The Billings Outpost, Billings, MT

Ten Things Learned in Ten Years

Artspace, 2719 First Avenue North: Cory Jaeger-Kenat's show "Ten Things Learned in Ten Years (or what they didn't teach me in art school.)".

The farewell show for Jaeger-Kenat includes the last of her chalk pastel paintings, rare now since her permanent switch to the use of acrylic paint. Jaeger-Kenat is celebrating the end of a decade making art and friends in Billings with this retrospective show at the same gallery where her student art was shown. Viewers are invited to bid on each piece in a silent auction that continues through the month of February. It is Jaeger-Kenat's way of gifting her art back to the community before the relocates to the East Coast later this year.

UU World: Creations

from Pieces of Eight, 2001 by Cory Jaeger. Pastel on paper. From left: Adolescent, 6x9 inches, Mother, 9x12 inches, Crone, 6x9 inches.

Cory Jaeger proudly calls herself a feminist artist, but she hasn't always. "Back in college", she recalls, "one of my professors told me that there was nothing worse than being labeled a 'feminist' artist." For several years, she took his word for it and avoided the communities that embrace feminist art.

Claiming the name has been liberating. The three pastel paintings shown here draw on her interest in the psychology of women's experience. "In Adolescent, she is a young girl, the print of her book dissolving into fanciful butterflies, "Jaeger explains. "She thrusts out of the earth in Mother, her essence a combination of oak tree and pear-laden branches. And in Crone, her years have given her strength, the quiet power of the rugged crimson mountains surrounding her." The paintings were displayed at the University of Vermont Women's Center in the fall of 2003 and will be featured during Women's Heritage Month at the University of Illinois in the spring.

Jaeger lives in Billings, Montana, where she is a member of the Billings Unitarian Universalist Fellowship.