A group exhibition of the 2021 Open AIR Residency participants
Christopher Baldwin
Christopher Baldwin is a cartoonist and graphic novelist. His work has been shown at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco, the National Academy of Sciences in 2020, and the Roswell Museum of Art. He also has work in the permanent archive of the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art. His graphic novel, "Glens Falls," was funded by a New York State Council on the Arts grant. He was a regular contributor to MAD Magazine and has graphic novels published by Penguin/Dial books and Simon&Schuster/Margaret K. McElderry Books.
Aaron Cobbett
Starting his career in the late 1980s, Aaron Cobbett worked as a window dresser at Bergdorf Goodman by day and documented the thriving East Village drag scene by night. These disparate cultures, projected onto the grim backdrop of the AIDS Crisis, formed the foundation of his aesthetic. In the 1990s, his high-concept, color-saturated images of club kids, drag queens, and celebrities became an essential and immediately recognizable part of the queer cultural canon. His work is characterized by high craft, deadpan wit, and harsh glamour, moving freely between textiles, video, installation, and photography. His work has been shown at The FIT Museum, The Leslie-Lohman Museum, The New York Historical Society, The Louvre in Paris, and the US and Europe galleries. He’s had two monographs published: Super Eros in 1999 and COBBETT in 2008. He lives and works in Brooklyn.
Quinton Decker
Quinton Decker is an enrolled tribal member of the Navajo Nation and a Salish descendant. He resides in Missoula, Montana. He obtained his Associate of Fine Arts from Salish Kootenai College in 2016. Then he went on to get his Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Montana, graduating in 2018 with an emphasis in ceramics.
Claire Emery
Since graduating from the Natural Science Illustration Program at UCSC in 2000, Claire has worked as a scientific illustrator, illustrating several books, posters, interpretive signs, and publications. Her clients include W.W. Norton, the New York Botanical Garden, Montana Audubon, US Forest Service, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, California State Parks, Mountain Press, and Orion Magazine. In 2005, she completed an M.S. in Environmental studies from the University of Montana, emphasizing place-based education and art. In 2015, she finally got to go to art school! She completed a cutting-edge, immersive MFA program in Visual Art from Vermont College of Fine Art.
Joy French & Rachel Young
Rachel Young has performed professionally across the country as a freelance dancer and a company member. As a dance maker, Rachel has created work for women’s prisons, public schools, outside spaces, multi-media performance spaces, and traditional theaters. Rachel’s choreography has been commissioned by Bare Bait Dance Company, Centennial State Ballet, and West Virginia Dance Company. Rachel has previously served on the Colorado Dance Education Organization (CoDeo) Board and is currently serving on the board for Presenting Denver. Rachel Oliver Young is the Education Director of the Dance Program at Denver School of the Arts.
Joy French is a dancer, choreographer, videographer and producer. Her professional stage debut was with MoTrans Dance Company (Missoula), and would go on to dance with Headwaters Dance Co.,The CoMotion Dance Project and many other companies throughout the West. After earning her MFA in Performance and Choreography at the University of Colorado-Boulder, Joy founded Bare Bait Dance, a professional contemporary modern dance company. As both BBD Artistic Director and UM adjunct professor, she has produced dozens of performances in Western Montana including her own evening-length concerts and screendance shorts; she is also the Executive Director of Kinetoscope Screendance Film Festival. In 2017, Joy received the Montana Arts Council’s Artist's Innovation Award.
Rachel Frank
Rachel Frank grew up near Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, the birthplace of American paleontology, where large mammoth and other megafauna fossils were found, altering Western views on extinction and evolution. Her work uses sculpture, video, and performance to explore our relationships and shifting perspectives toward natural history, climate change, and non-human species.
Stephen Glueckert
Stephen Glueckert was born in Missoula, MT, and received a BFA from the University of Idaho and an M.Ed. in Art Education from Western Washington University. He has taught at The University of Montana and the University of Papua New Guinea. He spent ten years at the Northwest Children’s Home as a counselor and teacher. He has been a recipient of a Montana Individual Artist’s Fellowship. He is Curator Emeritus for the Missoula Art Museum. In addition, being a practicing artist, he has written extensively about contemporary artists living and working in Montana.
Michelle Postma
Michelle Postma Is a ceramic artist, painter, educator, and adventure enthusiast living in Missoula, MT. She received a BFA in ceramics from the University of Georgia and earned an MFA at the University of Montana, where she focused on large-scale mural-esque paintings and ceramic figures covered in images. She recently completed murals at the Zootown Arts Community Center and in downtown Missoula for the Allez! mural program.
Madison Mayfield
Madison is a scientific illustrator, taxidermist, and natural history museum professional who offers freelance services in various fields. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Biology: Ecology, Evolution & Conservation and a certificate in Natural History Illustration from the University of Washington. In 2016, she moved to Brisbane, Australia, where she began working under the direction of Alison Douglas and Todd Knight as a natural history preparator at the Queensland Museum. Her work at the museum involved the creation of taxidermy mounts, design, and installation of the Discovery Centre, a permanent exhibition showcasing over 1300 specimens unique to Queensland, as well as specimen prep for scientific collections and education/outreach events. During her time in Australia she also worked as a freelance field technician preparing specimens in New Zealand with the Lavretsky Lab and assisting with the live-trapping of gliders with a Ph.D. Candidate Ana Gracanin. In July 2020, Madison moved back to the US and currently resides in Seattle, WA
Cristina Victor
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 of 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.
Maria Ylvisaker
Maria Ylvisaker is a visual artist in Brooklyn, New York. She works in watercolor and printmaking to explore nostalgia and everyday life. Her work has been published by Womanly Magazine and Duplikat Press and has been shown at Printed Matter’s NY Art Book Fair, David & Schweitzer Contemporary, and A.I.R. Gallery. During 2020 she participated in online exhibitions with GIFC and Vacant Museum. She holds a B.A. in studio art and rhetoric & communications studies from Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa.
This was made possible in part by collaboration with Hudson Therriault, a Certified Audio Describer.
