Le Cirque: Holter Gala 2026 Live Auction Preview

Frank Hyder – has participated in more than 200 group shows and over 100 solo exhibitions throughout the Americas, Asia, and Europe, including 10 individual exhibitions in New York City. Solo museum exhibitions in Venezuela at the Museum of Modern Art Caracas, Museo Jacobo Borges, Museum of Modern Art Zulia, Museo Universidad de Los Andes and Museum of Modern Art Coro. Other solo museum exhibitions: Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Carnegie Museum CA, La Salle Museum of Art, National Museum of Catholic Art and History and The Noyes Museum.

Jim P. Gilman – has been involved in art since an early age.  He has experience with oil and acrylic painting, silversmithing, stained glass, photography, and ceramics.  Jim attended the community classes at the Archie Bray Foundation from 1981 through 1991 and has been working out of his own studio, in Helena, ever since.

Much of Jim’s artistic influences comes from native and modern art, and from the hundreds of ceramic artists who have worked at the Archie Bray Foundation.

Hooshang Khorasani – Hooshang is an internationally exhibited artist with working studios in Ruston, LA, and Orange County, CA. His background includes a BFA in painting, plus 12 years as an award-winning graphic designer/illustrator. He has been self-employed in America and Spain since 1984. His paintings are displayed in private collections across Europe and the U.S. as well as in corporate collections; are included in permanent museum collections; and have been shown in numerous galleries.

Jon Stone – His work emerges from a lifelong pull toward the rawness of the American West—a landscape of vast horizons where worlds and legends collide. Through ceramic sculpting, Stone breathes life into clay, honoring earthbound material while chasing the pulse of myth and memory. Each form carries the weather of place—the grit of wind, the quiet of distance, the stories sedimented in riverbeds—and holds the charged space between the seen and the felt.

In the studio, his process is both excavation and invocation: carving, pinching, and firing until surface becomes story and vessel becomes voice. The result is work that echoes life—resilient, frontier-born, and open to wonder.

Christina Marian – is a Romanian-American visual artist best known for her highly experimental layered paintings investigating the notion of becoming, rather than being within fixed and stable grounds. Her work explores such themes as her experience within her community; togetherness and the sense of belonging; communal and global changes; and finding peace within unpredictability. Marian holds a BFA in Painting from the National University of Fine Arts in Bucharest, Romania, and an MFA from Montana State University, Bozeman.

Kate Huston – born in New Mexico. During her early childhood she moved to Boston where she attended Museum School of Fine Arts in 1995 and graduated with a BFA in arts education and Studio Art in 1999 After graduating she was accepted into the art residency at the Ucross Foundation in 2000. Following her residency she moved to Montana and has resided there since. Currently residing outside the Bozeman area she has attended the residency program at Montana Artist Refuge in Basin, Montana for the past three years. Several shows of her work have been exhibited throughout the state of Montana.

Claire O’Connell – began printmaking three decades ago as a student at Carleton College in Minnesota. She went on to receive an MFA in printmaking from the University of Montana. She is a certified art teacher and has taught at all levels. She lives in Helena, Montana with her husband where they raised two daughters. 

Chase DeForest – creates collaged and stitched leather artworks broadly exploring themes surrounding cattle, horses, landscapes, and the American west. She uses hides as a conceptual jumping off point for her subject matter. The artwork celebrates the many compelling properties of leather: supple, durable, flexible and fun.

Chase was raised riding horses on a rural family farm. After two decades making commissioned custom furniture, she was introduced to the idiosyncratic world of custom cowboy boot makers. In becoming one herself, she discovered the many attributes and potential of leather. She has now also taken the medium from the foot to the wall.

Chase has an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and presently resides in Livingston, Montana.

Stephanie J. Frostad – studied at Studio Arts Center International in Florence, Italy in 1985-86. She received a BFA from the Maryland Institute, College of Art in 1990, and in 1994 completed an MFA in Painting at The University of Montana. Frostad has exhibited throughout the Northwest, in California, Maryland, Washington D.C. and abroad in Canada, China, Italy and New Zealand. In 1994 she was awarded a Montana Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship. In 2018 she received MAC’s Artist Innovation Award. Her work is held in numerous private and public collections including The University of Victoria in British Columbia, The Montana Museum of Arts and Culture, The Missoula Art Museum and The University of Washington Medical Center. Born and raised in Walla Walla, Washington, Frostad now makes her home in Missoula, Montana.

Richard Swanson – Since obtaining his MFA from the University of Montana in 1994, his work has been honored with several major grants and awards, including a Montana Art Council Individual Fellowship, Art Matters Foundation Individual Artist Fellowship, Helena Presents Individual Artist Grant and a New Forms: Regional Initiative Grant. His many large scale works have found permanent homes in the Northwest and beyond. Several of his public art commissions have become the defining visual symbol for cultural institutions including the Myrna Loy Center, the University of Montana-Helena, and the Holter Museum of Art, all in his home town, as well as the Medford Educational Facility in Medford, Oregon. His figurative clay vessels are featured in many books and magazines and have homes in such prestigious institutions as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Mansfield Center for Pacific Affairs in Washington, D.C.

Dale Beckman – a Helena-based landscape artist dedicated to capturing the rugged environments of the Badlands of Eastern Montana and Western North Dakota. Working in acrylic and mixed media, Beckman uses energetic line work to imbue his compositions with a sense of vibrational energy. His technical approach is designed to trigger free association, presenting the landscape as a series of altering forms that require the viewer’s active participation to complete the imagery.

Society of Artists and Artist Equity. Beckman’s work is frequently showcased in premier regional galleries and institutions, including the Hockaday Museum of Art (2020), the Holter Museum of Art (2023), and the Myrna Loy Center in Helena. Through his evolving practice, Beckman continues to bridge the gap between the physical terrain of the West and the psychological experience of art.

Josh DeWeese – an artist and educator teaching ceramics at Montana State University in Bozeman, where he and his wife Rosalie Wynkoop have a home and studio. He is currently the Director of the School of Art at MSU. DeWeese received a Montana Governor’s Arts Award in 2022. He served as Director of the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts in Helena, Montana from 1992-2006. DeWeese has exhibited and taught workshops internationally and his work is included in numerous public and private collections.