Paris Gibson Square Museum of Art (The Square) enthusiastically announces new gifts to its permanent collection from the personal collection of Rick Newby and Liz Gans. Newby and Gans are leaders in the Montana arts and humanities community and have contributed significantly to the history of Montana art, culture, and literature. Likewise, their contribution to Paris Gibson Square Museum is a welcome gift to the museum and community of Great Falls, as the artworks align with the mission and are important to the history of art in the region.
The Rick Newby and Liz Gans collection of artworks was collected over a forty-year period and represents a range of artists in Montana.
Nicole Maria Evans, Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at The Square expanded on the history and meaning of the collection, “This outstanding gift to The Square consists of paintings, prints, drawings, and an extensive collection of ceramic works by celebrated Montana artists and significant figures of the world ceramics community who participated in artist residencies at the Archie Bray Foundation. Over the years gifts from their private collection have also been allocated to the permanent collection at The Holter Museum of Art, as well as to the Montana Historical Society in Helena, Montana which was contributed via the auspices of Joe Freeman Gans (1920-2020), Liz Gans’ father who was a vibrant artist, creative businessperson, and avid art collector.”
Visual artists represented in this collection of work include James Todd, Josh DeWeese, Richard Swanson, Robert Harrison, Freeman Butts, Jon Lodge, Stephanie Frostad, Pheobe Toland, Jerry Rankin, Nan Parsons, Jim Poor, Dale Livezey, Kurt Weiser, David Shaner, Chris Antemann, Matt Metz, Akio Takamori, Steven Young Lee, Nancy Blum, Doug Herren, and Gail Busch.
The museum invites the public to celebrate this gift of art which was originally individually selected and curated by its owners to reside in their home for pleasure, discussion, and to patronize Montana’s artist community.
The exhibition Collecting Montana: Gifts from the Collection of Rick Newby & Liz Gans, as stated by Evans, “provides an example of strong collecting habits, and evidence of a healthy Montana contemporary cultural community that is worthy of celebration and support.”
This exhibition is curated by Nicole Maria Evans, Curator of Exhibitions and Collection at Paris Gibson Square Museum of Art. Exhibitions at the museum are supported in part by the Montana Arts Council, a state agency funded by the State of Montana, and the National Endowment for the Arts. We are funded in part by coal severance taxes paid based upon coal mined in Montana and deposited in Montana’s cultural and aesthetic projects trust fund. Additional funding is provided by museum members and the citizens of Cascade County, Davidson Family Foundation, D.A. Davidson, Horizon Credit Union, an anonymous donor, and Kelly’s Signs & Design.
About Liz Gans and Rick Newby:
Born in Helena, Liz Gans is a fifth-generation Montanan. Educated at Oberlin College (history and art history) and Harvard Business School, she has spent her professional life in both the business and nonprofit sectors. She is a past executive director of the Holter Museum of Art, Helena, where she oversaw major exhibitions by early Montana modernists Frances Senska, Gennie DeWeese, Bill Stockton, and Rudy Autio. She has served on the boards of the Montana Artists Refuge in Basin, and Greenpeace USA.
Rick is a third-generation Montanan educated at the University of Montana. He is an award-winning poet, cultural journalist, independent scholar, and editor. Rick served from 2006-2017 as the Executive Director of Drumlummon Institute and editor of the online journal arts journal Drumlummon Views. He is a past member of the Montana Arts Council and the board of the Montana Center for the Book, and his publishing credits, as author or editor, include more than 30 books and exhibition catalogs. Rick received the Montana Governor’s Award for the Humanities in 2009 and the Montana Governor’s Award for the Arts in 2016. He makes his home in Helena, MT, and San Francisco, with his wife Liz Gans.
The gift and accompanying exhibition provide the perfect platform for Rick Newby’s newest publication A Regionalism That Travels: Writings on (Mostly) Montana Arts, 1975-2022, a substantial volume of essays by Rick Newby published by the Drumlummon Institute. The collection consists of essays, talks, and reviews–spread over more than 40 years–on Montana’s writers and visual artists and the state’s cultural history.
Newby writes, “I powerfully identify with my home state of Montana. And in the course of my writing life, I’ve only forged a greater appreciation for the people, the communities, and the natural environment that make this place worthy of love and respect. Given my particular tastes and predilections, what’s most important to me are Montana’s literary and visual arts traditions, their diversity, their balance between the local and the universal, their sheer beauty and energy, their refusal to give in to the worst kinds of retrograde mythologies.”
