 The scent of sage and pine ... the uplift of an autumn breeze ... these feelings come to mind when viewing the work of Edith Freeman. Printmaker extraordinaire Edith Freeman (1913-1992) lived her entire life in Montana. She was an artist, teacher, and rancher. For 30 years, she taught in the Billings area schools, including North Park, Garfield, and Broadwater. She began her artistic life as a painter, but once introduced to the woodblock print, became an accomplished and prolific practitioner. She took to the labor of the process and its strange combination of "sculpting" a woodblock in order to obtain a two-dimensional result.
Her subject matter are the flora she knew, both natural and cultivated, and the landscape of central Montana. She reveled in the seasons and in the modest and unassuming slices of the landscape that most observers overlook. In them, she found a quiet grandeur and a richly colorful palette. Edith Freeman was one of the "grand dames" of Montana's art scene, having learned from another of this same class, Isabelle Johnson. Freeman's serene, yet lush, images give us an intimate view of our region's natural beauties.
Edith Freeman's Montana Seasons is the first Freeman exhibition at the Yellowstone Art Museum since 1993. It is drawn exclusively from the YAM's rich permanent collection holdings.
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Exhibitions 
