about

Tracy Linder’s sculptures and installations address our integral connection to the land, the sanctity of our food sources and the innate survival skills of all species. Linder grew up on a family farm and now lives on the vast windswept prairie of south central Montana where she continues to find source material. Linder uses organic materials such as bone, leather, seeds, leaves, grasses, often combined with resin and beeswax.

Linder was awarded a Tinworks Art 2021 Artist Grant.

Linder’s work is the subject of an article in the November/December 2020 issue of Sculpture Magazine, interview by Ann Landi.  

The Yellowstone Art Museum presented a major mid career retrospective of Linder’s works in the winter of 2020. “Open Range” has an accompanying catalog with essays by Lucy R. Lippard and Susan Barnett, curator. 

Linder’s works have been shown nationally and extensively in Montana, Colorado, Wyoming and North Dakota. She has had numerous solo shows including: Missoula Art Museum, MT; Nicolaysen Art Museum, WY; OK Harris Works of Art, NYC; Fort Collins Museum of Contemporary Art, CO; Eiteljorg Museum, Indianapolis; Gallery 210, St. Louis; Holter Museum of Art, Helena; Dahl Arts Center, Rapid City; Prescott College Art Gallery, AZ; and Yellowstone Art Museum, Billings.

In 2015, Linder was a featured speaker at a TEDx event in Billings, MT. She served on the Montana Arts Council 2008-2021. Her work was included in the inaugural exhibit of the Bozeman Sculpture Park in 2011. She was the first artist in residence of the Yellowstone Art Museum’s Visible Vault for 6 months. She was also selected to be a resident at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming. In 2000, Linder was commissioned by the US General Service Administration’s Art in Architecture program for the Sweetgrass, MT/Coutts, AB Border station. Prior to that she taught at MSU-Billings and served as the Gallery Director for 7 years. She received her MFA in 1991 from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

statement

My art work is an extension of living a life close to the land. Living on a ranch gives a vivid depiction of the circle of life—birth and death become part of the everyday. I am surrounded by the harsh realities of storms that can wipe out a year’s crop in minutes, by ranchers braving the blustery cold to rescue a newborn calf from certain death, by a community that will drop everything to help extinguish a fire, and a sense of isolation that can be both comforting and profoundly lonely.

I create objects that convey an intimate experience of rural life. The interdependent relationships of both wild and domestic plants and animals provides my inspiration. I use a wide array of materials, such as bone, leather, hide, grasses, crops, dirt—much of which comes directly from the prairie—often combined with resin, to explore the vulnerability and strength of my subjects. As I work, I imagine the biographies of my subjects, be they animal, plant, or machine, I consider their lifespan and what they endured.

This consciousness is translated into a body of art work that reveals an unflinching narrative of the working land and our complex relationship to the environment. As we face the challenges of the climate crisis and the desire for a sustainable food system, I feel compelled to relate my experiences through the perspective of the land’s inhabitants.

I strive for a purely aesthetic experience; that the work provides for an innate ability to connect to the imagery, materials and scale.

resume

“Linder’s sculptures are the color of the high plains in early fall: gold, brown, tan, and white. Made from bones, seeds, leather, fur, branches, bronze, resin and time, her sculptures represent and incorporate cycles of growth, death, and rebirth. Life and death bear one another’s seed in symbol ad substance. Time infuses each work. Labor is embodied in stitches through unyielding materials, the weight of accumulation, and the traces of care spent shaping, stretching, and assembling.”—Susan Barnett, Curator, Yellowstone Art Museum (2020)