MISSOULA — The Arts Missoula Awards have honored local artists and their contributions to the community since 1999.
The categories for awards are Art Educator, Individual Artist, Cultural Ambassador, Business Support of the Arts, Cultural Vision and New to the Zoo.
The 2024 winner of the Individual Artist Award is John Floridis, who has spent the last three decades creating his music career in Missoula.
Growing up in Cleveland, Floridis started practicing guitar at the age of 10. Both of his parents were musical, but it was his father who inspired him to start training on the guitar.
“I would always say I took my dad's instrument, but my dad would be the first one to say to me, 'You have your mother's talent',” Floridis says.
More than his own family, Floridis gathered inspiration from famous guitarists, including Kieth Richards, Jimmy Hendricks and Michael Hedges.
As he got older, Floridis used Rolling Stone records to teach himself the chords from their songs. He eventually fell into electric guitar and played as lead guitarist for several bands in Ohio.
Floridis dabbled in piano and several other string instruments, including stand-up bass, but always found he was most attracted to the guitar.
“It so takes on the personality of the player,” he says. “The range of the instrument from some of the lower notes to the higher notes is kind of similar to a human voice. And yeah, it's just, it's a great vehicle for expressing oneself and for doing that with your own individual style.”
He went to school for music therapy and worked with troubled teens for about a decade before moving to Missoula. After a year in the Garden City, Floridis quit his day job to pursue music full-time.
“It was actually when my father passed away was the impetus for me to kind of say, 'Okay, if you're gonna try this, do it now',” he says.
Throughout the next 30 years, Floridis would play a variety of live shows, from the lobby of a Krispy Kreme to playing opener for a packed Wilma show. He explored further with electronic sounds and songwriting.
Writing has never come easy to the musician, but Floridis still experiments with combining certain messages with particular chords or melodies.
“My songs a lot of times follow this journey from darkness into light,” he says. “And I think that maybe that's the music therapy background that always seems to come back to the light. But to me, I always want to show some depth in both journey into darkness and light."
While playing in Missoula, Floridis found an eager audience– a city that prioritized music more than any other he had seen. Still, he says he found it hard to fit into a specific genre or box.
“What I'm grateful for is that at this point of my life, now in my 60s, is more than ever I feel like I've got my own niche, and that the community welcomes that.”
For Floridis, connecting with the audience during live performances has been one of the most rewarding parts of his musical journey.
“Regardless of whether that's a pristine listening room kind of situation or if it's a tap room for a brewery or something, my job is to be as present as possible with the music and try to bring that forward,” he says.
While music has been his living for a long time, Floridis has also worked for Montana Public Radio for 28 years. He interviews artists from around the world in many different genres to shine a light on not only their music, but their stories as well.
“It's something I've really come to value and the energy that I'm getting from hearing their stories and diving into their music is inspiring to me as a musician, but it's also I think, particularly nowadays, it's an important service because of the in-depth nature of getting the musicians to be able to tell their stories in a longer format,” he says.
While Floridis says his music journey has primarily been an independent one, he makes continued effort to be a part of and give back to the community.
Each winter he plays a number of benefit concerts around the state, which he often performs with several other musicians.
Hearing that he won an Arts Missoula Award was a shock.
“It's humbling to be recognized in that fashion, given the range of talent of musicians and artists… that I know in the state and to have someone say, ‘Well, how about this guy?’ That's pretty humbling,” he says.
Despite beginning a full-time music career in his 30s, Floridis is looking forward to the future of his career.
“I don't know that I would have been prepared when I started this journey to feel like that I'm in a lot of ways, the best I've ever been at what I do in my 60s.”
While Floridis has flourished in his individual journey through music, another Arts Missoula Awards Winner is fostering the same journey in dozens of young musicians.
Nancy Labbe — who won the 2024 Art Educator Award — is a choir teacher at Big Sky High School, and has taught singing for the past 29 years.
Labbe grew up in Deer Lodge with a musically talented family. Her mother was a piano teacher, and her siblings followed suit– her sister is also a piano teacher now and a couple of her brothers are educators.
In an effort to be different from the rest of her family, Labbe got a business degree and worked in a cubicle for a time. She was quickly unsatisfied, however, and eventually went back to school at the University of Montana to get her education degree.
Labbe taught choir in Corvallis for six years before settling at Big Sky High School. She believes participation in some type of arts education is important for every student’s success.
“It is so helpful for a well-rounded education, a well-rounded person, it's for humanity,” she says. “It just kind of brings light and color and expression to a world that maybe wouldn't have that.”
As evident by an office filled with graduation party invitations from students, Labbe’s favorite part about teaching is connecting with her class.
“I have students current and former that I run into that just have that kind of lifetime interest, appreciation for music,” she says.
Her current classes have also noticed the lifelong connections Labbe makes with her students.
“The great thing is that every single concert we have past students come back and they purposely like go and talk to her, but also talk to us and really it just shows how much of a community she's made, even though people graduated three, four years ago, but still come back,” Big Sky senior Bridger Jones says.
Jones has had a stutter all his life, but Labbe was the first teacher who said it wouldn’t hold him back. He says he would have quit music if it wasn’t for her.
“Really the first experience with a music teacher that, really a high school teacher, that encouraged me to just to be myself no matter what,” he says.
Other students share a similar sentiment, including junior Hayden Keintz, who didn’t have much interest in choir until starting Labbe’s class her freshman year.
“I liked how she included everybody and it was very very welcoming, coming in as like kind of a scared freshman I felt very, very included,” she says.
Labbe says the Arts Missoula Award was a nice recognition and show of appreciation for her dedication over the past 30 years.
Keintz says there’s no question why Labbe was considered.
“I think people should just know that she works really hard for what she does, and she puts in a lot of effort behind the scenes, and she's very good at fixing any problem that comes her way,” she says. “I just I'm really glad that I could have her as not only a teacher but also like a role model and a mentor.”
For Labbe, more than her own personal recognition — the Arts Missoula Awards are a great way to continue to showcase artistic talent in Missoula.
“I really appreciate that this award exists because the arts are so important, and we don't want to lose sight of that,” she says.
The Arts Missoula Awards Ceremony will be held on May 30 at the DoubleTree Hotel from 4:30 p.m. until 6:30 p.m. Tickets can be purchased here.
