Upcoming Exhibitions at MAM

Rearranging Stars: Jennifer Leutzinger, Brittney Denham-Whisonant, and Delia Touché

August 1- December 31, 2025

This exhibition began casually, with a knowledge of each artist’s working practice in print and bookmaking. Through conversation, it was revealed that each had an additional artmaking focus of repurposed and mended contemporary quilt making that is engaged, experimental, and uproariously fun. Quilting is a medium for personal and community histories, as well as individual expression. As settler colonialism spread westward in the late 1800s, missionaries from the Dakota Presbytery introduced the art of quilt making to the Northern Plains tribes on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation. Native women eventually made the star quilts their own by using colors and designs that were traditional to them.

According to tribal historians, as bison quickly disappeared due to U.S. Government starvation policies, star quilts became a cultural replacement of the buffalo robes. Just as buffalo robes were valuable gifts of honor, the star quilt became the honored gift in these Native cultures. The language of abstract art is embedded in histories of sewing, weaving, quilting, making, women’s time and labor — think, for instance, of the quilters of Gee’s Bend in the antebellum South. Pattern and repetition, or disruption, make for some of the most inherent and satisfying visual experiences. Star quilts are a cross-cultural language. Each artist approaches this language uniquely, as if they were speaking a dialect or in a particular stylistic manner while sharing commonalities. All are using the star as a point of connection and departure. 

J.M. Cooper: Adel Sheep Shearing

Aresty Gallery at the Missoula Art Museum

October 3, 2025-February 21, 2026

This series of photographs focuses on the annual sheep shearing at the Sieben Live Stock Company in Adel near Cascade, Montana. Cooper photographed the event over three separate years. The ranch was founded in 1868 by Henry Sieben, subject of a new book to be published in tandem with the exhibition by Farcountry Press and the Foundation for Montana History.

Cooper began photographing in the 1970s, and was a student of Lee Nye, the infamous black & white photographer from Missoula, MT. “When Lee walked into the classroom wearing aviator sunglasses, I knew I was going to be a photographer,” he says.

Cooper recently retired as archival photographer for the Montana Historical Society. He has documented spring shearing and branding, and Montana architecture including the Archie Bray Foundation, Deer Lodge Prison, and Helena’s Last Chance Gulch. His photos are published in Dark Spaces: Montana’s Historic Penitentiary at Deer Lodge in collaboration with Ellen Baulmer.  

Stella Nall

Oct 3- Dec 27, 2025