This presentation by Will Wright focuses on the life and home of abstract painter Helen McAuslan, using both to understand the connections between art and architecture within the context of Montana’s modernist movement. A common thread for McAuslan’s version of “modernism” was her rejection of a traditional past in hope for a more liberated future. McCauslan’s concern with social justice, reflected in her Kent State paintings, also developed into political engagement through the League of Women Voters. If the nineteenth-century West was remembered through the works of male artists such as Charles Russell and Frederic Remington, then the twentieth-century West should be known through the contributions of female artists like McAuslan.

Recorded August 30, 2017 at the Museum of the Rockies.