October First Friday includes new shows by popular younger artists like Stella Nall as well as homegrown traditions like the Missoula Monster Project. Here are some highlights.
Stella Nall, ‘Offerings from My Heart’
Missoula Art Museum
Nall, a first descendent of the Apsáalooke (Crow) tribe, has developed an instantly recognizable style since graduating from the University of Montana, bringing her visions of playful creatures and messages about identity to ever bigger venues: group shows, then murals, and now a solo exhibition at the Missoula Art Museum, without leaving her home state.
Nall (Bisháakinnes, or “Rode Buffalo” is her Crow name) even has her work in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. Earlier this year, she was included in “19 Under 39,” a juried exhibition of Montana artists under age 40 hosted by the Montana Museum of Art and Culture. You might have seen her work in mural form at the Mountain Line Downtown Transfer Center, too, or in the “Feeling Welcome” alley behind the ZACC.
This exhibition will be on view in Missoula before traveling to the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, next year.
Details: On view through December. First Friday reception, Oct. 3, 5-7 p.m. with live music by Dylan Running Crane. Getting in: The MAM is renovating its entryway. Head to the north entrance by the art park.
Jennifer Leutzinger, Delia Touche, Brittney Denham-Whisonant, ‘Rearranging Stars’
Missoula Art Museum
Contemporary quilts and prints with a star theme come together in this group exhibition by three artists.
Leutzinger owned and operated the Brink Gallery, a downtown contemporary gallery with a focus on non-commercial art, and now Bob’s Your Uncle, an art space on the Westside on Toole Avenue that features local artists. It’s also home for her art studio, where she’s continued exploring fabric works, including a high-selling disco ball wall piece featured in the MAM auction in February.
Touche (Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota/Assiniboine) is based in the Midwest but has art connections in Montana through the Open AIR art program, where she spent weeks at the American Prairie.
Denham-Whisonant is an art professor and gallery director at Sheridan College in Wyoming.
Details: Oct. 3, 5-7 p.m. with live music by Dylan Running Crane. Getting in: The MAM is renovating its entryway. Head to the north entrance by the art park.
Missoula Monster Project
Zootown Arts Community Center
If you haven’t heard of the Missoula Monster Project, it is yet another DIY Garden City tradition started up by the Zootown Arts Community Center and the enterprising child of a supporter.
Now for the 11th year, the nonprofit has teamed up with Missoula County Public Schools. This year, the kindergarten classes at Franklin, Jeannette Rankin and Chief Charlo elementary schools participated.
The format is simple but results endlessly variable as the mind of a child set loose with crayons. The students draw a monster of their own devising, including a short biography. They’re clever, funny, charming and have left-field ideas that adults secretly or openly envy. Then, local artists, from seasoned career professionals to college students or whoever wants to try their hand, create an interpretation of the child’s monster. The finished pieces are displayed together in the gallery. The adult monsters are for sale, with proceeds going toward MCPS Fine Arts Department. Last year, the horde of fabulated creatures raised $3,317.
It’s one of the nonprofit’s most popular annual exhibitions, so expect a strong turnout.
Details: On view all month. First Friday, Oct. 3, 5-8 p.m. Reception features music by Cowboy Andy and the Salamanders, a local indie version of a kids’ band, plus monster cake from Yoke’s.
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Brooke Armstrong, Danielle O’Malley and Tina Opp, ‘Therefore, I Am’
The Clay Studio of Missoula
This group exhibition of work by ceramic artists “explores the idea that our existence and identity are shaped by the context of surroundings,” according to the news release, which notes the title of the show is a reference to “Es, ergo sum” (“Or you are, therefore I am”), a variation on Descartes’ famed phrase, “Cogito, ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”).
Armstrong, who earned her MFA at the University of Montana School of Visual and Media Arts, is now an assistant professor at the University of Texas in San Antonio. Her work, which she’s shown in Missoula since finishing school, comprises narrow porcelain beads.
Opp’s based in North Dakota, is also a beekeeper whose work sometimes references honeycombs.
O’Malley makes large-scale work with environmental themes, the release said. She’s the executive director of the Art Mobile of Montana and director of Montana Clay.
Details: On view until Nov. 1. Reception Friday, Oct. 3, 5-8 p.m.
Bev Beck Glueckert, ‘Remembrance 2025’
The Artists’ Shop
Bev Beck Glueckert, a mixed-media artist, is marking the season with a show of prints, drawings and mixed media, with imagery of nature (birds, flora, topography) that invite contemplation of mortality.
“The current body of work reflects sentiments around death and honors those who have gone before us,” according to a statement forwarded by the gallery.
Details: On view through Oct. 31. Opening reception First Friday, 5-8 p.m.
David Mensing, ‘In the Majesty of the Commonplace’
Dana Gallery
One of the painting-centric gallery’s longtime artists, David Mensing, is holding a solo exhibition with reverent renderings of landscape scenes in his signature style, with subtle red underpainting and heightened highlights, with his distinctive blocky rendering of trees, mountains and more.
Details: On view all month. First Friday reception with the artist from 5-8 p.m. He’ll give a painting demonstration on Saturday starting at 4 p.m.
Later in the month
Sara Mast, ‘Standing in the River’
Montana Museum of Art and Culture
The museum’s new building will host three shows this fall, beginning with paintings and sculpture by Mast, a painting and drawing professor at Montana State University. According to the catalog, the works touch on her long interest in art, nature and science. The abstract paintings, heavily textural, and often in pairs called diptychs, allude to night skies, forests in light and dark and more. The free-standing sculptures comprise columns of rock-like objects made from PEM glass, or plasma enhanced melter. According to the catalog, a technology developed at MIT can transform trash into nontoxic glass.
Details: Opens Thursday, Oct. 16, 5-7 p.m.
Cory Walsh is the arts and entertainment reporter for the Missoulian.
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