The University of Montana is about to open a wide look at Dana Boussard’s career, six decades of paintings, drawings, textiles and glass by an artist who grew up in Choteau and has long worked from a studio on the Flathead Reservation.
“Forever Floating Home: 60 Years of Creating a Sense of Place” starts Thursday, Nov. 12, at the Montana Museum of Art and Culture. The Missoulian reported the opening on Wednesday. A free public reception is set for 5 to 7 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 19, UM Marketing and Communications said.
The show reaches back to works on paper from the late 1960s and oversized soft sculpture from the 1970s, then to the textile-and-paint pieces Boussard became known for, her public commissions and recent drawings. She left the Rocky Mountain Front for the Art Institute of Chicago, came back to UM for a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1968, taught in New York and finally returned to Montana for good. She has been in the reservation studio for more than 35 years, the university said, making work “about what it means to make a home, to lose one and to keep searching.”
Houses, birds and what she calls “spirit figures” run through that work, along with handwriting, barbed wire, nails, flowers and fruit. She has also made large public pieces for airports, civic buildings, banks and churches, from Anchorage to Washington, D.C. “I don’t separate the public from public artwork,” she has written. “Always passionate about exploring the role of artists in shaping public perception, I have continued to speak about the issues of art in terms of politics, the environment and social responsibility.”
The museum’s director, H. Rafael Chacón, is the contact for the exhibition, at (406) 243-2019.
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