Welcome to this intimate gathering. I thank you for making the trek.

Melissa Ragain is an art historian, art critic and an Associate Prof of Art History at MSU, Bozeman. She has written for numerous art journals and magazines. Melissa has won prestigious Fellowships and awards Here’s a sampling: a 2016-2017 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard, and a recipient of the 2016 Art Writers Grant from the Warhol Foundation. She will soon have a book published entitled, Domesticating the Invisible: Formalism and Environmental Anxiety in Postwar America.

Sandra Dal Poggetto, our superb artist, hails from Helena and has been living in the inland West for 30 years. Over this period, she has worked within the tradition of painting to give form to her experience of landscape. Her work has been exhibited widely and her personal essays on art and landscape have been published in regional and national journals and anthologized. I am thrilled for these two talented, accomplished, and cerebral individuals to have a conversation here at Aunt Dofe’s.