music
Slide guitarist Dan Dubuque in concert
“Dan Dubuque, a Whitefish acoustic slide guitarist... is no longer a secret outside of western Montana,” wrote the Missoulian in a recent article.
When all his gigs were canceled due to COVID-19, Dubuque took his music online and has earned thousands of followers and rave reviews.
A master of the Weissenborn slide guitar, he is in concert at Lewis & Clark Taproom Thursday, June 4, live and online, 7 to 9 p.m.
Lewis & Clark Taproom is following new rules based on COVID-19 health department guidelines.
The taproom has capacity for 60 people to watch the stage while seated, but shows will also be streamed live online for everyone to enjoy from home. Music will be streamed live from their Facebook and YouTube/Twitch channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/ and https://www.twitch.tv/taproomtrivia.
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A few important rules include: Table service ONLY. Do not come up to the bar to order for onsite consumption.
Groups need to be six people or fewer, and do not move chairs or tables because everything is separated properly. The staff will be wearing masks so feel free to wear one.
Ask a server if you’re unclear about rules when you arrive.
Lena Marie Schiffer & Ryan Acker in concert
Lena Marie Schiffer of Laney Lou and the Bird Dogs and Ryan Acker of The Last Revel will perform 7 to 9 p.m. Friday, June 5, at the Lewis & Clark Taproom.
Enjoy a special evening of acoustic bliss with Schiffer and Ackerl.
The Lewis & Clark Taproom is located at 1517 Dodge Ave., https://www.lewisandclarkbrewing.com/music-events, 442-5960.
theater
Grandstreet Zooms ‘Words By Kids’
Grandstreet Theatre School announces the names of the young playwrights for the 2020 “Words by Kids” tour sponsored by Kiwanis Club of Helena.
Every year the third and fourth grade class at Grandstreet Theatre School sends a request to third and fourth grade students in the Helena School District for any stories, songs, or poems that they have written.
This year the following students were chosen to have their work put live on stage by Grandstreet Theatre School students.
Due to COVID -19, Grandstreet was unable to tour the schools, but they recorded the “Words by Kids” stories on Zoom and sent the link to the schools.
The students were honored with a performance of their story online and a gift certificate from the Montana Book Company.
Award winners include:
Broadwater School, “When Jake & Carl Found A $100 Bill” by Caeddyn Kralick and “My Glasses” by Maddie Rask;
Central School, “Green, Yellow, Red” by Jake Wojciechowski and “I Can’t Sit Still” by Greta Petersen;
Jim Darcy, “I Hear A Sound” by Cyla Larson, “The Arctic Adventure” by Max Maxell and “Breathe In Space” by Bryson Miller;
Smith School, “Explosions” by Gene Semmens;
Montana City School, “May” by Sam Sova;
Jefferson School, “Missing Homework” by Cate Murray.
art
Holter exhibit features Montana innovative art award winners
An exhibit of art by six Montana Arts Council Innovation Award recipients is on display in the Holter Museum of Art High Gallery.
It includes works by two local award recipients, Robert Harrison of Helena and Nan Parsons of Basin.
Other 2019 honorees are: Jane Waggoner Deschner of Billings, and Jennifer Reifsneider, Naomi Siegel and Melissa Stephenson of Missoula.
This award encourages artists to invest in research and continued exploration.
The Artist’s Innovation Award includes a $5,000 honorarium. Artists who receive this award must convey their artistry to other Montanans during the course of the upcoming year.
This honor rewards Montana artists who demonstrate innovation in their work as well as originality and dedication to their creative pursuits.
The Montana Arts Council established this award program in order to foster environments where the innovation and creativity of artists are valued and celebrated.
Nan Parsons has expressed herself through art – drawing, painting and shaping three-dimensional objects – even before grade school.
Often inspired by nature, Parsons created a series of paintings fueled by an intense study of water, its currents and reflections.
The work culminated in a one-woman show at the Holter Museum of Art in 2006, and a smaller exhibit in Tucson.
The natural world has long been her muse, but in recent years, inspiration has come from another source, sound, and particularly the tonal vibration of music.
