Traveling Exhibitions

In an effort to expand its reach and diffuse compelling art and ideas, the MMAC regularly curates and travels exhibitions across the state and region through the Montana Art Gallery Directors Association (MAGDA). You might have seen these exhibitions most recently on view across the state. Please contact us if you want more information on these shows.

Past Traveling Exhibitions

Thomas Gainsborough, “A Market Cart,” c. 1786, oil on canvas.

James Todd, Patriot Parade
Woodblock print, 2000-2006
Courtesy of the artist

Copper King Collection Comes to Butte

For the first time ever, an exhibition featuring seven masterpieces from the collection of Sen. William Andrews Clark, one of Butte’s famous Copper Kings, was exhibited from June 10 to Aug. 13, 2021 at the Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives.

“William Clark and the Art of the Gilded Age” is sponsored by Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives and the University of Montana’s Montana Museum of Art and Culture. The exhibit will include significant paintings from the Baroque to the Industrial Age by European artists, including French painters Jean-Charles Cazin, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Jules Dupré, Jean-Honoré Fragonard and the Englishman Thomas Gainsborough.

“Given the great wealth amassed by William A. Clark throughout his mining enterprises in Butte, it seems fitting for the Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives to host a selection of his art in 2021,” said Ellen Crain, director of the Butte-Silver Bow Archives.

In coordination with the exhibit, a series of lectures, architectural tours and book signings were held in Butte, informing on the collection, the man and the Clark legacy in Butte and across Montana.

Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives, Butte MT, June 10 to August 13, 2021

James G. Todd: Looney Toones

When James Todd retired from a long teaching career at UM in 2000, his mother presented him a collection of drawings he created from age five to eight during WWII, unseen by the artist for more than 50 years. Looney Toones features these remarkable drawings as well as the artist’s reinterpretations of his childhood art through woodcut prints created a half-century later. In this exhibition the young artist and the mature one come full circle.

On view at:

Yellowstone Art Museum, Billings MT, November 8 2018 - January 6 2019

Holter Museum of Art, Helena MT, January 14 - April 15 2019

Paris Gibson Square Museum of Art, Great Falls MT, October 20 2019 - January 20 2020

MonDak Heritage Center, Sidney MT, February 1 - May 1 2020

Ben Steele The Bataan Death March 1950 Oil on Canvas
Ben Steele, The Bataan Death March,
1950, oil on canvas,
Gift of the artist
MMAC Permanent Collection

Ben Steele: Prisoner of War: Ben Steele’s Personal Chronicle from Bataan to Hiroshima

Ben Steele was an American soldier in the Philippines at the beginning of World War II. When American forces on the Bataan Peninsula were surrendered in 1942, Steele was one of tens of thousands of American and Filipino troops forced to go on the Bataan Death March. He spent the next three and a half years as a POW in several labor camps, including the infamous Tayabas Road Detail. During his captivity, he survived beriberi, dysentery, pneumonia, blood poisoning, malaria, and the death ships. When the war ended, he was working in a Japanese coal mine less than 80 miles from Hiroshima.

Like many survivors, Steele struggled with memories of his captivity. As he came to terms with what he had seen and experienced, he began to draw from memory. Over the next decades, Steele became a critically acclaimed artist of the American West, but the Bataan Death March and the labor camps were never far from his mind. Steele passed away at the age of 98 on September 25, 2016.

On view at:

Western Heritage Center, Billings MT, May 16 - October 5 2019

Richard S. Buswell, Mine Bits,
Silver gelatin print, 2013,
Courtesy of the artist.

Richard S. Buswell: What They Left Behind: Photographs by Richard S. Buswell

This exhibition presents 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 years, and the present collection of photographs displays his evolving relationship with his subject. Crisp, intentional, and profoundly beautiful found objects are here for us to discover. Although we may not understand what we are looking at, we can enjoy the eloquent abstract vocabulary of Richard Buswell. His art is worthy of opening ourselves to fully experience What They Left Behind.
- Victoria Rowe Berry, Director, Oklahoma State University Museum of Art

Buswell has exhibited internationally and his work 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.

On view at:

Hockaday Museum of Art, Kalispell MT, April 18 - June 22 2019

Close To Home: New Photographs by Richard S. Buswell

Richard S. Buswell, M.D., a fourth generation Montanan, has been photographing western settlement sites, ghost towns and frontier homesteads for over forty-one years. In this new body of work, Buswell moves closer to his subject matter. His close-up photographs are rendered abstractly. He uses silver selenide gelatin prints, among the most stable material for long term photographic preservation, to capture fleeting instants, or as he states, “the inspired moment”, that may vanish soon after the shutter clicks.

On view at:

Masur Museum of Art, Monroe LA, November 1 2018 - February 9 2019