Happy Friday, everyone! Next Thursday will be the last Whitefish Gallery Nights of the season, and it should be a good one. I’m especially excited that Kevin Red Star’s work will be featured at the Cawdrey Gallery, with Red Star himself in attendance.

Born in Lodge Grass on the Crow Indian Reservation, Red Star is a spectacular artist whose paintings and lithographs often focus on depicting Crow culture and history.

The gallery will have 13 different works of Red Star’s on display, and will also be selling copies of the 2015 Daniel Gibson art book “Kevin Red Star: Crow Indian Artist,” which have been signed by Red Star.

Red Star is based out of Roberts, and has his own art gallery in neighboring Red Lodge. My old colleague at The Billings Gazette, Jake Iverson, has written about Red Star and his work over the years. As Jake put it in a 2024 piece, “Kevin Red Star is about as established as a Montana artist can be. His paintings and lithographs showing Native American life in intimate detail are bold, subtly experimental and fiercely his own. A Kevin Red Star is a genre as much as it is a specific description.”

I reached out to the Cawdrey Gallery about their upcoming showcase of Red Star to find out more. In recent years his work has been on display elsewhere in the valley, including a 2023 exhibition featuring his work at the Wachholz College Center’s Wanda Hollensteiner Art Gallery.

In a press release about Red Star’s appearance, Cawdrey Gallery manager Jess Curran provided some more background on their featured artist next week:

“Working primarily in acrylic, ink, and collage, Red Star creates powerful visual narratives that draw directly from Crow culture and history. His distinctive style has earned recognition in major exhibitions across the country, with over 100 exhibitions featuring his work throughout his career, including 40 solo exhibitions. Red Star’s work gained national attention through the Gambaro Gallery’s ‘Indian Artists, 1977’ exhibition, where he was featured as ‘representative of the new generation of Indian painters’ alongside renowned Native American artists such as Allan Houser. More recently, his work was included in the major survey exhibition ‘Stretching the Canvas: Eight Decades of Native Painting’ (2019-21) at the National Museum of the American Indian George Gustav Heye Center in New York.”

Additionally, Curran told me she is especially excited about the chance to see his painting Little Nest (as seen in the main image of this newsletter) in person.

The Cawdrey Gallery event featuring Red Star’s work will go from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Oct. 2.

While we’re on the topic of art, I thought it would be worth sharing some commentary from the Montana-based writer Tom McGuane, as delivered at the recent Free Press Fest in Bozeman. Our friends over at The Montana Free Press have published a selection of other livestream videos from the festival, which is how I was able to hear some of McGuane’s remarks.

McGuane’s event was a conversation between himself and his daughter Maggie. I’ve yet to watch the whole thing, but I did come across an interesting segment where McGuane makes the case for the social and cultural importance of literature and reading.

Here’s an excerpt of what McGuane said: “I continue to be startled by people I’ve actually run into who can’t guess when the Civil War was. I was talking to some young person who had been reading about the Battle of the Bulge and he didn’t know that was part of World War II. And Vietnam is beginning to sink into that zone of unknowing.

I don’t know how we connect to our own lives and our own history as a people unless we do read. The advantage of fiction — and I’ll go kind of circle back to that a little bit —is that it can represent human consciousness in a particular set of historical circumstances better than anything else. And if you want to test that idea, read ‘The Great Gatsby’ and see how people felt about life in America, life of wealth life of class conflict, all those things. Read that and then go back and read the newspapers from 1926 or look at the movies from 1926 and see if they make any sense to you at all about the consciousness of those times. You won’t get anything from that.

But you can read ‘Anna Karenina’ and know what it was like to be those people. Otherwise you end up living in kind of a way in which your information base is only the years you actually lived, and you’re living those days with very limited information about your fellow humans.

The other thing that seems to me is there’s always an attempt—and we’re seeing this a lot in politics—to turn other people into objects. Literature helps us rescue them from objecthood and return them to their status as subjects.”

You can listen to the full conversation with Tom McGuane here.

Thursday, Oct. 9 at 7:30 p.m. – Old Crow Medicine Show
Grammy Award-winning Americana string band known for their high-energy live shows and timeless blend of bluegrass, folk and rock are stopping in Kalispell during their 2025 Circle the Wagons Tour. This show offers general admission seating on the main floor for those who want to stand and dance. The balcony features reserved seating.

Sunday, Oct. 12 at 7 p.m. – Rumours of Fleetwood Mac
Personally endorsed by Fleetwood Mac founding member Mick Fleetwood himself, this tribute group has been performing to sold-out crowds all over the world, recreating the music and energy of Fleetwood Mac’s legendary live shows.