In its 2025 season starting in February, The Brinton Museum is offering a host of exciting exhibitions and programs all under the theme of Celebrating Women in the West. Throughout the year, the museum will highlight women who have left their mark in the fields of art, science, politics, military service, community service and more while living and working in the West. The season at The Brinton Museum kicks off with a woman as featured artist in its popular Illustrator Show now in its twentieth year. Linda Pease is a member of the Crow nation who calls Lodge Grass her home. She graduated from Montana State University in Bozeman with a BFA and has been working as an artist, especially in the filed of illustration, for more than four decades. In addition to pursuing illustration, she taught art in schools and worked as a museum educator. Pease is a painter who works in a collage style with different mediums, including ledger book paper, vintage paper, maps, photographs, ink, watercolor, acrylic, and more. In all her collaged paintings she is a story teller who draws on family history, Crow legends, children’sstories, spirit animals, and the landscape of Montana and Wyoming.
Seeing the art of Linda Pease is a journey into a whimsical world that inspires viewers to take a leap of the imagination, to use their creative eye and see things differently. Throughout her art, Pease draws on her Apsáalooke heritage and her memories of going to the dances, watching the Indian relays, attending Crow Fair and the parade, the camps with lodges, and the creation stories she learned growing up. She draws inspiration from her female ancestors: there is the great grandmother who was Hidatsa, a sister tribe of the Crow, and who practiced old Hidatsa agricultural ways; there is grandmother or Kaale who is the center of the family and the small square wooden home they shared; there is her mother, from a mining family in Butte, who is a musician and a weekend cowgirl; and there is Earth Mother, who is personified as a grandmother in Pease’s art, a mother figure who makes it her mission to protect the earth.
