Hockaday Educators Workshop Paints a Picture of Charlie Russell’s Life and Work
In some ways, the whole concept of a workshop among peers is in the spirit of how Russell and his wife Nancy spent their time at the Bull Head Lodge on Lake McDonald
By Mike Kordenbrock
Twenty people arrived at the Hockaday Museum of Art in Kalispell Thursday for the start of a grant-funded educators workshop that will take them into Glacier National Park and the surrounding area for a place-based, immersive learning experience about the famed Montana Western artist Charlie Russell.
Called “Charlie Russell: The Artist and His Friends in Glacier National Park,” the workshop has an itinerary that includes educational guided hikes, plein air painting, field journaling, historic tours, lesson plan building and a lineup of speakers covering a wide range of topics relevant to Charlie Russell’s work. Participants will be staying at cabins provided by the Glacier Institute.
Talks featured in the workshop include “Kid Gloves and Brass Knuckles: The Life of Nancy Cooper Russell,” “The Gangs All Here/Where Will We Sleep?” “C.M. Russell: Heritage and Legacy,” “Art and Impact of the Great Northern Railway on Glacier Park” and “A Blackfoot Way of Knowing.”
In some ways, the whole concept of a workshop among peers is in the spirit of how Russell and his wife Nancy spent their time at the Bull Head Lodge on Lake McDonald, where they would summer for more than two decades. The lodge was a regular place for artists, writers and environmentalists. During a tour of the Hockaday on Thursday, the museum’s education Director Kathy Martin talked about how Russell would take other artists under his wing, including the Kalispell-based western artist Ace Powell. As Martin shared, Powell’s signature ace of diamonds that he marked every painting with, was actually born of an attempt to mimic the buffalo skull that the self-taught Russell had long included in his own signature.
Powell was just a boy when he had a chance to paint with Russell and another artist friend of Russell’s Joe De Young, who was one of the few artists that Russell went so far as to claim as a protégé, according to Martin. Powell had been trying to paint the exact same thing as Russell, which went all the way down to the buffalo skull signature. De Young compared it to putting someone else’s brand on your own horse, and so the artists helped Powell come up with his own signature mark.
“Which he did, from that time, until he died,” Martin said, of Powell’s ace of diamonds signature, as she stood in front of a row of paintings by Powell, De Young and Russell.
The overarching focus of the workshop is to inform participants on the effective use of primary sources for teaching in K-12 classrooms and museum settings, so that they can bring those skills and newly learned information back to their communities. Part of the workshop includes teaching participants how to access art and information found in collections, including the Library of Congress, the Montana Historical Society and the Montana Museum of Art and Culture. Some of the workshop participants are local, while others traveled from places more far-flung from northwest Montana, like Georgia.
Alyssa Cordova, the executive director of the Hockaday, said that while this is the first year the museum has hosted this event, she’s hopeful that they can build off of this with an eye towards future programming. The workshop is funded by a Library of Congress Teaching Primary Sources grant, something for which educational consultant Cheryl Hughes, who is helping lead the workshop with Martin, said she suggested the museum should apply.
Among the speakers at the four-day workshop is Kirby Lambert, who co-authored the book “Montana’s Charlie Russell: Art in the Collection of the Montana Historical Society,” with Jennifer Bottomly-O’Looney. Lambert, who lives in Helena, is retired now from his time working for the Montana Historical Society.
For Montanans, Lambert said the connection to Russell seems have something to do with the closeness to him, maybe just a single degree of separation in some cases, that people feel. More broadly though, Russell’s depictions of the west, which Lambert said drew on a romantic vision as well as realism, have a way of drawing people in.
“Mostly I think it’s his ability as a storyteller, and the stories he tells through his art speak to people’s imagination and their idea of what Montana was like,” Lambert said.