MT Day 4 - Crazy Burgers, Cowboy Art, and Creative Caves
Today I started out by going back to downtown Bozeman for some good coffee at a sleek little spot called Rockford Coffee Roasters. It had a great atmosphere, friendly service, and most importantly a mean cup o’ Joe. The best part for me was that just down the street was a funky little sculpture of tortoise made out of recycled metal by an artist named Kirsten Kainz. It was part of a public art project in the area called the Gallatin Art Crossing, that seeks to highlight local talent and make the area a bit more beautiful. This piece in particular with it’s grumpy face and roly-poly body definitely succeeded in putting a smile on my face and making me think fondly of Bozeman.
After fueling up, I bid Bozeman farewell and made a two hour drive to Billings where I’d be doing some comedy later tonight. My first stop of the day was one I was very excited for: The Burger Dive. This unassuming lunch spot might look like a casual fast food spot, but the burgers they sling have actually one them both local and national acclaim. They’ve been voted Best Burger in Billngs, and their team of chefs took home the World Food Championship title for Best Burgers in the country in 2016. My mouth was already watering as soon as I walked through the doors. Naturally I had to go with one of their more unique award winning burgers, so I got the Date with Jim Bean and Coke Burger which consisted of a perfectly grilled patty slathered with bourbon date and coke barbecue sauce and topped with roasted garlic, arugula, smoked gouda, and garlic basil mayo. It was wild, crazy, and one of the single best burgers I’ve ever had in my life. I don’t know what kind of witchcraft went into making that barbecue sauce, but it was such a delicious balance of sweetness, tang, smokiness, and whiskey and it brought out all the best flavors of the meat itself without being overpowering. All that cheese and garlic was just icing on top, and having the fries to clean up the mess was truly just an embarrassment of comfort food riches.
I took my heaving belly to my next stop in Billings, the Yellowstone Art Museum. The museum made first impression with a bronze cast the absolutely stunning Ile de France statue by the artist Aristide Maillol right outside the main lobby. She just projects so much confidence, it must have been hard to keep for the model to hold that stance for so long.
Once inside things took a more whimsical turn with a very different kind of impressive sculpture, Brad Rude’s Into the Calm which features mixed media animals, machinery and plants all swirling around in some kind of infinite loop. I’m not totally sure what it’s supposed to mean, but each individual part was impeccably crafted so I was pretty sucked into its weird dream logic.
The first main exhibition was called the Montana Collection which houses the bulk of the museum’s pieces. These galleries showcase the wealth and variety of modern and contemporary art coming out of and/or inspired by the Northwest Region. Having seen a whole lotta more traditional Western Art going through the Southwest, it was pretty cool to see more post-modern interpretations of the same themes. The collection had a blend of sculptures, photos, and paintings ranging in style from totally realistic portraits and landscapes to dreamy hallucinatory abstractions. I love seeing how the same landscapes can evoke such different responses and feelings in different artists.
My favorite pieces from this collection included: a surreal symbolically rich painting called Wounded Grand Marshall by Ernie Pepion of a wounded Native American falling off a horse in front of Chevron station while clowns and executives do their business in the background; a beautiful pop-art cowboy sunset by Bill Schenck; a haunting expressionist painting of a lone barn swathed in over-powering sky by Christopher Warner; an incredible photograph by Wanda Mock of a young boy sprinting past an erupting Yellowstone geyser that is truly an unbelievable moment in time to have captured; a dream logic acrylic painting by Gordon McConnell that blends a cowboy painting with the history of photography and the first slow motion photos of horses running; and a jaw-dropping landscape by Chuck Forsman that is somehow improbably just pen and ink.
