Richard Buswell: Close To Home

May 2 - August 3, 2013
Paxson Gallery

This exhibition represents a new body of work by fourth generation Montana photographer Richard Buswell.  Buswell has been photographing Montana settlement sites, ghost towns and frontier homesteads for over forty-one years.Rather than strictly working as a documentary photographer, Buswell moves closer to his subject matter.  Rather than mythologizing the West, Buswell’s close-up photographs focus on including corroded artifacts and decayed bones to highlight loss and the ravages of time.  His work also tells the story of the renewal of the land.  His impulse to record sites that are disappearing is ironic since his photographs are often rendered abstractly and do not identify sites or offer context.  Instead, he uses silver selenide gelatin prints, among the most stable material for long term photographic preservation, to capture fleeting instances, or as he states, “the inspired moment”, that may vanish soon after the shutter clicks. Buswell has exhibited internationally and is included in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Corcoran Gallery of Art; the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film; Baltimore Museum of Art; Brooklyn Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University; Library of Congress; Detroit Institute of Arts; Yale University Art Gallery;  High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Denver Art Museum; Seattle Art Museum and Montana Museum of Art & Culture. The University of New Mexico Press is publishing a fourth book of Buswell’s photography of the same title. His past books, all published by The University of Montana Press, include Echoes: A Visual Reflection; Silent Frontier: Icons of Montana's Frontier and Traces: Montana's Frontier Re-visited.

A Hundred Years Later: Julius Seyler Among the Blackfeet

May 2 - August 3, 2013
Meloy Gallery

This exhibition commemorates German painter Julius Seyler’s (1873-1955) centennial visit to Glacier National Park. The two years Seyler spent in Glacier among the Amskapi Pikuni (Blackfeet), Sqeilo (Salish) and K’tanaxa (Kootenai) tribes transformed the artist’s work.  Seyler, a celebrated German Expressionist painter, trained at the influential Munich Academy.  He painted in France and Norway and participated in the New York Armory Show.  Seyler was introduced to Glacier National Park through Louis Hill, son of James J. Hill, the Chair of the Great Northern Railway board who was influential in establishing Glacier National Park. There, Seyler spent two summers creating a body of work that endures as a record of Blackfeet culture.  Faced with severe anti-German sentiment at the outset of World War I, Seyler returned to Germany.  Though he never visited Montana again, Seyler continued to make paintings based on his experiences in Glacier. His artwork lapsed into obscurity and remains relatively unknown.  In 2010, UM Professor Emeritus Bill Farr wrote the first-ever monograph on Seyler which chronicled his life and career.