Gallery Opening on the Second Friday, April 8, 2022, 5-8 PM
Exhibiting in the Main Gallery through April 30

Visit in-person during open hours:
Monday through Saturday 10 AM to 6 PM and Sunday noon to 4 PM

The ZACC is delighted to host 12 fantastic women artists in celebration of their love for birds, opening on the second Friday, April 8, from 5-8 PM in the ZACC’s Main Gallery. Each artist provides her own vision of the avian world, with multiple mediums represented.

STEPHANIE FROSTAD / PAINTINGS
Stephanie J. Frostad studied at Studio Arts Center International in Florence, Italy in 1985-86. She received a BFA from the Maryland Institute, College of Art in 1990, and in 1994 completed an MFA in Painting at The University of Montana. Frostad has exhibited throughout the Northwest, in California, Maryland, Washington D.C. and abroad in Canada, China, Italy and New Zealand. In 1994 she was awarded a Montana Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship. In 2018 she received MAC’s Artist Innovation Award. Her work is held in numerous private and public collections including The University of Victoria in British Columbia, The Montana Museum of Arts and Culture, The Missoula Art Museum and The University of Washington Medical Center. Born and raised in Walla Walla, Washington, Frostad now makes her home in Missoula, Montana.

CLAIRE EMERY / WOODCUTS
Claire Emery an American artist, naturalist, and educator who has lived and worked in Missoula, Montana since 1991. Claire began her visual arts career over 25 years ago hiking the Northern Rockies with a field journal in her hand. Intimacy with the natural world is the axis around which all of her work as an artist and educator spin. Her woodblock prints highlight the nature and culture of the Northern Rockies and are full of vitality, warmth and exquisite detail. Her field sketches, book illustrations and original woodblock prints are found in museums, university and private collections around the world.

USCHI CARPENTER / PHOTOGRAPHY
Uschi Carpenter is a nature, wildlife, and fine arts photographer living in Missoula, Montana. After careers in teaching and international relations, she found her true calling as a photographer capturing the beauty of the wild. Her educational path spanned three countries (Germany, Great Britain, and the United States), but it was the grandeur of the Rocky Mountains that turned Uschi into a "shadow catcher and light chaser." After initially practicing the Zen of landscape photography, her passion for photographing birds has transformed her into a seeker of magic, equilibrium, and soul in those feathered relatives we call "birds."

CYNTHIA SWIDLER / WATERCOLOR
Cynthia Swidler is an artist and retired occupational therapist in Missoula, Montana. Inspired by the spirit of the natural world, she works in photography and painting as an expression of her observations, whether in the garden or in the wild. She studied art education and occupational therapy at Wayne State University and the University of Montana.

JEAN ALBUS / PHOTO COLLAGE
Jean Albus was born and raised in Montana. She left to live and work in Seattle 15 years before returning to live in Red Lodge, MT in 1988. Later, she and her husband lived off the grid in the high desert above the Clarks Fork Valley near Bridger, Montana where a large body of her photography was created. She currently resides in small-town Carbon County with her husband and faithful dog. She continues to work in photography and sight-specific installation. She is represented by Walker Fine Art in Denver. Her work resides in the Yellowstone Art Museum permanent collection.

SALLY FRIOU / MIXED MEDIA
Sally Friou completed her BFA, Master of Arts and Education, and teaching credentials at the University of Montana. She taught art in her own studio, the Missoula Art Museum and Missoula County Public Schools for 27 years. Sally has pursued painting, photography and ceramics exhibiting at the Missoula Art Museum, Bernice's Bakery, Zootown Art Collective, Buttercup Cafe, Downtown Dance Collective, the Loft, Art City, and Montana Bliss Artworks.

KAREN SAVORY / PAINTINGS & PRINTS
An appreciation of both nature and art has always been a part of Karen Savory’s life. Growing up along the Niagara River in Western NY, she could never get enough of either. She would beg her dad to take her camping and fishing with the boys and then beg her mom to let her “help” with sewing and painting projects. These loves continue now that Karen is living in a small log cabin in the foothills of the Bitterroot mountains of Montana. In addition to selling her work in more traditional ways she is proud to use her art to support the protection of wild places and open lands by partnering with her local land trust and several environmental organizations. As she continues to explore the surrounding mountains, she knows just how lucky she is to combine her longtime passions as she creates art that shares her love of nature.

DIANE OLHOEFT / WATERCOLOR & SILK PAINTINGS
As a child in rural Pennsylvania, Diane grew up watching her mother paint and sketch ideas for clothing she wanted to create, as she made most of her family's nicer clothes. Diane's time was spent outside, building forts, exploring old homesteads and pretending she was a wild horse. Watercolor and silk painting has some of the wildness of childhood. Watercolor is a perfect medium as it was light, portable and could come on any adventure. It has really helped her to appreciate her surroundings in a more detailed way. Diane loves the colors and free flowing way the paint goes on the paper. It seems to be in tune with the unpredictability, adaptability and movement of nature.

KATE DAVIS / ETCHINGS & SCULPTURE
Kate Davis has been immersed in a world of wild animals beginning as a teenager with the Cincinnati Zoo Junior Zoologists Club, then a degree in Zoology from the University of Montana in 1982. She founded the non-profit organization Raptors of the Rockies 34 years ago. The Florence facilities house a dozen non-releasable and falconry birds. These Teaching Team raptors have been stars in 1820 education programs for 137,000 participants young and old alike. She has also presented her lively PowerPoint programs across the country from Boston to Seattle, with Chicago, Salt Lake City and Detroit in between. These raptors are models for Kate’s art – printmaking, drawing, painting, and big welded steel sculptures.

GAIL TRENFIELD / PASTELS & PAINTINGS
As a child, I spent many hours studying paintings and learning to paint on my own. By the time I entered Indiana University, I was ready for intensive figure drawing and painting. The idea was that, if you could manage a figure, you could manage anything – and that proved true until I began to think about painting birds. I have long included them in my paintings, but that is not the same as considering how they live in their environments, and somehow getting that into paint. These paintings are early in this journey, which I hope will be long and fascinating.

CATHY WEBER / CERAMICS
Cathy Weber grew up in the Midwestern U.S., studied at the Herron School of Art and Indiana University, and completed a formal painting apprenticeship in Mexico City. In 1981 she moved to Montana, where she maintains a studio in historic downtown Dillon. Though most of Weber’s work is done in oil, she is skilled in a variety of media. Her work is motivated by an increasing sense of urgency to make things of beauty in response to war, injustice, greed and violence. Weber finds comfort and hope in the process of creating beautiful images of common objects.