Columbia Falls Grad Showcases Women’s Rights in Print Selected for Art in Embassies Exhibition

Making a linoleum reduction print is a meticulous, sometimes maddening artistic method to learn. The production process to some extent involves thinking in reverse. A single piece of linoleum is used to create a multilayered printed image, which means that the artist must continually carve away depth from the linoleum as successive colors are added. The use of negative space, by removing material from the linoleum, prevents those portions of linoleum from taking on ink and contacting the print with each application of color. Once something is carved out, there isn’t really any going back without completely starting over, which can make the process an extremely deliberate and time-consuming one.

It helps, though, to choose a subject you care about.

That was a key part of an assignment that was given out in an art class taught by Columbia Falls High School art teacher Kate Daniels last school year: look through editorial pieces and choose something you care about or resonates with you, and make a reduction print of that thing.

For some students the thing they care about enough to recreate in a reduction print might be the Columbia Falls High School Wildcats, or, in the case of one student, Chinese architecture. For recent Columbia Falls High School graduate Brie Treat, the choice was women’s rights. As she contemplated the assignment, Treat turned toward an image that would call attention to the grave risks that women, and their freedoms, face across the world.

For hours on end, through numerous applications of ink on paper, Treat recreated a portrait of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Iranian woman of Kurdish descent who died last September after she was detained by the country’s morality police, who said she had been held in relation to the country’s hijab rule, which requires women to wear a headscarf in public. Security services in Iran said that she died of a heart attack while receiving educational training on hijab rules, the New York Times reported in September 2022, but Amini’s family says she was healthy before she was detained, and believe police are responsible for her death.

Protests roiled the country since Amini’s death, with hundreds of people involved in the protest movement having been killed by Iranian security forces. Amini has become a symbol for a movement in which women seek to defy the country’s restrictions around the way they appear in public, with some cutting off their hair or burning hijabs.

With encouragement and support from Daniels, Treat submitted her reduction print of Amini into a student competition hosted by the U.S. Department of State’s Art in Embassies office. Earlier this summer, Daniels received notice that her student’s creation was one of 29 pieces selected out of more than 140 entered into the competition, and the only submission selected from the state of Montana. Treat’s art is now part of a virtual exhibition in the Art in Embassies program’s Democracy Collection, which can be viewed on the National Art Education Association’s (NAEA) website.

The print shows Amini with one hand pulling back her hijab at her neck as she gazes to her right and is based on a photo of her that has widely circulated since her death. Treat made the print primarily using shades of purple. In an accompanying caption she wrote, “This reduction print of Mahsa Amini is in response to the current social climate of Iran. Art is an amazing vehicle for democracy because it gives artists like me the opportunity to speak out about injustices. I have a voice, and I’m able to express it through things I create.”

In her 15 years of teaching, this is the first time Daniels said she has had students enter the Art in Embassies competition, but she said that, historically, she tries to encourage them to submit their work into competitions. Daniels said she sees competitions as an opportunity for students to gain recognition, or monetary rewards, and for their artwork to receive more exposure.

“I think that definitely, being recognized for something like this helps students be willing to take the risk to try something new next time, or enter a contest, or apply for a job. It’s that positive feedback that people really need,” Daniels said.

Of Treat’s selection, Daniels called it “a great honor” for her as a teacher. “She’s very deserving and has worked hard, and really pays attention to detail to express her thoughts.”

Asked what it’s like to live in Columbia Falls and watch the protests in Iran and observe what women in that country are experiencing, Treat described the complex feelings of seeing things beyond what she has ever encountered, and yet noticing small echoes in her own corner of the world.

“It’s hard because I don’t want to say that’s something I can relate to. That’s something that’s really terrible — I mean, these women are literally being murdered for indecency,” Treat said. “It’s just really tough to watch, and I don’t want to say it’s something I can relate to. But on a much smaller scale I notice things in my own life and my community. It was really interesting following along with that and then just noticing the much smaller versions of the same problems that I was seeing.”

Treat said that she expects art and creating art will continue to have a place in her life after high school. She said she grew up with talented artists in her immediate and extended family, including her mother, and in the home where she grew up there’s even a room filled with art and craft supplies.

In the immediate future, her professional aspirations lie in the world of ballet dancing. Treat said she danced for Noble Dance, a ballet school in Kalispell, from the ages of 4 to 18. Last summer she spent time dancing in a program by the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, and this year she performed in the San Diego Ballet’s performance of the Nutcracker at the Wachholz Center at Flathead Valley Community College.  By the end of the summer, Treat will be relocating to Salt Lake City to study dance at the Ballet West Academy. Her goal is to advance at Ballet West and have a chance to join the dance company’s professional ranks. As she continues to study ballet, Treat said she’ll also be working and taking online courses to get her core college credits out of the way.

“It’s an art and a sport at the same time,” Treat said of ballet. “I’m definitely more drawn to the artistic aspect of it. It’s another thing where I really just like creating and using my energy for something artistic.”