News from Toucan
A revamped newsletter. Our new location. The art of the everyday. The transition begins.
Those of you who have been on this journey with us for a while know that this Toucan newsletter has been realized in various ad-hoc iterations over the years, from the purely promotional to the more discursive and literary. There was even that moment in 2020, with the blooming of a viral pandemic and a stay-at-home order in effect, when we didn’t know if Toucan might only ever again exist in some kind of digital form, some manifestation of beautiful things wrought from the pixels of whatever the new convention, some permanent socioeconomic cyberspace engaged from some prophylactic bunker, our dystopian nightmare finally and fully realized.
Thankfully, our early disorientation, if not panic, was assuaged with time and knowledge (I’ll leave the ideological polarization out of it so as to maintain this as a pleasant Montana meadow of blooming daisies and civil discourse), and Toucan continues apace in physical form, a platform for in-person, human relationships and cultural exchange.
So, with Toucan alive and well in the real world and a thoroughgoing reinvigoration of the brand, the place, the pursuit, underway, we thought we’d throw the newsletter into the brew and serve up a new and improved vehicle for communication with our friends, colleagues, clients, and customers, in Billings, Montana, around the country, and even some around the world.
With this renovation of the newsletter comes a move to a new platform. We’ve relocated this correspondence to something called Substack, which is how you received it today. Substack is all the rage, you may know, which is usually a pretty good reason to avoid something, but I like its ease of use, its writerly pose, its simplified aesthetic. Some of you may know Substack because of its paid subscription model, but this isn’t about that and will be free to read.
The newsletter is expanding a little, though, seeking to return to and more fully realize its early-pandemic iterations, with more content, a little more extensive reach into our community, something more than mere marketing (and, if you aren’t up for a little extra reading, you can easily scan to the pretty pictures of the beautiful things available in the Toucan store proper). The newsletter will come out in a somewhat, somehow, mostly monthly interval.
And while it might not be so eccentric, obsessive, and, well, Wes-Anderson-y, as The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun, it will be as eclectic, colorful, and curious as something improbably called Toucan that exists on the arid, high plains of Montana.
Thanks for subscribing and reading and being part of Toucan in all its forms. If you’re reading this, you don’t need to do anything but continue to look for us in your inbox. The change of which I write has already happened.
And now, on to what you’re really here for: a construction update.
NEW LOCATION UPDATE
As many of you know, Toucan is moving to a new location this fall, a site we are developing, a building we are renovating, in order to reinvigorate Toucan and, hopefully, in some meaningful way, the culture of art and beauty that we serve in Billings.
In our previous update, I expressed frustration at the nature of bureaucracy as it related to our acquisition of a building permit for our project. The story of such frustration is not novel, of course, in that everyone has one, stemming from confronting the complex of customs and regulations—and the people whose job it is to administer them—which constitutes our system of public oversight of all manner of human progress. And while in the scheme of things—concept, design, budget, construction, community development, the human condition, etc.—this acquisition of the proper paperwork might seem minor, when it’s the bite of rib-eye lodged in your windpipe and Dr. Heimlich isn’t responding to his pages, well...
Frustration is the heat of resistance, of course, and regulation is the medium that resists our dreams. Much was made during the four days of media frenzy that engulfed the circumstances of the then missing, privately-operated, Titan submersible, en route to the undersea wreckage of the Titanic with four so-called “extreme” tourists aboard (extreme-ly wealthy might be the better term), as to its operating outside the authority of any recognized regulatory body in the context of deep-sea vessels and their operation. CEO and founder of Oceangate Expeditions, which owned the now known-to-be imploded and destroyed Titan, the made-for-Hollywood named, Stockton Rush, who had been piloting the sub, had once said that, “there hasn’t been an injury in the commercial sub industry in over 35 years. It’s obscenely safe because they have all these regulations.” He went on to express his own frustration: “But it also hasn’t innovated or grown—because they have all these regulations.”
The idea that the free-wheeling, improvisational nature of human creativity, the jam session that composes the music of human progress, is hampered by outside constraints is not exactly a revolutionary idea. Rush is right, in theory, but now he’s also dead in practice, along with the passenger/patrons who had entrusted their lives to his innovative ways. Because whatever the revolution, it will be regulated (not that we won’t argue about those regulations, officially, in legislative chambers and courtrooms; and, well, not, in break rooms, backyards, and at the bar). This resistance to the future we’re trying to make slows down our yearning to realize the time to consider the consequences of our actions, and, as a result, to ensure our public safety.
In any case, the regulatory process always seems less coercive and is made more meaningful on the other side of being in its clutches, by which I mean: we got our building permit! And since then, while our building process has not been without its delays—and for all the reasons you’ve heard about, including long lead times and supply chain disruptions—construction is well underway at Toucan’s new site and building in the East Billings Urban Renewal District at the corner of 2nd Avenue North and 10th Street.