One piece very literally stood head and shoulders above the rest and that was Willem Volkersz’s monumental 12 ft. tall sculpture Childhood (Lost). The piece is made of handmade wooden suitcases, with little found childhood figurines and trinkets placed around it as if they were scaling a mountain. The last suitcase on top was painted by Volkersz’s granddaughter combining some genuine childhood innocence with her grandfather’s nostalgia for it. It’s a weird, beautiful mix of true craftsmanship as well as pop-art artifice, but it gains much more significance when you learn that it was originally part of a larger exhibit where Volkersz attempted to work through his feelings about learning that 167 of the students he went to elementary school with in Amsterdam had been killed in concentration camps during WWII. He had been so young at the time, that he had never really realized or processed this horrific statistic until years later when a book of interviews with other adults who had grown up in that area was published in 2006. In trying to memorialize these tragic losses, he came to use the symbol of the suitcase, because each child was only told to pack a single suitcase during their forced removal from their homes. The suitcase reminded him of his own much less dramatic emigration to the States, and served to him as a symbol for the way the world makes all children eventually grow up either through trauma or simply through life. It adds a poignancy and melancholy to a piece that initially seems so silly and playful, and I guess the fact that both things can be true at the same time sort of captures the beauty of childhood in a really wonderful way.
The next room in the museum was dedicated to one of the legends of more traditional Western Art, Will James. James was one of the most prominent authors and illustrators of cowboy stories during the early 20th century, and this museum has the largest single collections of his work anywhere. James spent much of his later life right here in Billings, and the museum does a cool job of letting the work speak for itself by just hanging it floor-to-ceiling in an impressive salon style display. The scenes may be all sort of similar but just letting them pop out and wash over you, you see how deftly he captures motion, character, and landscapes with simple well-placed lines and brushstrokes. It was really something to behold.
The next room was mostly dominated by a unique installation marking a collaboration between different contemporary Western artists, Deborah Butterfield and John Buck. I’m more familiar with Butterfield’s trademark skeletal horse sculptures but I was less familiar with Buck’s massive woodblock prints and surrealist sculptures. I feel like I probably would have liked their individual contributions to the installation on their own, but I like the way that when placed all together they make the viewer form mental connections between the more celestial Buck sculptures and paintings and Butterfield’s more grounded naturalistic work. The synergy of their pieces and styles is a good sign as in real life the two artists are husband and wife, so that the fact they work well artistically hopefully translates to the marriage.
The last gallery on this floor was a small showcase of a talented local artist named Edith Freeman who was considered a master of the difficult craft of reduction woodblock printing that requires a complex method of layering different cut blocks of woods with the different colors you’d like to achieve. She makes this lengthy, difficult process look positively easy with effortlessly beautiful impressionistic landscapes of the Montana Wilderness like this:
Tucked under the staircase up to the next galleries was a weird sculpture that the children of Billings had voted as their favorite piece in the museum (a very cute little bit of community promotion). Patrick Zentz’s serene installation, Pool, looks deceptively simple, all minimalist geometric shapes suspended above a reflecting pool, but it actually involves a lot of complex hidden technology to achieve its zen-like state. The top par of the sculpture is actually connected through hidden wires to weather monitoring equipment in the courtyard of the building. The equipment measures temperature and wind speed and sends that information back to a microchip within the sculpture which tells it how many drops of water to let out. The water drops pass through different pipe and depending on where they land they either ping off more pipes or plop in the pool creating a pleasant ever-changing soundscape. It’s so creative that the artist was able to take a silent invisible phenomena like temperature and translate it into both visual and aural representations. It’s an amazing piece that a still image doesn’t totally do justice.
The first second floor gallery I went to featured abstract expressionist works that showed different artist either being inspired by outright using the landscape in very non-traditional representations. Highlights for me included: a piece that combined acrylic on jute fabric with found birchwood with fascinatingly complimentary patterning; a charcoal swirl of spooky organic shapes by Barbara Cooper; a blend of paint, ink, and printed imagery on unstretched canvas by Marc Vischer entitled Desiccate Wood; a dreamy blend of nature imagery that is barely contained by the soft pink banner called Morning Walk by Dennis Voss; a grid by Mario Reis of the naturally abstract patterns made by submerging cotton canvases into the sediment rich Daisy Creek in Cooke City, MT; and a grey nostalgic blend of printed photographs and paint by Robert DeWeese on unframed masonite.
