ARTWALK:
Curate / Instigate: Gordon McConnell & Stephen Glueckert | April 3 – May 29

Two Montana curators bring their refreshingly loose yet learned works on paper and multi-dimensional sculpture to Kirks’ front galleries. Sandy Dvarishkis displays the newest firings from her kiln plus works from Jane Waggoner Deschner. (click link on each artist to see full bio and artwork for sale)

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, the University of Papua New Guinea, and throughout the Pacific Northwest. 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.

Jane Waggoner Deschner

Jane Waggoner Deschner is one of Montana Arts Council’s 2019 Artist Innovation Award recipients. She has worked with found photographs since 2001 and began embroidering into them in 2008. Her “reckless” pieces include four from her “Remember me” series and two from the “Maxim” series.

Sandy Dvarishkis

Sandy Dvarishkis is a ceramicist and artist whose work ranges from whimsical yet stoic creatures to political themes on vases, cups, plates, and sculpture. Sandy studied at MSUB and is a regular at Kirks’ Grocery.

Gordon McConnell

Early on, I was not particularly drawn to traditional western art, but my lifelong enthusiasm for western movies was stoked by the revisionist and off-beat westerns of the late 1960s and early 1970s—Once Upon a Time in the West, The Wild Bunch, Little Big Man, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, El Topo—and, living in Texas, I began to see the works of artists who were also revisiting and revising western subjects, interpreting cowboys and Indians and western places in fresh ways—Fritz Scholder, Luis Jimenez, Terry Allen, Robert Wade, Vernon Fisher and Ed Blackburn, among others.