Kevin Red Star opens new gallery in Red Lodge

The past and the present intermingle in Red Lodge. Trendy shops pop up in antique buildings. New eateries sit next to places whose menus haven't changed since miners ate there. The mountain air is crisp and clear sure, but everything else is a little blurred down here.

If you really want to see the intersection of new and established, head to 11 N. Broadway, right between AlpacaLand and the Beef Jerky Experience. According to some barely legible numbers on the sandstone facade, the building was erected in 1900. The upstairs tenant has put a display of Lego flowers on the windowsill, the rare greenery that won't freeze in a mountain winter.

Underneath all that you'll find the new Kevin Red Star Gallery, which officially opened on Thursday. It's a big, bright space, with high walls capped by a stamped metal ceiling. There are some comfy couches and a cow hide rug and the walls are overflowing with Red Star's art.

"We're part of the community, which is great," Red Star said. "It's a beautiful valley here. Red Lodge is a fine, fine city with tremendous people."

Kevin Red Star is about as established as a Montana artist can be. His paintings and lithographs showing Native American life in intimate detail are bold, subtly experimental and fiercely his own. "A Kevin Red Star" is a genre as much as it is a specific description.

Red Star has lived in Roberts, about 13 miles north of Red Lodge, for decades. He's got a studio just off the main drag there, but it's not much of a display space.

It's not like it's hard to find Red Star's work. Five galleries in Montana — not counting his own — represent him, and so do spots in New Mexico and Colorado. But this one is personal.

About 30 years ago, Red Star did have a gallery in Red Lodge, on South Broadway. His daughter, Merida Red Star-Miller, was always by his side there.

"She was running the show," her father remembers. "She was a fine salesperson."

At 18 she was working in the gallery and by 25 she was director and her father's agent. In 2008, at age 29, she was killed in a traffic accident.

"I let things go for a while," Red Star admitted. "It kind of just shattered the whole family for a number of years."

The South Broadway gallery closed, and Red Star operated out of Roberts for a while. But then his grandson, Red Star-Miller's son, got an idea.

"He grew up in the arts," Red Star said of his grandson Mason Miller. "His mother took him to galleries in New Mexico, Arizona, California, Denver, all while he was a little infant."

Miller is 24 now, and he's the one who pushed his grandfather into opening another Red Lodge gallery.

"He said. 'Grandpa, we've got to do this. We've got to keep this alive.'" Red Star said.

The artist had a collection of limited edition prints and posters that were taking up space, but he didn't like selling out of his Roberts studio, since that interrupted his work. Prompted by his grandson, he started looking at properties in Red Lodge.

The building at 11 N. Broadway was home to the Carbon County News, but it was empty after they moved up the street.

"We looked at it, and it was big and all that, but it needed a lot of work done," Red Star said. So he bought the place and handed it over to Miller and his wife, Jovi Rosselott, who is now the gallery director. And don't be surprised if you see their son — Red Star's great-grandson — hanging around. It's a family affair.

Rosselott is an interior decorator, so she took charge on transforming the space from an office to a place suitable for fine art.

"It was quite the transformation," Red Star said. "We needed a space like this."

He's 80 now, and handing off the business end of his career to the next generation. And while the artist certainly isn't slowing down — he's still in his studio almost every day, preparing works for upcoming shows in Montana, New Mexico, Texas and more — he is starting to look back.

Red Star was born in Lodge Grass on the Crow Reservation, growing up "around horses, good people, aunts, uncles, grandparents."

"The Crow people are very artistic," he continued. "The way they furnish their lodges, their homes, their ceremonial regalia and costuming. I've always seen that in us."

His environment was saturated with this, and from a young age he wanted to pursue a career in the arts, but he didn't know how. He had no shortage of inspiration, but he needed structure.

The Institute of American Indian Arts provided it. Red Star was one of the 150 students chosen for the inaugural class in 1962, so as a sophomore in high school he left Montana for Santa Fe, New Mexico.

It was in the southwest that he learned the technical stuff, like what paper and canvas to use, how to mix colors, what an art opening looks like.

"As an Indigenous American person, in the '60s we weren't known as producing fine art, but we were doing it," he said. "We opened a lot of doors."

Some of those doors led him to tribal groups in the area, where he was able to see how they were different from his own.

"The colors were different, the rituals were different, songs were different, dances were different," he remembered. "It was a good comparison."

Red Star stayed out of Montana for a while, going to college at the San Francisco Art Institute and living and working in Santa Fe.

"My parents were getting old, so I came back to be closer to them," he said. "I didn't want to live on the reservation, and I didn't want to move to Billings."

One day while driving to Red Lodge he stopped in Roberts, and it just felt right. He rented a large building to use as a studio, and it's the one he still works in every day.

And now his work is permanently on display just a few miles from there, and being cared for by his family and the community he's cultivated. This gallery is looking into the future while being cognizant of the past. And even at 80, Red Star isn't slowing down anytime soon. As far as he's concerned, the best is yet to come.

"The universe is so good to people that produce and think positive and go forward," Red Star said. "We just rely on the universe to help us."

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Arts and Entertainment Reporter