Artists featured in solo exhibitions at UM museum

The University of Montana will offer solo exhibitions this spring by two important artists, Aden Arnold and Geoffrey Stocking. Both exhibits will launch Thursday, Feb. 19, at UM’s Montana Museum of Art and Culture, located on campus at 795 S. Fifth St. E.

 The Arnold exhibition, “Reassessing Aden Arnold,” and the Stocking show, “In Sequence,” open to the public with a free reception from 5 to 7 p.m. in the museum’s Patricia Payne and Ron and Nancy Erickson Galleries. Stocking also will deliver a talk from 6 to 7 p.m. in the museum’s Michele and Loren Hansen Galleries.

 MMAC Director Rafael Chacón describes Arnold (1901-1973) as an overlooked modernist who taught at UM for 30 years.

“While Montana modernists Rudy Autio, Jim Dew and Walter Hook are well-known names, Aden Arnold, the man who hired them to teach at UM, is virtually forgotten,” Chacón said. “We are proud to reassess this transformative teacher-artist’s important legacy of diffusing modernism in 20th-century Montana.”

From his arrival in 1939 to teach at UM until his death in 1973, Arnold advocated for art as a discipline of the highest order and for modernism as the appropriate direction for the arts in rural Montana.

Featuring a wealth of new research, the exhibition highlights Arnold’s contributions to the state’s modernist landscape through his teaching, artistic legacy and identity as a queer artist in a time of great social and legal repression. Arnold also championed modern art by teaching thousands of UM students and helping to establish the state’s first modernist arts organizations, the Montana Institute of the Arts and Montana Art Educators Association. He was a painter and designer who made the transition from classical figuration to Abstract Expressionism, all the while teaching and promoting the major styles of the 20th century.

 “He not only taught and promoted the great art movements of the day such as Cubism and Surrealism, but he synthesized and ‘Westernized”’ them in his own unique style,” Chacón said.

 The “In Sequence” exhibition introduces contemporary painter Stocking to western Montana. Chacón said the show presents a body of work that reflects Stocking’s sustained commitment to artistic excellence and thoughtful inquiry.

 “Through his vibrant non-objective paintings, Stocking explores themes of color relationships, inviting audiences to engage with complex ideas, including the influence that colors have on the world and the people in it,” Chacón said. “A former UM art major, Stocking returns to exhibit at his alma mater after 22 years.”

For more information about these exhibitions and programming, email Tracy Hall at [email protected] or call 406-243-2019.

    This 1937 painting by Aden Arnold is titled “Boy with Sickle.” (Photo by Eileen Rafferty)