by JAN RICHTER
SPONSORED BY THE CLARK CHATEAU
Tour Schedule
- HOLTER MUSEUM OF ART January 15 – March 14, 2027
- EMERSON CENTER FOR THE ARTS & CULTURE April 9 – June 4, 2027
- CARLE GALLERY at the BUTTE SILVER-BOW PUBLIC LIBRARY June 21 – July 31, 2027
Exhibit Details
- 36 photographs
- 16″ x 20″
- 2 crates
- Available March 2026 – December 2028
- Up to 6-weeks: $300/ 7 – 12-weeks: $600
- Integrative Resources: A book is being published in conjunction with this show and can be made available. Artist talk may be possible with advanced notice, as artist will be traveling from Prague.
These are not the sort of photos to sell to someone looking to decorate their 3rd home. They are not touristy photos full of nostalgia for the past. These are a letter to a friend, a song half remembered sung late after midnight, a conversation in a bar where the floor is suspiciously sticky, laughter mixed in with the woodsmoke from the fire. It’s negative forty and no one wants to go outside and everyone stays up a little longer, delaying the inevitable cold walk home telling stories late into the night.
Butte is a complicated place to make art and to make art about, and even more complicated to photograph. Oftentimes photographers in Butte make the common blunder of only focusing on the poverty, the mines, the real suffering that happens here. Or even worse there is an over abundance of nostalgia, American flags and headframes, old historic houses and wrought iron fencing, myths of an American West that doesn’t exist. Butte has always been at the heart of various extractive industries and myth making is certainly one of them.
There is an honesty in these photos, a clarity of vision. These parts of Butte are acknowledged, but they are not the most important part. There is a recognition that the heart of Butte is the people here, the ones who continue to live here in spite of the troubles and long dramas, and try to get along and maybe sometimes don’t. These are portraits of the artists and the dreamers that chose this strange place and made it their home. Everyday folks living their lives and just trying to get by in a place where that is not always easy. People who are really living.
This body of work collects the last 20 years of photographs taken over many visits to Butte. The final show will be composed of 36 photographs and a new book, “Back to Butte” that is a collection of a small portion of this large body of work.
MAGDA 