This is the first of a two-part series on the Roosevelt Center in Red Lodge and the many artists who have come it call it home.
The ever energetic, enthusiastic, and perfectly charming Kat Healy is the director of the Roosevelt Center, a new community-based venture in Red Lodge Montana. The former school is now home to dozens of artists, from painters to musicians, quilt-makers to sound engineers.
Roosevelt Center’s stated purpose is both ambitious and all encompassing: “We will Restore, Reuse, and Revitalize the Roosevelt Center into art, culture, performance, reception, conference, education and community gathering space, providing both indoor and outdoor spaces for people to interact, converse, celebrate and express themselves.”
Kat says that not only do artists need studio space, but the community currently lacks adequately sized downtown venues for people to meet and engage with one another.
Artifact Concepts is the studio of Brian Langeliers. Born in 1978, Brian was raised as a young artist in Montana before receiving his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with an emphasis in Oil Painting from the University of Montana, Missoula in 2000. He then spent 14 years in Boulder, Colorado building an artist management career within the music industry, specializing in art direction and branding. Brian now lives in Red Lodge, where he focuses on his fine art career while maintaining a role as management consultant for musicians. His paintings and conceptual artwork focus on the exploration of place by defining new perspectives on the landscape. Brian is currently working on large-scale piece consisting of aerial landscape paintings that cover the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness of Montana & Wyoming in the Rocky Mountains.
Carol Hartman is a prolific landscape painter. Her recent series of family homesteads painted on behalf of children and grandchildren of Montana pioneers become treasured memories of those who worked the land. After researching and sketching those homesteads, she creates large colorful oil paintings reminiscent of the interesting stories about that very land. Her custom pieces involve a walk through the desired homestead to identify the most significant memories about the land and the buildings, resulting in a family heirloom painting to cherish for years.
Each month she hosts "Painted Ladies" a group of amazing women come paint at the Roosevelt. Originally from California, Carol loves travel, but with the pandemic, she seems perfectly content to stay busy in her large, well-lit studio in the Roosevelt Center.
Manette Rene Garrison recently moved to Red Lodge from San Francisco. Her life-size monochromatic paintings subtly merge human body parts – hands, feet, knees - into vast eerily beautiful landscapes.
She is a multidisciplinary visual artist who approaches her work as a storyteller. Her practice is informed by human behavior, history, psychology, mythology, as well as the natural world and our place in it. The wild wonderful wilderness of the Beartooth range is a perfect inspiration for her large canvases.
