UM museum acquires 200-piece modern Art collection

MISSOULA — The University of Montana recently acquired a significant collection of modern art belonging to alumna Penelope Loucas.

Donated to UM’s Montana Museum of Art and Culture, the gift of over 200 works was collected over a period of 50 years.

Montana Museum of Art and Culture (MMAC) Director Rafael Chacón said it represents the former gallery owner, curator and educator’s lifelong commitment to contemporary artists in Montana and the Northwest.

“Penelope Loucas should be celebrated as one of Montana’s and the Northwest’s most influential gallery owners and advocates for modern art at the turn of the last century,” Dr. Chacón said. “This collection reveals not only the focused attention and passion of a dedicated collector of modernist art but also her loyalty to its practitioners and her profound understanding of their unique talents and visions. It showcases the breadth of modernism in Montana over the past 50 years.”

Loucas will speak in a gallery talk series titled “In the Know” at 2 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 9, in the MMAC’s Joe Batts and Lana Richards Batts Gallery. The exhibition “Penelope Loucas: A Lifetime of Collecting” opens to the public Thursday, Oct. 10, with a free public reception from 5 to 7 p.m.

Loucas was born in 1940 to Greek immigrant parents in Roundup. A graduate of Roundup High School, Loucas was among the first generation of rural Montanans to attend a university in the post-World War II period.

An avid reader and lover of literature, history and philosophy, she studied English with Leslie Fiedler and humanities with Rudy Turk at UM in Missoula, graduating in 1958.

After briefly teaching high school from 1962 to 1965, she pursued a master’s certification in comparative literature at Indiana University. She went on to teach avant-garde and cross-cultural art movements at the University of New Hampshire. During those years, she traveled extensively and wrote about modernist movements such as expressionism, surrealism and abstract expressionism in the arts.

Returning to Montana, she worked for the state Department of Labor in Helena until 1981. Noting there were few exhibition venues for modernist artists in the state, she opened the Upstairs Gallery in a rambling Victorian house in Helena.

Loucas promoted the careers of modernists such as Lela Autio in Missoula; Bill Stockton from the Billings area; Bob and Gennie DeWeese, Frances Senska and Jessie Wilber from Bozeman; and resident ceramicists at Helena’s Archie Bray Foundation such as Akio Takamori and Kurt Weiser. Her advocacy for modern ceramics helped shift the perception of the art form from craft to fine art.

Loucas also embraced contemporary Indigenous artists who participated fully in Montana modernism such as Blackfoot painter and printmaker Neil Parsons, Crow painter Susan Stewart and Salish artist Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith.

She had a particular penchant for younger artists at the start of their careers, including ceramicist Beth Lo, textile artist Nancy Erickson and painter Patricia Forsberg – all Missoula-based artists who completed their master’s degrees at UM.

Loucas befriended and represented artists who, according to Chacón, “pushed the boundaries beyond representation and decoration to abstraction and symbolic content.”

In her own words, she “was interested in the great innovators – artists who were breaking boundaries through political, symbolic and spiritual expression – definitely not cowboy artists or the merely decorative.”

In 1988, Loucas took the position of curator at the Tacoma Art Museum. She opened her second gallery in 1990. Until 1998, the Penelope Loucas Gallery & Salon exhibited Montana modernists and West Coast and international artists. She held breakthrough exhibitions in Tacoma, Washington, for California modernist George Stillman and German-born Holocaust survivor Antje Kaiser.

After retiring from the gallery world, Loucas returned to teaching art as an adjunct at the University of Washington in Tacoma, where she presently lives.