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When we picture Charles M. Russell, we often imagine bucking broncos, buffalo hunts, and sweeping Montana plains. But beginning in the early 1900s, another landscape began shaping his art and his life: the soaring peaks and glacial lakes of what would become Glacier National Park. This summer, the Sid Richardson Museum will open a new exhibition exploring Russell’s deep and enduring relationship with Glacier. Centered on the works he created in or about the park, the exhibition invites visitors to look beyond the “Cowboy Artist” and discover an artist profoundly transformed by alpine wilderness.   Lake McDonald, Glacier National [...]

When audiences today tune into gritty TV series like Yellowstone or Outer Range, they’re tapping into a long legacy of storytelling that dates back more than a century. In our current exhibition, The Cinematic West: The Art That Made the Movies, visitors can explore how that legacy took shape—quite literally—through the bold, colorful movie posters that helped define the Western genre in its early days. These posters weren’t just advertisements. They were promises of adventure, heroism, and the mythic West. And they are visual echoes of the dynamic artworks by Frederic Remington and Charles Russell featured alongside them in our [...]

What happens when a painting leaps from the canvas onto the silver screen? That is the story at the heart of a recent lecture at the lecture Sid Richardson Museum, in which our director, Scott Winterrowd, traced the fascinating journey of Remington’s 1897 painting A Misdeal—a smoky, tense card game gone wrong—through Hollywood history, illuminating how Western art and cinema became deeply intertwined. Remington’s A Misdeal is not attached to any specific story, yet it brims with narrative potential. Gunsmoke lingers in a dimly lit saloon. Wounded players slump at the table, with one figure still standing at center. The [...]

Long before the silver screen mythologized the American West, Charles M. Russell had already etched it into bronze and canvas. But in the twilight of his life, Russell wasn’t just painting cowboys. He was rubbing elbows with movie stars. When Charlie and Nancy Russell began wintering in Southern California in 1920, they weren’t merely escaping the Montana cold. They were entering a lively, evolving cultural hub where artists, filmmakers, and writers mingled freely. And where the Old West met the New Hollywood. Russell’s ties to Tinseltown may sound like an unlikely chapter in the life of a Western artist, but [...]

From Cowboy to Costume Designer: Joe De Yong and the Art Behind Hollywood’s Westerns Before Clint Eastwood donned his poncho or John Wayne rode into the sunset, there was a young cowboy from Oklahoma with a sketchpad and a dream. Joe De Yong’s life reads like a Hollywood script: cowboy, artist, silent film actor, survivor, and ultimately the bridge between Western art and the golden age of Western cinema. But unlike many stars on the silver screen, De Yong never craved the spotlight. Instead, he worked behind the scenes, shaping the imagery of the American West that generations of moviegoers [...]