She found herself especially moved by the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, an artist “who is able to express and touch the deepest, darkest parts of us and to bring us out of the depths to a brilliant joy.”
As she listened intently to the composer’s music and studied the Baroque period, she began to “respond to, and paint what I feel as I am touched by the music.”
She seeks “to express in the whole body of my work the broad musical sweep – the depth, mystery, and majesty – the glory of the music that is Bach.”
Sculptor Robert Harrison came to his large-scale architectural works through the malleable medium of clay, the use of fire and its alchemy.
He earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Manitoba, and his MFA from the University of Denver, both in ceramics. Over four decades, he’s built an extensive and global record of exhibitions and installations.
He was a founding member of the Montana Clay Tour and received the Meloy Stevenson Award of Excellence from the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts in Helena (where he was a resident artist, instructor and board member).
His residency at the Archie Bray Foundation was pivotal for his career, giving him the materials and space to create large-scale sculptural work.
Initially, Harrison was drawn to ceramic vessels, but eventually “the work took a decidedly sculptural bent.”
Architecture, land art and other sculptural materials began to influence his work, and he gained an international reputation for large-scale pieces.
He has worked with national and international brick, tile, clay-pipe and porcelain factories, utilizing the resources and tools they offer to further his creative pursuits.
“My continued effort is to innovate, respond to the environment, utilize the given space and create work that leaves a ‘ceramic echo’.”
Visual artist Jane Waggoner Deschner came to art in her 30s when she enrolled at Montana State University Billings to pursue a second bachelor’s degree, this time in fine arts.
Her preferred medium was photomontage, incorporating images from slick fashion and architecture magazines.
Waggoner Deschner has made the everyday family photograph her medium, buying large lots of seemingly mundane snapshots on eBay.
in 2008, her early predilection for sewing surfaced, and she began to embroider quotes by famous people onto existing photos.
So far, she’s created more than 750 pieces in her ongoing project she calls “Remember me: a collective narrative in found words and photographs.”
In this series, she hand-embroiders anecdotes from obituaries onto found snapshots and studio portraits in an effort to forge empathetic connections and demonstrate our common humanity.
“Diagrammatic sculptures” – that’s how Jennifer Reifsneider describes her recent body of work.
“I often begin by thinking of my flesh-and-bone body like a planet in space,” she writes. “I map my latitudes, perimeters, rotations and orbits. I translate these measurements through quiet but labor-intensive processes, seeking an elusive moment when what is exact in the mind becomes fluid in the hand.”
After earning a BFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology, Reifsneider landed in Missoula in 1997 and later earned her MFA from California State University, Long Beach.
Her work has been in more than 70 solo and group exhibitions across the United States.
Trombonist, composer, bandleader, educator and community organizer Naomi Siegel performs music “to ride the edge of the moment, creating in real time with others while listening to my internal state.”
Siegel graduated from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and began her professional career in Oakland.
She founded Lakebottom Sound in 2017, a non-profit under the umbrella of Arts Missoula that’s dedicated to nourishing creative music in Missoula through a concert series, monthly jam sessions and improvisation workshops.
She founded and conducts the Missoula Conduction Orchestra, a multi-generational collaboration of musicians with backgrounds ranging from jazz to country to classical that employs a form of collective improvisation called “Conduction.”
Missoula author Melissa Stephenson started writing poems at age 7, and honed her skills early on with a scholarship to Interloken, a fine arts boarding school in Michigan.
She earned a bachelor’s in English from the University of Montana and an MFA in fiction from Texas State University, while working as an editor and freelance writer. Stephenson’s first full-length collection of poems was a finalist in 2017 for the Barry Spacks Prize and Brittingham/Pollak Prize.
Her memoir, DRIVEN, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2018 and long-listed for the Chautauqua Book Prize.
For more information on the Artist’s Innovation Award program and all of this year’s honorees, visit: art.mt.gov/aia.
Benefit
No Show Gala
For information about the HolterMuseum of Art’s No Show Gala & Auction June 11-13, visit https://www.holtermuseum.org/upcoming-events.
helena movie listings
Myrna Loy
15 N. Ewing, 443-0287, myrnaloycenter.com
- The High Note, PG-13
- True History of the Kelly Gang, R