Our endeavor to restore and renovate an old auto shop into the new Toucan is not a very big project in the scheme of projects, but it’s certainly not nothing. We stripped the interior of this circa 1950s building clean and are installing, necessarily, completely new electrical and mechanical systems. This work, while fundamental, will be lost, of course, behind walls and doors, under floors, overhead (although we’re using surface-mounted conduit and junction boxes up there, a form-follows-function aesthetic aligned with our art-industrial mashup), but is essential to the future functioning of this aesthetic delivery “machine,” a building for beautiful things.
This existing concrete, above, is being demolished to accommodate a garden area outside of what will be our office door. You always know something is happening when a Bobcat shows up on site, and even someone as bookish as I am is attracted to its mechanical manifestation of pure puissance.
Our main gallery wall is being constructed of gypsum board over plywood (which is over the existing concrete block of the building), for secure hanging and mounting (the walls in the current Toucan space are plaster over brick, which is not and never has been in any way recommended for what Toucan is and does, but put up with for over 40 years now).
Shown above is existing glass block fenestration in what will be our new Toucan office in the northeast corner of the building (currently waiting for paint, and, rest assured, we’re going to fix that crack in the center glazing there).
And we’ll be preserving these vintage baseboard vent covers…obviously!
THE ART OF THE EVERYDAY
At Toucan we have always been partial to the art of the everyday, the beautiful, thoughtful, intentional, things that artists and artisans make that can be integrated into a life well lived, every day of that life. Sure you can buy a plate or a mug at Target and enjoy its utility in a utilitarian sort of life, but what if you drank your morning coffee out of a mug made by a person from right around here, someone who made it from a place of passion, belief, love, hope (obsession, anxiety, and suffering too, but still...love). Since everybody needs to eat and drink, why shouldn’t whatever the configuration of our daily necessities be elevated to more than habit, the servicing of our needs approach the sublime?
All of the ceramics shown here are available right now at our current location on Montana Avenue.
Fallen Leaf Pottery Chip ‘n Dips by Matt Guenthner
In a utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that fairy tales should be respected.
—Charles Dickens
Clockwise from top right: Don Hanson, Ryan Mitchell, Kate Morris, Lynn Munns.
A lovely little cloud cup by Ryan Mitchell.
THE TRANSITION BEGINS
Along with the summer, our Montana Avenue days are waning. It’s hard to believe, but we’ve reached the time to enter a transitional phase at Toucan. There is a lot to do to make everything we’re trying to accomplish happen in any kind of efficient manner.
So what we’re going to do is reduce our hours starting next week. We will be open three days a week—Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday—until September 15th, when Toucan will close until we open at our new location (I know!?!).
Toucan will be closed for about six weeks, which sounds like a lot of time, but really isn’t in the scheme of things, i.e., moving a forty-year-old business to a new location that is being completely renovated, reinvented, and remade in Toucan’s image.
We’re not going to be completely out of commission, however, during this time, so give us a call (406-252-0122) or send us an email (toucan@toucanarts.com) if you need something or want to check in.
This newsletter will publish a little more frequently during our closure, with continuing updates on our progress, as well as the manifestation of some kind of virtual Toucan to, if nothing else, stir the mind in our physical absence. Which, I guess, is kind of where we started. With this newsletter. This little piece of Toucan—a wing? a beak? an eye?—during a time when Toucan is closed.
But please come see us before the 15th. And stay in touch. Toucan isn’t going anywhere. Only to our next phase, a new era, the future of Toucan and our town.
We’ll see you here. And then we’ll see you there.
ONE LAST THING
I am a sucker for a good art heist story. In fact, sometimes I think the art of the heist can be as compelling as the art so heisted. Not that I condone such things, but that “art” and “heist” marry so readily, that there is this particular category of theft of such magnitude that it requires an FBI Art Crime Team of more than two dozen agents, and that the idea of an art thief has been romanticized to the point that it requires Pierce Brosnan to play one in the movies, well, the category of art thievery is too juicy to ignore. For me at least.
In 1990, thirteen works of art were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The works, collectively worth hundreds of millions of dollars, have never been recovered and the crime remains unsolved to this day. Some of the paintings stolen were cut cleanly from their frames, which the museum has left hanging as homage, but mostly in hope of their eventual return. I took this photograph of someone considering one of those very frames (this one held a Rembrandt) at the Gardner when Allison and I were in Boston last fall.
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist has been covered extensively over the years, including a recent documentary series on Netflix, but here’s a brief and pretty good overview in Smithsonian Magazine, including some of the most recent pertinent details, and there is information on the Gardner Museum website, including images of the thirteen stolen works, as well.
Images that might be worth a look, I have to say, because if you were to happen to have any information that leads to the recovery of these particular stolen works, the Gardner continues to offer a reward of $10 million for that very information. You might want to keep an eye out at the yard sales.