Bozeman INaugural Exhibition

Opening a new location in Bozeman, Montana, with an exhibition featuring the work of Anne Appleby, James Chronister, Amy Ellingson, Wolfgang Ganter, James Sterling Pitt, and Andy Vogt.

Anne Appleby was born in 1954 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and moved to Montana at age 17. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1977 from the University of Montana and embarked on a 15-year apprenticeship with an Ojibwe elder, learning to patiently and deeply observe nature. Appleby would watch and then translate into color the cycles of leaves, stems, buds, fruit, and seeds, transforming nature’s fluid evolution into two-dimensional portraits.

Appleby received her Master of Fine Arts in 1989 from the San Francisco Art Institute and has since exhibited her painting internationally to high acclaim. She has had solo exhibitions at the Tacoma Art Museum, 2018, the Ulrich Museum of Art at Wichita State University, Kansas, 2011, the Museum Ritter, Waldenbuch, Germany, 2010, and the Boise Art Museum, 2000. In 2007 the artist was featured at the Villa e Collezione Panza, Varese, Italy, which commissioned a permanent major painting installation. Her paintings are in the permanent collections of the Albright-Knox Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Denver Museum of Art, the Museo d’ARTE Moderna e Contemporea, and numerous other public and private institutions.

Anne Appleby has received grants from the Pollock Krasner Foundation, the Western Arts Federation, and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation; in addition she is the recipient of the SECA Award from the San Francisco Museum of Art, the David S. McMillan Award from the San Francisco Art Institute, and the Northwest Biennial from the Portland Art Museum.

James Chronister (b. 1978) earned his MFA in 2004 from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco where he received the Richard K Price Painting Award. In 2010 Chronister was nominated for the SECA Award by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 2013 he was awarded the Artist-In-Residence at the Lux Art Institute which was accompanied by a survey of his work from the years 2009-2013.

“I am interested in the feeling of listening to a walkman in the woods behind my parents’ home, looking at the mountains through my bedroom window at night as a child, playing my father’s vinyl records and burning incense, driving in the middle of a Montana winter, riding a train through rural villages and countryside during a German summer, playing Dungeons and Dragons, reading Lord of the Rings, and watching Zeppelin’s The Song Remains the Same.

Within painting, I find a different, imagined and bruised reality.”

Amy Ellingson’s work has been exhibited nationally and in Tokyo, Japan. She is the recipient of the Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship and the Artadia Grant to Individual Artists and has been awarded fellowships at the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation.  Recent group exhibitions include Open Ended: Painting and Sculpture Since 1900 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Unfamiliar Again: Contemporary Women Abstractionists at the Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane University.  Ellingson’s work is held in various public collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Crocker Art Museum, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Oakland Museum of California, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, and the US Embassies in Algeria and Tunisia. She received a B.A. in Studio Art from Scripps College and an M.F.A. from CalArts. Her public commission, Untitled (Large Variation), is an 1100 square foot ceramic mosaic mural. It is a permanent installation on view in Terminal 3 at the San Francisco International Airport. Ellingson was Associate Professor of Art at the San Francisco Art Institute from 2000 to 2011 and has served on the Board of Directors at Root Division, a San Francisco nonprofit arts organization, since 2011. She lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico. 

James Sterling Pitt’s artistic process is one of exploring and honoring the often abstract and unknown realms of memories and their emotional counterparts. His sculptures, even in their most austere form, allow for intimacy and tenderness while the playful and illustrative forms maintain a sense of gravity.

For many years Pitt’s artistic practice served as an autobiographical image bank, representing particular memories, places, and sensations. Fleeting sightings and experiences were reinterpreted as two and three dimensional reconstructions; standing as surrogates for images lost during momentary, perceptual shifts. Having suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car accident over ten years ago, this way of working began as a tool to help cope with short-term memory loss and difficulties with language. Through a process of drawing and sculpture, he was able to give form to the less concrete and harder to articulate aspects of the mind, such as something sensed or a fading memory.

James Sterling Pitt (b. 1977, Warwick, New York) earned his BFA from the University of New Mexico and his MFA from Mills College. Pitt’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions in San Francisco, Boston, and Berlin, and group exhibitions throughout the Bay Area and New York. His work is in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Berkeley Art Museum.

Andy Vogt grew up in the suburbs of Washington DC and attended Carnegie Mellon University where he earned a BFA in Intermedia, a program focused on time based media, performance and installation. He lived in Pittsburgh PA until 2000.

His current work using reclaimed wood from demolished buildings, started around 2004, a few years after moving to San Francisco. Since then, his work has been exhibited nationally and locally including solo shows at Eleanor Harwood Gallery, Eli Ridgway Gallery, Hap Gallery (Portland, OR) , Southern Exposure, The Museum of Craft and Design and Ampersand International Arts. Group exhibitions include Headlands Center for the Arts, San Francisco State University Art Gallery, Swarm Gallery and Adobe Books Backroom Gallery. In 2010 he was an artist in residence at Headlands Center for the Arts.

Andy lives and works in San Francisco, California.