May 2024 Featured Artist: Coral Raines
This month’s featured artist is Coral Raines! Coral graduated with a Bachelor of Art in 2011 from the University of Montana after having moved back to Montana from Washington, where she had lived for eight years. Coral has spent the past decade navigating the relationship between the environment and its influence on her identity and well-being. How does it shape our perceptions, our lifestyles, and our grief journeys? These are the things she explores as she paints animal subjects with distant Montana landscapes in the background, as a grounding, spiritual anchor. See her work at The Wren Hotel First Friday May 3rd from 5 – 7 pm!
Visit her website here.
April 2024 Featured Artist: High School Students – Montana World Affairs Council
During Academic WorldQuest, a global affairs conference, high school students from across the state collaborated to create an Arabic Friendship Mosaic. They learned about the history and craft of Islamic tilemaking, integrating Arabic calligraphy into the designs. Arabic speakers shared stories about friendship, teaching phrases and words that the students incorporated into their tiles.
Learn more Here
March 2024 Featured Artist: Barbara Morrison
Barbara Morrison is a native of Montana, born in Billings in 1953. She attended the University of New Mexico, and graduated in 1975 with a degree in English Literature, magna cum laude. She returned to Montana and began to paint and to make textile art, which Barbara showed in the Castle Gallery and then in the Toucan Gallery in Billings. In 1986 she received her teaching certification from Rocky Mountain College in Billings. She moved to Missoula in 1987, where she has continued to make art and show it at different places around the country. Her art has been featured in several magazines and in four books about unusual techniques in doll making, and about polymer clay. Barbara’s paintings have been shown nationally and internationally.
Visit her website here.
February 2024 Featured Artist: Kaisha Gerhardt
Kaisha Gerhardt is a mixed media artist pursuing a degree in Media Arts focusing on game design along with a minor in business administration at the University of Montana. Kaisha explores a range of mediums to work as a conduit for expressing personal and external experiences that elicit abstract impacts, fostering self-reflection. In 2022, Kaisha worked as a graphic designer with the Milwaukee Road Historical Association to publish Taft: The Story of the St. Paul Pass Tunnel and America’s Wickedest City – Building the Hiawatha Trail. This year, Kaisha worked with the city of Missoula Public Art Committee for the Traffic Signal Box Project, where her design for the project is displayed on the traffic signal box in Missoula, MT. Kaisha is currently interning with the Non-Profit Missoula-based Artist-in-Residency program, Open AIR. Alongside working as a 3D asset creator with the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation.
Visit her website here.
December 2023 / January 2024 Featured Artist: Abby Elliot
Abby Elliot attended Moore College of Art in Philadelphia, Pa. Originally from New Jersey, she has settled in Missoula after living in Santa Fe, New Mexico for eight years. Abby is retired after having worked in the picture-framing industry for over twenty years. Her work can be seen at Art Attic Framing and Design and various shows around Missoula. The collages/mixed media pieces she creates are done to express her thoughts and emotions. She’s inspired by nature, current events, books, life experiences and concern for the environment is frequently on her mind.
November 2023 Featured Artist: Madelaine Millar
Madelaine Millar is a 24-year-old artist and freelance writer who was born and raised in Missoula, Montana. She started painting young – some of her earliest memories are of her father teaching her one-point perspective on the kitchen floor – but art took a backseat to academics when she moved to Boston to study journalism. She picked up a brush again when the COVID pandemic hit, and has been using her art to express, expunge, process, and share her emotional states since then.
Visit Madelaine’s website here.
October 2023 Featured Artist: CJ Ash
CJ Ash draws inspiration from nature; as well as beauty in the old, rusted, and patinaed. Having started with pastels and pottery before moving on to paints, CJ has found his niche in using only his fingers to create his pieces. Fingerpainting frees him to create in a more impressionistic tone. Starting with a blank canvas, CJ builds layer after layer to create the depth and texture desired to bring the subject to life.
Visit CJ’s website here
September 2023 Featured Artist: Jayne Piazza
Be it the fluidity of fish, or the languid women, either often swim in or out of Jayne’s work. A bit on the witty, and willingly on the wild side, an unorthodox sense of humor will surface that merges the two. Stripping, shade by shade, is the essence of the bleaching process while layering forms the basis of her paintings. By the particular selection and application of Italian glass, a mosaic beauty unfolds. A colorful life, or the love of color, life, nature and adventure ignites her work. In any case, working with children on a large scale project, or privately in her Montana studio, the fun and passion of the project prevail.
Visit Jayne’s website here
August 2023 Featured Artist: Laura Blue Palmer
Laura Blue Palmer has a true passion for the wild spaces of the west, as she documents her experiences of nature in evocative abstract landscapes. Laura loves to work with color and light in representing the moods and places she has seen in the wilderness. She has backpacked extensively in Montana, Canada, Wyoming, and Alaska, and draws on these locations to create her oils. Laura’s work is as much about memory as it is about place. She looks upon her paintings as a map of her life, which she is constantly creating.
Visit Laura’s website here
July 2023 Featured Artist: Mickey Haldi
Mickey Haldi is a multimedia artist creating work in Missoula, MT. They earned their Bachelor of Arts in painting with a minor in Art History at the University of Montana in 2021. Haldi has shown their work at the Missoula Art Museum, the Zootown Arts Community Center, and have had work collected by the Museum of Modern Arts and Culture. As a contributor to the arts scene in Missoula since 2015, they have taught music, film, and art camps through the ZACC and the Roxy Theater, participated in local arts festivals, and figure model through UMT, Life Drawing Missoula, and privately for local artists. Haldi also hosts Life Drawing Missoula in rotating venues. They aspire to live a life in paint.
Visit Mickey’s website here