Legendary rodeo poet Paul Zarzyski and singer/songwriter Wylie Gustafson team up to create music infused with the heart of the past that’s grounded in the present.

After a Grammy nomination and playing music with some of the world’s most famous vocalists, Phillip Aaberg’s inspiration still comes from the place it started, in the tiny Montana town where he grew up.

Against all odds, after barely surviving the Bataan Death March, Billings artists Ben Steele went on to make his life an act of generosity.

       Go outside. Walk Slowly. Pay attention. Listen. Smell the air. Taste it. Look at the soil and see how it responds to your step. Notice which grasses shine brightest in the morning dew. Compare birds, the differences in wing and shape and flight pattern. Maybe kick over a rock, see what’s under there.
       This is land snorkeling. Doing it could take you almost anywhere, even if you never leave your own neighborhood.
       Think of it like snorkeling a reef. You drift over mysterious turf. You keep your head down, mostly. Everything is cool, so you look it all over, and you wonder. You come back smiling.

Western Art & Architecture

Winter/Spring 09

     Every afternoon for 10 days, John Banovich went to the banks of Botswana’s Khwai River, where families of elephants gathered to eat and drink and bathe.  With 25 trips to Africa under his belt, he’d seen a lot of elephants, but he wanted to see more, to learn more.

     Then, on the eleventh day, he decided to join a group of 12 bulls in the river, slipping into the chest-deep water, among the hippos and crocodiles, trying not to think about mysterious bugs and parasites.

       Chris Boyer has a thing about junkyards. Flying at low elevation across Montana, you or I would likely dwell on the prairie undulations or jagged riverine breaks, the erose peaks or that great big sky we’ve entered.
       Boyer marvels at all that, too. But he focuses on the junk, the atolls of our discards that speckle the land. He takes special interest in these monuments to our ethic of disposal and replacement, miniscapes that, if left alone, will disappear only at the speed of rust.

Wayne Skertich was a builder by trade, but music was his passion. With it, he made friends around the world. With his fiddle and piano, his bass and guitar, he spread a lot of joy, lifted a lot of spirits.

On Saturday morning, at 2 a.m., after police had surrounded his home for 26 hours, after close friends and his wife had pleaded with him to come outside, he put his gun to his head and the music was over.

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