RED LODGE — The past and the present intermingle in Red Lodge. Trendy shops pop up in antique buildings. New eateries sit next to places whose menus haven’t changed since miners ate there.
The mountain air is crisp and clear sure, but everything else is a little blurred down here. If you really want to see the intersection of new and established, head to 11 N. Broadway, right between AlpacaLand and the Beef Jerky Experience.
According to some barely legible numbers on the sandstone facade, the building was erected in 1900. The upstairs tenant has put a display of Lego flowers on the windowsill, the rare greenery that won’t freeze in a mountain winter. Underneath all that you’ll find the new Kevin Red Star Gallery, which officially opened Thursday.
It’s a big, bright space, with high walls capped by a stamped metal ceiling. There are some comfy couches and a cow hide rug and the walls are overflowing with Red Star’s art. The Kevin Red Star gallery in Red Lodge is seen here in July.
“We’re part of the community, which is great,” said Red Star, whose work is also featured at Old Main Gallery & Framing in Bozeman . “It’s a beautiful valley here. Red Lodge is a fine, fine city with tremendous people.
” 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 d.