Less abstract, but still delightful was a very Picasso-esque vase by Peter Voulkos with a wonderfully blobby bull sketched into the glaze.
The big special exhibit up while I was the museum was actually two complimentary exhibits of landscape artists Emil Carlsen and Clyde Aspevig. Carlsen, a Dutch transplant, rose to prominence around the turn of the 20th century as a leader of the American Post-Impressionists, marrying European stylistic flourishes to the American Landscape. Aspevig, by contrast, is a contemporary artist from Montana who specializes in highly realistic lush panoramas. Together Carlsen’s poetic minimalism and Aspevig’s technical virtuosity end up accentuating each other’s skills and really capturing the full scope of the land.
I started with Aspevig’s half of the space, where my jaw was largely on the floor with the way each canvas felt like a window looking out of different vistas. The paint just seems to glow, and I love the way he uses clouds, water, and snow to add a little bit of bit of textural complexity to the otherwise hyperreal scenery.
Carlsen’s room, while less strictly representational, incredibly evoke the feelings and emotions of places. I particularly loved his seascapes, and they feel almost more like dreams or memories of places rather than pure reality.
Carlsen’s colors really made him stand out for me as on par with more famous Impressionists, and the immersively layered shades of green (look at the reflection of the trees in the water) of his painting Woodland Stream were a real highlight.
The showstopper of this exhibit though for me was where the two collections met, which in a really great bit of curation was just a massive collage of smaller canvases by both artists grouped together in an a powerful and overpowering explosion of colors and views.
The last major special exhibition was a showcase of gorgeous contemporary photography by Mark Chapman and Larry Sandler called Rough and Tumble, Smoke and Rope. The photos document in remarkable snapshots the daily lives of the men, women, and children who raise, herd, and protect cattle. You get a real feel for the struggle, beauty, love, and work that goes into this business that affects all of our lives despite how little most of us actually see it. I really liked how the photos sort of capture the long solitary stretches of just watching over slow grazing animals with the occasional bursts of dramatic action when you have to do some real wrangling. It seems like such a difficult job, but it was sweet seeing photos of kids and families working at it together.
The photos were complimented with a visually stunning documentary made up of interviews and narration by ranchers as well as just sweeping shots of the endless high planes that were amazing to behold even if I didn’t really have time to watch the movie in its entirety.
As I made my way to the last couple community galleries I was struck by a poster featuring work by one of the most incredibly named artists I’ve ever encountered, one Mr. Freeman Butts.
The last galleries were as much about highlighting the community as the art itself and these included some fantastic pieces by local grade schoolers. Depending on their grade, kids worked on either self portraits or superheroes, and either way we all won for getting to see such pure unadulteratedly joyful creativity.
The last gallery was works for sale by local adult artists which I was pretty impressed by. The highlights for me were some surrealist nudes by an artist named Stephen Haraden and more impressionistic paintings of porches and candies by Connie Dillon.
After the museum, I met up with a great local comic and radio host named Charlie Mulluk, who came by to say hi and give me some details about a show he had helped me book for the night. He was a friend of friend from Boston, so he helped me out with the gig as a favor and just asked me to call into his radio show to record some funny answers to call in questions. It was a win-win for me, and he was such a warm and funny dude I had a great time chatting and calling with him and I really appreciated his help navigating Montana comedy (which is great but very spread out over this massive state).
After saying goodbye to Charlie, I got some coffee and did some writing at a really sleek, hip spot called MoAV Coffee. It was a great space with strong tasty coffee, so I just sat and wrote there for a while. I have very distinct memories though that I was watching Basic Instinct while I was writing because they had just put it on Amazon and I’d never seen so I was very self-conscious the whole time by how much Michael Douglas nudity was in the corner of my screen. That says much more about me than the venue though, but it’s still a very vivid memory I have.
