Donna Forbes' art collection is on the walls and the soul of the YAM
If you feel like you're in Donna Forbes living room at the Yellowstone Art Museum, it's because you basically are. She might have never lived in this building, but she sure built it.
Forbes was the YAM's executive director from 1974 to 1998. She took the reins of the Yellowstone Art Center, a quaint community space housed in a literal prison and left behind the Yellowstone Art Museum, a state of the art and renowned museum that combines the history of Montana art with its future. She retired the day after the ribbon was cut on the major YAM expansion she shepherded.
She was also a central figure in the rise of Montana Modernism, the style of art that challenged the landscapes and cowboy scenes that dominated much of the early art made in this state. Through her decades at the museum, Forbes collected and displayed works by people who were trying to redefine what art in Montana could say. If she took another job in the mid-1970s, Billings and Montana might be a very different place right now.
"She held up contemporary art as being as important as anything else happening in the state," said Jessica Ruhle, the YAM's current director.
If you spend that long in the arts, you're bound to wind up collecting a few pieces. For decades, Forbes' extensive collection lined the walls of her house, which sat right in the heart of Billings, just off Grand Avenue.
There was a Neltje in the stairway. A Bill Stockton statue on the piano. A massive Shiela Miles painting in the bedroom. Everywhere you looked there was some mini masterpiece.
Donna Forbes, who led the museum from 1974-98, gave the YAM 28 pieces from modernist artists like Bill Stockton, Robert DeWeese, Isabelle Johnson, Russell Chatham, Jane Waggoner Deschner and more.
But in 2022, the now 95-year-old Forbes sold her house and moved to Seattle to be closer to family. And art isn't much good if nobody can see it.
So in 2023 she donated her whole collection to the museum she jumpstarted. Over 20 pieces, a who's who of the artists who built, rebuilt, popularized, challenged and expanded Montana Modernism.
"(Forbes) was a champion for artists," explained Ruhle. "That led to the (YAM Permanent) Collection and her own private art collection."
Now the two are one. "The Donna Forbes Collection" exhibition is on display at the YAM until February. It contains all the works she donated to the museum, many of them displayed in the same order she hung them in her house.
The art is, of course, spectacular. It's a near university level course in the last 50 plus years of Montana contemporary art. There are a pair of Russell Chathams. Bill Stockton is everywhere, in different mediums. Kurt Weiser is represented, and so is Jane Waggoner Deschner, Jessie Wilber and Frances Senska. Several Isabelle Johnsons, including a stunning work called "Ghost Town, Winter." It's not behind glass, so you can get close and see how she turned whisps of paint into an abandoned town.
But there's more to it than that. Look at the tag next to that Johnson piece and you'll find a paragraph about her relationship with Forbes and a picture of Johnson sitting on the jail steps during the early days of the Yellowstone Art Center. The painting is magnificent on its own, but it's richer when you understand the context.
Many of the tags have paragraphs like that. The one on Dennis Voss explains how Forbes encouraged the artist to prioritize art while still working as a full-time rancher. There's a picture of them, his arm around her shoulder, hers around his waist.
The tag for Frances Senska's ceramic piece "Covered jar" is about Forbes interviewing the artist for the Smithsonian Institute, an integral transcript that is now in the Smithsonian's archive.
The blurb on Patrick Zentz describes the time Forbes took a critic from Newsweek magazine to see Zentz's sculptural work. The piece in "The Donna Forbes Collection" was inspired by a conversation Zentz had with Theodore Waddell when Waddell was Zentz's advisor at the University of Montana.
Zentz and Waddell are prominently featured in another part of the exhibition, which is a pair of TV sets looping video of Montana's art luminaries talking about Forbes and her career. Alongside the artists there are interviews with YAM board member Larry Martin, former education director Linda Ewert and more.
This is more than an art exhibition, it's the evidence of a life in the arts. As long as these pieces are held in places of esteem and can be viewed, Donna Forbes will always be here. Her presence is inescapable.
"She had a zeal for this," said Gordon McConnell. "She had a great depth of intellectual acuity and understanding and love of art."
He'd know about that better than almost anyone.
McConnell is many things. He worked at the YAM for decades, as assistant director from 1982 to 1998 and senior curator from 1991 to 1998. He might be Eastern Montana's greatest movie mind, and it can feel like talking to a Wikipedia page after you've watched something with him. He's an accomplished and brilliant artist, capable of blending Old West fallacies with the hard realities the myths were meant to mask. Two of his pieces are in the exhibition.
And, even though he blushed when Ruhle called him it, he's probably the best art historian in Montana. He's got a story about every piece in the exhibition.
And that's because every piece here has a personal connection to Forbes. It's unclear how many of the works she purchased and how many of them were gifts, but each was important and part of both her story and the story of art in Montana.
The Jon Lodge pieces, McConnell speculates, were likely bought as a sort of token of appreciation from Forbes to Lodge, who was the longtime manager of Artcraft Printers, and there's no better friend for a museum director than someone who knows how to print and frame.
Many of the pieces are unnamed. They were so personal and intimate to Forbes they didn't even need monikers. She knew exactly who and what they were.
One untitled Robert DeWeese piece is a quick sketch of what looks like a meeting in the old Yellowstone Art Center. The context in which it was handed over to Forbes isn't known, but you can imagine the conversations.
When Forbes turned 90 in 2019, the museum had a big party. And McConnell gave her a scrapbook full of cards and little artworks done by some of the many area artists she'd worked with. Forbes' family loaned the scrapbook to the YAM for the exhibition. You can leaf through it, seeing these intimate works up close. There are pieces and cards from people featured in the exhibition like McConnell, Zentz, Lodge, Jane Waggoner Deschner as well as people Forbes worked with like Deborah Butterfield, Willem Volkersz and Sally McIntosh.
There's Mary Serbe, who now curates Kirks' Grocery, which is carrying on Forbes' commitment to exploring new ways for Montana artists to express themselves. And there's Jodi Lightner, who teaches at MSUB and has a major installation at the YAM right now, on the floor directly above Forbes' exhibition. Her influence is airborne now.
Forbes was never a professional artist herself. She was a sort of lightning rod for contemporary arts across the high plains, drawing in outside energy and spreading it out so everyone could use it.
But the exhibition does contain one piece of art she worked on. It's a small pastel called "Prairie - Winter" that she completed in 2002 and gave to Billings Gazette photographer Larry Mayer. He loaned it to the museum for the show.
There's a loneliness to the scene, and the plains look windswept and cold. But you feel a little warmth looking at it. Because here is someone who always shined the spotlight on others at long last taking center stage.
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