News Release

Glacier Announces 2019 Artists-in-Residence

Date: April 29, 2019
Contact: For Media Inquiries, 406-888-5838
Contact: For Visitor Inquiries, 406-888-7800

West Glacier, MT – Three artists have been selected to participate in the 2019 Artist-in-Residence Program at Glacier National Park. The artists are Amory Abbott, Chad Farnes and Nic Fischer. 

The program offers professional artists the opportunity to pursue their artistic discipline while being surrounded by the park’s inspiring landscape. Each artist will pursue their work while in the park, and then engage and inspire the public through multiple outreach programs. The public programs will be related to their experience as the artist-in-residence and can be demonstrations, talks, exploratory walks, or performances. Digital images of selected work produced as a part of the residency may be used in park publications, websites and presentations for education and outreach. 

The Glacier landscape has long inspired art and expression, from traditional dances and stories, to serving as a summer residence and source of creativity for the famous painter Charlie Russell. In present day, art in the park continues in the form of the Artist-in-Residence program, countless art workshops held in and around the park, and with thousands of visitors who come each year, bringing easels, cameras, and other tools to capture the beauty around them. Art inspired by Glacier regularly appears in both local and worldwide gallery shows and museums. 

Artists this summer include:

Amory Abbott (June 3 - June 28)

Abbott’s charcoal landscape works are imaginative and dramatic reinterpretations of the world around us. Atmospheric and dark, dreamy and foreboding, his drawings envision wild and remote geographies as places of ancient magic, origins of myths and prophecies, of adventure, communion, cataclysm, and transformation. By combining local history, regional folklore, and global ecological concerns, Abbott uses his unique and fantastical style to explore how the deeper experience of place can inform how we see, how we relate, how we live in, and how we move through the land around us. Through workshops, material demos, and campfire stories, he and park guests will search for deeper connections to the ground under their feet, and ethical paths forward as caretakers of our magical and precious planet. 

Chad Farnes (July 8 - August 2)

Farnes uses the unique medium of tape, such as duct tape and painter’s tape, to create photo realistic images. His art can best be described as a mosaic, emphasizing the overall impact that can be achieved through a collection of small pieces. Farnes plans to recreate images from Glacier National Park using only tape and to aid visitors in creating their own tape art masterpieces through a tape-by-numbers (similar to paint-by-numbers) system. The ultimate goal is for visitors to interpret the mosaic style to further evaluate the importance of individual actions when creating a sustainable environment.

Nic Fischer (August 26 - September 20)

Fischer is a painter who combines field studies with satellite imagery to illustrate backcountry exploration within expansive landscapes. During his residency he will paint from the summit of Edwards Mountain and create a foundation of reference from which to execute a large, complex landscape painting celebrating the reopening of Sperry Chalet and its majestic surroundings.