After my great coffee and great shame, I went to get some good nature in at Pictograph State Park. The Park consists of three caves accessible by a short looping trail where hundreds of Native American artifacts have been found, the oldest of which date back 2000 years! Archeologists suspect the caves were most likely used as natural shelter for hunters while away from the main camps on expeditions. Even without being the site of some fascinating history, the park makes for a great visit if only because these big sloping caves are some of the strangest shaped rock formations I’ve encountered above ground. They’re not particularly deep or big compared to other notable caves, but they are still so monumentally impressive to see up close.
The namesake Pictograph Cave is the most notable of the three caves for featuring about 100 different carvings by Native hunters depicting various symbols, animals, and figures. Nobody’s totally sure what their meaning is, but it’s pretty amazing that they’ve been so well preserved. They’re very hard to make out unfortunately in the photo I took below as a couple thousand years will add a little wear and tear but if you click here you can see an artist’s rendering of what things might have looked like in their heyday.
As amazing as the caves in the park where, I think the view of the rest of the park from the park really captures just what makes Montana’s vistas so unique.
After the park, I killed some time before comedy by having a pint at the fantastically named microbrewery Angry Hank’s. Rather than making me angry, the brewery met my hankering for great brews with the Street fight Irish Red, a fantastic malty red ale that was perfect for sipping and brooding over.
I made my way to The Loft Dance Club, a really fun gay bar and club that was also hosting the night’s comedy. The main attraction was a great local Improv Troupe called Projectile Comedy led by the talented and super welcoming Chas Llewellyn. They did mostly short form improv games and scenes (think Who’s Line), which is probably my preferred form of improv. That’s partially because it’s what I did in college so I’m just more familiar with it, and also because I just think it lends itself more to the comedy element of improv comedy because you can be super silly and then get out of a scene whereas good long form improv requires as much acting ability as comedy ability which is harder to pull off. They did a great job and everyone was super funny, really playing off one another as a team, which was a treat to watch. I felt like despite everyone being very funny, it took maybe two games for the audience to really start participating, but once everyone was on the same page things really started cooking and I think a great time was had all around.
Personally my job was to do stand up during the intermission of the two halves of the improv show. Performing during an intermission was a real learning experience about tapping into and working to maintain crowd energy because naturally most people during an intermission want to stretch, grab a drink, or go outside. That made my role different than normal because I didn’t want to deprive people of their intermission, but I wanted those who did stick around to have an enjoyable experience so I had to sort of front and back load a longer set so that as people were leaving and as they were getting back I was telling my best jokes so that at the very least there was the illusion of a constant energy level going back into the show. It probably took me a couple of jokes to figure out how to really do an enjoyable set without demanding attention but at least one of my stories about my awkward encounter with Flavor Flav really landed so that made me feel like I at least didn’t let my funny improvisers down.
After the show, I just enjoyed the hang out vibe and the very strong free cocktails of the club (including an interesting green melon beverage called Liquid Marijuana which was dangerously sweet), and it was such an enjoyable and silly way to spend a Thursday night in Billings, MT. I couldn’t have asked for better.
Favorite Random Sightings: Ski Naked (a bold suggestion from a billboard); a sign reading “Brunch without Mimosas is Just a Sad Late Breakfast” (my kinda mantra); a very unfortunate garage called Lube Alley
Regional Observations: I’d heard the term High Plains before (thanks, Clint Eastwood) but I don’t think I appreciated that higher altitudes could also be so flat until I drove through central Montana and saw clouds so close to rolling to fields in every direction.
Albums Listened To: To Leave or Die in Long Island by Bomb the Music Industry (just Stand There Until You’re Sober); To Pimp a Butterfly by Kendrick Lamar (a true modern masterpiece)
People’s Favorite Jokes:
A lawyer and an engineer were fishing in the Caribbean.
The lawyer said, "I'm here because my house burned down, and everything I owned was destroyed by the fire. The insurance company paid for everything."
"That's quite a coincidence," said the engineer. "I'm here because my house and all my belongings were destroyed by a flood, and my insurance company also paid for everything."
The lawyer looked somewhat confused. "How do you start a flood?" he asked.
Songs of the day:
It’s like a punk campfire sing along
Such an incredible band and performance
The first preview of the album to come