News Release

Glacier Announces 2018 Artists-in-Residence

Date: April 27, 2018
Contact: Lauren Alley, 406-888-5838

West Glacier, MT – Four artists have been selected to participate in the 2018 Artist-in-Residence Program at Glacier National Park. The artists are Matthew Harrison, Emily McIlroy, Meg Leonard, and Jamie McHugh. 

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 important 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:

Matthew Harrison (June 4 -July 29)
Matthew is a vocal music specialist who plans to translate the epic landscapes and rich local culture into choral literature for all ages. Through choral music, students can be metaphorically transported to the park and experience the sights and sounds through their active engagement with music written in Glacier for Glacier. He believes when people can stand shoulder to shoulder with one another and experience the inherent beauty of creating harmony, a powerful force awakens for good in a world that needs more empathy.

Emily McIlroy (July 9- August 3)
Emily uses the practice of drawing and painting as a means of connecting inner and outer landscapes. Her work explores forces and life forms of the natural world as metaphors for human emotional experience, and points to the radical ways we are interrelated with our environment. During her residency, she will focus on the act of walking as part of her artistic process. Responding to Glacier’s wilderness through the creation of images and text, she will compose an aesthetic field guide that aims to connect visitors with their passage through the park. 

Meg Leonard* (September 3 –28)
Glacier National Park is known for its grandeur. Meg wants to give equal importance to the minute details in an interplay of scale. She is captivated by light, relationships of colors, or a brief, crystalline moment in the midst of change. Music or bird songs provide rhythm and tone. Her landscape paintings in oil and pastel are derived from developing the most compelling quality of the moment. Meg hopes to explore climate change, melting glaciers and residual ice fields, looking for revealed patterns and colors as ice melts into streams and lakes. She will share her process with others on trails and during campfire chats. 
 *Meg Leonard was originally selected as a 2017 Artist-in-Residence. Due to the Sprague  Fire, her residency was rescheduled for 2018. 

Jamie McHugh (October 1 – 26) 
Jamie is a multi-disciplinary artist who focuses on the interplay between the inner landscape of the human body and the outer landscape – or larger body – of the natural world. His photographic and video work, primarily generated on the northern California coast, centers on the varying forms, qualities and movements of water to create inner coherence in the viewer. He is thrilled to immerse himself in the Glacier Park ecosystem to discover all that a new, unique terrain can inspire and generate.

--NPS—