Tippet Rise Art Center opens today for its 10th season. Tippet Rise is the creation of Peter and Kathy Halsted, a creation. The Center's mission statement says it is an intersection where art, music, land, sky, and poetry can weave together into an algorithm which is greater than the sum of its parts. Some of those parts include a variety of large scale sculptures placed strategically and aesthetically on a 12,500 acre working sheep and cattle ranch, all accessible on trails through the summer.
Karl:
Can you give us kind of the framework for the opportunities for tours? I believe in the next few weeks here and over the summer, and then the concerts tour, the later part of the summer.
Lindsey
We'll start with our hiking and biking season and our sculpture tours running Friday, Saturday and Sundays.And then sprinkled in June, July, we have, we're working with the Yellowstone Bighorn Research Association again, doing a series of Geo-Paleo tours, which we've been working with them since 2017. And it's always an honor and a hit for all of our guests who do get to participate in those tours.
We're also working with Montana Insight Theater, so at the end of June, we have a series of two different days where we do different theatrical performances on site with this organization. And this is something we've been working with them for a few years as well. They're Montana based. It was more Shakespeare related in the past, and we're moving more towards a nature-based, land-based theme for 2025.
We're doing a number of onsite filmings. We're working with Colby College for an educational student residency this summer, and then we're also bringing in two amazing poets for residency and then a poetry reading in mid July.
Karl
When you put together this intersection of nature and art, architecture, music sculpture poetry, all of that coming together, logistics problems are number one, an installation just of a piece.
I'd love to hear a little bit about how that goes and the time frame involved with that. As artists. finish the piece, put it out there, but also the weather and some of the surprises that you get from the weather. So let's start with the idea of the installation. Just getting things out there so that people can see them.
Pete
Again, I've got wonderful people that I get to work with. And a lot of times the artists will have either themselves or sometimes some of the folks from their studio. And it's just a really cool collaborative effort to, to rebuild these things out in our environment, which, I guess I would liken it to, jigsaw puzzle to some degree of how the separate parts and pieces fit back together.
They get bolted back up or welded or whatever it might be, and that's just the works that are in existence or created in a studio and then brought to Tippet Rise where there's a lot of forethought into the assembly of it.
Then of course the site specific commissions are completely different. They take way more design time
Lindsey
…such as the ensemble studio work.
Pete
Yeah, the ensemble studio works are a good example: Stephen Talasnik's Satellite #5: Pioneer, which is a big wood sculpture. They have so much problem solving at the moment. 'cause, it's like construction that's been tipped on its head.
It's everything that you want to do in a normal residential construction project. You can't do that here, but you're using the same tools, to try and get the job done. So it's a lot of thinking outside the box and problem solving at the moment. And you think oh, this tool and this type of connection's gonna work just fine, and then you'd try and do it in the field and it doesn't work the way you think it's gonna work at all. So you kinda have to go back to the drawing board. And often for Stephen Talasnik's project, we actually brought the engineer, one of the structural engineers, to the art center for two weeks. They sat with us and helped us troubleshoot every single connection that was being fabricated as the sculpture went up. Yeah it's really interesting work. Really rewarding.
