Threads
exhibition sponsors
Linda Shelhamer & Stephen Haraden
Charles M. Bair and Northwest Projects Galleries
November 6, 2025 – January 11, 2026
Threads presents a selection of collages, assemblages, textiles, eco-prints, and weavings made by nine women who work as artists, mothers, and art teachers. Ariea Berry (Missoula), Jennifer Combe (Missoula), Cortni Harant (Great Falls), Shontee Johnson (Browning), Crystal McCallie (Missoula), Caitlin Shelman (Mission Valley), Monica Thompson (Missoula), Maura Whalan (Missoula), and Radium Woolf (Browning) offer diverse perspectives surrounding their identities, place, and heritage, and through their work, explore connections with family, teaching, and the landscape.
The artists/mothers/teachers connected at a Montana Art Education Association art retreat in the spring of 2022 at The University of Montana. MFA candidate Crystal McCallie led a multi-day workshop on sewing and printmaking textile and paper collages. The artists/mothers/teachers found new ways of working with textiles and detritus to explore family, land, and identity with chosen materials.
With these works, the artists/mothers/teachers invite viewers to ponder heritage through a female lens, elevating the domestic, the home, and, as Radium Woolf writes, “oyiisskimaa – making of a nest.” In the case of these women, the nest is built to support their children and their students.
Threads is sponsored by the Montana Art Gallery Directors Association (MAGDA), a state-wide service organization for non-profit museums & galleries, and supported in part by grants from the Montana Arts Council, a state agency funded by the State of Montana; coal severance taxes paid based upon coal mined in Montana and deposited in Montana’s Cultural and Aesthetic Projects Trust Fund; and the National Endowment for the Arts.
