sonya Kelliher-Combs, Susie Silook,
Da-ka-xeen Mehner and Nicholas Galanin, four Alaska Native artists who create contemporary installation-based work that explores gender, memory, race, nationality and cultural heritage.
 

Funding for this exhibition is provided by the Western States Arts Federation (WESTAF) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). This exhibition was organized by the Craft & Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles, California in partnership with the Anchorage Museum, Alaska.

 

Image: detail, Da-ka-xeen Mehner, Double-Headed Language Daggers, ca. 2012, variable dimensions, courtesy of the artist

 

Banner image: detail, Nicholas Galanin, There Is No I, ca. 2012, digital photograph, courtesy of the artist 

 

OPENING JULY 17, 2014

 

Sandra Dal Poggetto: Meditations on the Field

 

Meloy and Paxson Galleries

 

Helena-based artist Sandra Dal Poggetto will be featured in a solo exhibition of new and recent works. 

Dal Poggetto uses an abstract language and fragments of the western landscape-hide, feathers, wood and wire-to create evocative paintings and drawings. She draws on and deconstructs both Euro-American pictorial language and American Indian visual traditions to create uneasy syntheses which Pulitzer-Prize winning author/critic Mark Stevens describes as "truthful reflection[s] of our culture's complex relations to the landscape of the West." In addition to displaying her artwork, Dal Poggetto will select objects from the museum's Permanent Collection to illustrate different philosophical and aesthetic understandings of the human relationship to the natural world. Through Dal Poggetto's re-contextualization of these works, she probes, questions and reveals the past, calling for a renewed connection with nature.

 

Image: Sandra Dal Poggetto, American Fork #9,  ca. 2013-2014, 90 1/2 x 103 1/2 inches, courtesy of the artist 

OUT TO LUNCH SPONSORSHIP 

 

Join us to celebrate SUMMER in Missoula!  MMAC is co-sponsoring the Missoula Downtown Association's Wednesday, July 23, 2014 Out to Lunch from 11am-2pm at Caras Park in downtown Missoula.  Hop on the Out to Lunch trolley free anywhere on South Higgins and join us for this lunchtime festival showcasing Gladys Friday, a soul, funk, R&B band.  Out to Lunch and Missoula Downtown and MMAC...Connecting Our Community!  

 

 

THE ART OF THE STATE

 
The Art of the State
 

MMAC presents an unprecedented handbook highlighting its Permanent Collection of nearly 11,000 objects. In celebration of its upcoming 120th anniversary in 2015, MMAC presents "The Art of the State: 120 Artworks for 120 Years."  


From January 22 through May 23, MMAC will present a major exhibition featuring all 120 pieces included in the handbook along with special related programs. 

 

Great as gifts, softcover handbooks are available for $35 and hardcovers are $55. For more information or to order the handbook, call 406-243-2019 or email [email protected]. Shipping and handling apply. For more information about the museum, visit www.umt.edu/montanamuseum.

 

 

 
 
 
Image:book coverThe Art of the State; 120 Artworks for 120 Years, MMAC and the University of Montana Press, 2013 

 

ARTWORK OF THE MONTH 

   

This Month's Feature: 

 

Fireboard for a Bow Drill

Fossilized ivory, 10,000 B.C. - 200 B.C.

Yupik, St. Lawrence Island, Alaska

Collected by Captain W.T. Murnan between 1911 and 1917

MMAC Permanent Collection

 

Near the close of the exhibition This is Not a Silent Movie: Four Alaska Native Artists on July 5th, we wanted to share this Yupik fireboard that comes from St. Lawrence Island. The holes would have held tiny wood shavings and tinder, while a spindle was rotated rapidly with a stringed bow to create the necessary friction to create fire. St. Lawrence Island has been a site of human habitation for millennia and formed part of a land bridge that once joined Asia with North America during the Pleistocene period.  That period ended with the last ice age 11,700 years ago. The island is called Sivuqaq in the Central Siberian Yupik language, and is located closer to Russia than Alaska, just 36 miles from the Chukchi Peninsula.

 

This drill was collected by Captain William T. Murnan at the beginning of the 20th century. He traveled north from Seattle at age 14 as a stow-away aboard a windjammer whaler bound for the Arctic.  The crew adopted him and he returned to the same vessel every year from 1911 to 1917. Murnan collected fossilized whale and seal teeth that are also in the MMAC Permanent Collection.  Two of these teeth are pierced, revealing they were used as beads or jewelry. Teeth that are fossilized or collected along beachfronts are exempt from the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act. Murnan's fascination with oceans continued throughout his life. During WWII, he worked in the Coast Guard as a shipyard welder. After the war, he built a 30 foot long stainless steel yawl (a two-masted sailboat) of his own design, which he christened The Seven Seas II. In it, he circumnavigated the globe from 1948-1952, the first person to complete such a voyage in so small a sailboat.  

 

  

 

 

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