Arts & Culture

Monte Dolack is one of the most widely recognized and beloved artists in Montana. The artist marks his 70th birthday in the year 2020. As the inaugural exhibition of the Montana Museum of Arts & Culture sesquicentennial season, "Monte Dolack: The Artist's Nature" brings together many original oil paintings, sketches, lithographs, and posters, reflecting Dolack’s love of the natural world and blending his interests in storytelling and mythology with his profound sense of humor.

Listen now to learn more from Monte Dolack.

This is a moist and mildly spicy gingerbread with the taste of cider and applesauce. Served plain, it makes a marvelous snack. When offered along with a spoonful of the cider cream, it would be a welcome dessert after a hearty meal.

Geffrey Davis’s award-winning second collection of poems reads as an evolving love letter and meditation on what it means to raise an American family. In poems that express a deep sense of gratitude and wonder, Davis delivers a heart-strong prayer that longs for home, for safety for black lives, and for the messy success of breaking through the trauma of growing up during the crack epidemic to create a new model of fatherhood. In this interview, Geffrey Davis speaks to these themes, as well as his relationship with fly fishing and what it means to live through the present moment.

You've harbored a stash of cupboard and refrigerated condiments since the last century. Food Guys Jon and Greg suggest novel uses for them.

"Flavors Under the Big Sky: Recipes and Stories from Yellowstone Public Radio & Beyond and the radio show that gave rise to it, Flavors Under the Big Sky: Celebrating the Bounty of the Region, are my homage to Montana and to all the people who have shared their food stories with me. This book reflects the evolution of my cooking after moving to Billings from San Diego twenty years ago. It is a small representation of the food I now cook after unearthing the bounty available here. This is a cookbook where I took Montana basics and created a world of flavors. Let this book be one you use over and over when you cook under the Big Sky." – Stella Fong

Bats are wonderful, mysterious creatures: they swoop gracefully through the night, and sometimes through our nightmares. We fear what we don't understand, and most of us know little about bats. They behave in strange ways: only breeding when it's rainy, giving birth upside down, and sharing as a group the responsibility of nursing young.

After seeing Dr. Cate Shanahan on television, Food Guy Greg Patent is all-in with her advice about cooking fats and oils to avoid. Greg gets worked up telling Food Guy Jon Jackson about PUFA*-rich seed oils (*"polyunsaturated fatty acids.") that Shanahan says cause metabolic damage and inflammation.

With familiar mastery, Russell Rowland, the author of In Open Spaces and Fifty-Six Counties, returns to rural Montana to explore a small town torn apart by secrets and suspicions, and how the tenuous bonds of friendship struggle to hold against the differences that would sever us.

Last summer I was helping teach a geology field camp near Dillon. On our way back to the Birch Creek Outdoor Education Center each day, after long hours in the August sun spent identifying and mapping incredible exposures of rock, we would drive past a few crumbling cabins beneath an unweathered cliff face footed by large piles of scree.

This was once the town of Farlin – a long-abandoned copper mining camp at the base of the Pioneer Mountains. Shortly after the dawn of the 20th century, it was home to hundreds of men, women, and children. Inextricable from the experience of Montana, ghost towns like this one now dot the landscape they once extracted.