In Conversation at Toucan
I'm talking to Jessica Ruhle, Executive Director at the Yellowstone Art Museum
Herewith, a brief correspondence to let you know that we’re bringing the tone and tenor of this newsletter to a live event at Toucan on Thursday, May 30, 2024, at 7:00 pm, when Toucan resumes its “In Conversation” series. This series features area artists and creative professionals in conversation with, well, me.
On Thursday, I’ll be talking to Jessica Ruhle, the new(ish) director of the Yellowstone Art Museum in Billings.
Previous conversations have included artists working in a variety of media, as well as a chef, an architect, and others. These conversations come from my own interest in creativity and artistic production across disciplinary boundaries, which, in fact, comes from my own creativity and artistic production across disciplinary boundaries.
The Who and Why
I grew up under the assumption that I would become an engineer, my own assumption, mostly, as it was what I knew growing up, beginning with the view, toddling around, from the floor of my father’s engineering office. A couple of teachers in high school (including one who had the talent and will to arrange a Chick Corea chart to feature two students in the West High Jazz Ensemble, myself on flugelhorn (like a trumpet, but with a larger, more conical bore and a mellower tone because of it) and my friend, Arin Waddell, on soprano saxophone) opened my eyes to other possibilities and my mind to the potential for creative thinking and expression. I found myself at the University of Montana studying music and ended up getting a master’s degree in architecture from Montana State University.
My higher education was characterized by curiosity and exploration, and I continuously coursed back and forth between mediums of expression. Working on my thesis at the end of my architectural studies, I was also learning the Trumpet Concerto by Johann Nepomuk Hummel (the first movement of which I actually played for jury in order to get a credit from the music department at MSU that I didn’t need) and regularly escaping from the architecture studio to play through Amsden’s Celebrated Practice Duets (if you know, you know) with Jerry Makeever, the trumpet professor at MSU (in a fortuitous physical manifestation of my interdisciplinary work at collapsing boundaries between mediums, Cheever Hall, the architecture building, and Howard Hall, the music building, are literally feet away from each other on the MSU campus). I played in the Bozeman Symphony during my last year of architecture school, and my thesis, which explored interdisciplinary correlations between music and architecture (“I call architecture frozen music,” wrote Johann Wolfgang von Goethe), led to a published paper which I co-authored with two of my thesis advisors (from the first interdisciplinary thesis committee in the history of the architecture school) and an interdisciplinary seminar that mixed music and architecture students on the MSU campus (also for the first time).
I worked for architects and landscape architects and a commercial photographer until I followed my restless creative instincts to start my own enterprise, Imagimark! Productions, which provided a platform from which to offer my unique skillset to a wide variety of clients in various media. I worked for Hollywood production companies and shot photography from airplanes and designed brand campaigns and wrote advertising copy, and, well, so much more. I met my now wife, Allison O’Donnell, we bought Toucan eighteen years ago, and after a break from the commercial grind, I’ve returned to making photographs and writing words like these.
I tell you all of this only to frame my interest in talking to people who operate in the arts and other creative fields. As I’ve indicated, I’ve done many and a wide variety of things, studied and written about interdisciplinary correlations between artistic mediums, and, in the end, understand that the process of producing creative expression is informed by intelligence that transcends the media in which that expression is realized. Developmental psychologist and Harvard professor, Howard Gardner, exemplifies this idea in his book, Creating Minds, of which the subtitle makes the case: An Anatomy of Creativity Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi. These are subjects, people, creating minds, who were all doing the same thing, while at the level of practice, each was producing outcomes distinct in the mediums of their manifestation.
In Conversation at Toucan is an opportunity to understand local creating minds in this context. For Jessica Ruhle, the medium is the museum, and on Thursday we’ll explore the collision of art and patronage, culture and capitalism, the tangle of the executive and the fiduciary, of course, but mostly I think we should hope to learn a little bit about our selves and our passions as we attempt to create community. Which is to say, that over the years, I’ve found myself more interested in the who and why than the specifics of the what and how, but at the end here, it is probably the where and when that matters most to those who wish to attend:
JESSICA RUHLE IN CONVERSATION AT TOUCAN
7 pm, Thursday, May 30, 2024, at Toucan’s new location: 1002 2nd Avenue North
And if you can’t attend, excerpts from our conversation will be published in a future edition of this newsletter.
I’ll sign off with what I have come to think of as a kind of tagline for myself, and really just a personal mantra, I suppose, and which, most importantly, I stole from Song of Myself by Walt Whitman:
Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)