CoFlourish- Selected Works
Art & Resiliency in Montana during the Pandemic
Lisa Flowers Ross
Open AIR Resident at Flathead Lake Biological Station
Fabric works, hanging & cradled board
Lisa Flowers Ross is an artist living and working in Idaho. Her colorful, abstract artworks are made with fabric which she hand-dyes and stitches together. Inspired by nature and her surroundings, she works to find its simple beauty, underlying elements and to portray it in a unique way.The artwork of Flowers Ross has been exhibited in solo, group and juried exhibitions regionally, nationally and internationally. Flowers Ross has created public artworks for the cities of Boise, Meridian, Eagle and Ketchum, Idaho and her art is included in private, public and corporate collections. She has participated in artist residencies in the Western states and has been the recipient of grants from the Idaho Commission on the Arts and from the Alexa Rose Foundation. Flowers Ross holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Studio Art (Drawing), as well as a degree in Business. She is a juried artist member of Northwest Designer Craftsmen, Studio Art Quilt Associates and Boise Open Studio Collective Organization. She has worked as a curatorial assistant in the past and currently teaches workshops in her home and at other locations.
Explore her website here
Amanda Kaye Bielby
Open AIR Resident at Rattlesnake Creek Dam
Snake In The Grass
Scagliola inlay, wood
Amanda Bielby is a contemporary artist with a building trade background. She fell in love with historic paint and plaster techniques, usually used in a cathedral-like setting. She twists them around, adds some modern mixes, and places them on a substrate so that you can have a piece of the cathedral to add to your home or business. “Wilderness and conservation have found a way of focus in my work and way of living.”
Explore her website here
Kathleen Herlihy-Paoli
Open AIR Resident at Historical Fort Missoula
Purpose, Truth in Governing, Conviction
Digital Prints and Threads
Kathleen Herlihy-Paoli was born in 1956 and grew up in Connecticut, New York, and Massachusetts. She holds a degree in Fine Art from Skidmore College. In 1995 she and her husband moved to Missoula MT. She is a member of The White Columns Artist’s Registry. In January, 2022 a solo show of paintings entitled Intermission was exhibited in New York City at Marinaro Gallery. In 2019 she had a solo show at the Missoula Art Museum entitled Act Three, this show traveled the state through MAGDA, including The Emerson in Bozeman; Paris Gibson Square in Great Falls; The Holter in Helena; and MonDak in Sydney, MT. The tour ended in early 2022. The summer of 2020 included an artist residency through Open A.I.R., MT in Missoula which was spent at Fort Missoula. In 2018 she had a solo show at The Center for the Arts in Jackson Hole, WY. Her work has been included in solo and group group shows in Boston, MA, Portland and Springfield, OR, Philadelphia, PA, Saratoga Springs, NY, Missoula and Bozeman, MT, and in Sassoferrato, Italy.
Cristina Victor & Salisha Old Bull
A collaboration inspired by Cristina’s Residency at the Montana Museum of Art & Culture in collaboration with Open AIR and Missoula Parks & Rec
Cristina Victor is a Cuban-American artist whose making always stems from the hyphen. Her interdisciplinary practice materializes storytelling, meditations on the failure and power of language, auto-ethnography, and critiques the framing of identity by mass media outlets. Using performance, textiles, sculpture, installation, and public engagement she is committed to creating and facilitating generative exchanges about the complexities of our collective and individual human experience. Vexillology, analog graphic design, and archiving act as foundational threads in her translations. Her concern for access balances her formal object-making and public engagement projects. She received her AA from the New World School of the Arts, Her BA from Sarah Lawrence College, and her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is a transient maker and goes wherever her work takes her.
Explore her website here
Salisha Old Bull was born in Eastern Montana and raised on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Western Montana. Her mother is Salish and father is Crow so she has a well-rounded bundle of Indigenous teachings from the Montana area. She is married to Shandin Pete and has 5 children. She was an aspiring artist as a child but chose to follow a different career path. She kept art in the background of her life and expressed most of her creativity through beadwork. She was taught to bead by her maternal grandmother, Rachel Arlee Bowers when she was a very young child and considers her earliest memories of beading at about her second grade in elementary school. In addition, painting, photography, and drawing are other favorite mediums. She gains inspiration from traditional ecological knowledge from both Salish and Crow tribes and uses this imagery within her artwork. These aspects of cultural knowledge are the attributes that empower Indigenous people.
Explore her website here
