Although a series of her assemblage work features hands pinned like insect specimens inside shadow boxes, artist Kate Huston is not so easily pinned down. Her works spans decades and mediums, all with an eye toward creating community both in and out of the world of art. As her art travels, Huston follows, hosting free art events in the hopes of inspiring creativity in others.
She provides supplies and often homemade pie. “Pie brings people together,” she said during an interview in her home studio outside Bozeman on Tuesday, later mentioning how she and her mother gather to test new recipes. Huston will host events at the Covellite Theatre in Butte on Friday evening and outside the DADI mini museum at 6 p.
m. on Saturday, where she is the new featured artist. “It’s great, it’s two hours of community gathering and free art,” Huston said.
“I think people think art can be inaccessible and expensive, and I really don’t want it to come off as that.” Plus, who knows where it could lead? Huston, who graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University in Boston in the ’90s, cites a class taught by Jesseca Ferguson as inspiration for the shadow boxes that would eventually become the assemblage collage pieces. A print from Ferguson, with a collection of found objects, hangs over the mantle in Huston’s living room.
But in the class, the materials were a bit more outside of the box. “Who knows that working on pig intestines with cyanotype would lead to this?” Huston asked. Huston found herself drawn to the surrealist work of artists like Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp and to dioramas like those in the Boston Public Library.
“It’s not just some building with an Army man in the front,” she said. “There’s a lady selling vegetables off in the far corner. What’s her story? What’s going on over here?” She hopes to bring the same sense of exploration to viewers of her shadow boxes.
“My heart is these collage works that I’ve done, and I’ve done them throughout the last 30 years,” she said. The latest iteration of Huston’s work started as simple imaginary worlds created with reproductions of Victorian etchings from the public domain, an era she said is marked by invention and discovery. Now she’s using the medium to retell stories of women from fables, folk tales, Greek mythology or the bible.
Eve is not the antagonist in Huston’s version of Eden, and the acquisition of knowledge is beautiful and necessary. Medusa isn’t beheaded and is instead allowed to keep her head, her love and her beauty. “We have all these great mythologies, all these great tales, but women always seem to get stuck at the bad end of it,” Huston said.
An avid reader from a young age, Huston found herself drawn to these mythologies, tales she says formed civilizations and philosophies. They taught lessons and gave people an idea of how the world worked, before mythology was replaced by science. “And they were just such fantastic stories,” she said.
“You have love affairs, beheadings, creatures, wars and all these gods playing with each other and taking out their emotions on each other.” The show at the DADI mini museum, featuring four muses, feels like a bit of a full-circle moment for Huston as she reflects on her work in Bozeman. When she first moved to the area 25 years ago, she had a studio in the Story Mill, just up the road from the DADI’s current location on Griffin Drive within sight of the mill building near the old stockyards and across from Story Mill Community Park.
“This year has just been absolutely crazy, and it’s been wonderful because it has really been pushing the boundaries of what I have been doing with the artwork.” Huston’s upcoming exhibits include a version of her tiny box worlds at the Holter Museum, a walk-in shadow box designed for a show at Omerta Arts Gallery, both in Helena, a crankie box collaboration with son Alwren for Random Acts of Silliness and an exhibition of her photography focused on the remnants of Montana’s homesteads and mining towns at the The Paul Harris and Marguerite Kirk Gallery in Belgrade. Next year, she has a writing residency planned at the Montana Artists Refuge in Basin to work on a book of photographs of state lands.
It feels a little surreal Huston said, especially after her art took a backseat to life for about 15 years. As Huston says, “life happens.” She had a kid, now an adult teenager, and dove into her other passion for improving food systems for Montana’s children.
In what Huston calls the “artist dilemma,” she splits her time between making art and this career. Both seem to be more than a full time job. Starting Sept.
23, Huston will be running a grant to improve meal programs in up to 10 rural school districts in Montana, focusing on local and indigenous foods, whole foods and bringing scratch cooking into lunch rooms. “I’m passionate about food and children and nutrition in schools, especially in Montana where we have so many food deserts,” she said. After the interview in her home studio, Huston visited the DADI mini museum to hang the last of the four pieces to be featured with the help of founder Richard Nelson whose love of art was inspired by a class he took in college from Dadi Wirz.
The mini museum was conceived after Nelson closed the Silver Bow Art Gallery in Butte in 2021 and inspired by a personal motto. “If you can’t do something grand, so something tiny in a grand way,” he said. The shipping container-based museum was created in collaboration with Intrinsik Architecture.
More recently, Western Glass installed a wall of windows to protect the art. Many of the early exhibitions were from Nelson’s own collection, though lately he has been incorporating the work of local artists as well. “I love what he’s done out here,” said Huston, who reached out to Nelson about the possibility of a show.
“It brings art and nature together and makes it so accessible to the public.” Get any of our free daily email newsletters — news headlines, opinion, e-edition, obituaries and more..
