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Of Neon & Bones: New Acquisitions from 2020 to Now. Yellowstone Art Museum, Billings, Montana, 2025–26.
Crossbeat, 2018, oil on canvas, 60 x 60 inches. This painting is from my Avian Witness series. It contemplates primordial forces—bird migration, magnetic fields, wind—and their juxtaposition with human activity. Source materials, some embedded beneath layers, include aerial landscape views, topographic maps, gestures of penmanship, and my pen-and-ink drawings of the movement of birds.

I’m getting ready to hand out this new trifold at the Arts Council of Big Sky gallery reception on July 30, 2025. My work has been selected to highlight wildlife migration through abstract painting in conjunction with the Wildlands Music Festival charity auction for Center for Large Landscape Conservation and American Rivers. Special thanks to Outlaw Partners for their support. Come on by!

WEDNESDAY, JULY 30, 2025
WILDLANDS: CREATIVE CONNECTIONS
5 – 8 PM ARTS COUNCIL OF BIG SKY

Stremmel Gallery, Reno, presents this work at the Reno Tahoe International Art Show, 2024.

Catherine Courtenaye, Lateral Drift, 2023, oil on aluminum, 48 x 48 inches

The Yellowstone Art Museum, Billings, Montana, has added Edgeland of the Sora Rail to its permanent collection.

Edgeland of the Sora Rail, 2020, oil on panel, 30 x 30 inches

Catherine Courtenaye@Echo

https://artdaily.com/news/166572/Missoula-Art-Museum-presents-works-by-renowned-artists-collected-by-Kim-and-Ruth-Reineking

Catherine Courtenaye, oil on panel, 2012

MISSOULA, MT.- The Missoula Art Museum presents a rare view into a superb private collection in Critical Eye: Selections from the Kim and Ruth Reineking Collection. Regionally and nationally renowned artists represented include: Anne Appleby, John Buck, Bobby Tilton Cone, Catherine Courtenaye, Gennie DeWeese, Elizabeth Dove, Clarice Dreyer, Bev Beck Glueckert, Stephen Glueckert, Kristi Hager, Trey Hill, Jerry Iverson, Terry Karson, Kathryn Kress, Beth Lo, Jon Lodge, Cathryn Mallory, Bobbie McKibben, Neil Parsons/Tall Eagle, Jaune Quick-To-See Smith, Jerry Rankin, James Reineking, Ace Sloan, and Patrick Zentz.

The exhibition features selections from the Reineking’s promised gift to the MAM collection. A sculptural vessel by Rudy Autio, a central figure in national ceramics, shares the gallery with a sculptural buoy form by Trey Hill, titled Buoyant, that might surprise a viewer familiar with his branched ceramic forms. In another area, Lela Autio’s lit neon Plexiglas faces Jon Lodge’s monochromatic-in-white Torqued Strands (Motet). The Reineking Collection is intensely local and deliberately modernist and contemporary; as such, it’s a natural extension of MAM’s collection in terms of subject matter and focus.

The Reinekings have collected quietly over the last few decades, assembling a magnificent collection almost as a by-product of their numerous friendships with artists and the museum. Many of the artists in the Reineking Collection have longstanding connections to MAM. Through significant donations of art, Jaune Quick-To-See Smith helped establish the museum’s important Contemporary American Indian Art Collection, which serves museums across the nations through loans of work by significant Native artists. Stephen Glueckert served as MAM’s curator for over 25 years. The Reinekings shared personal memories of their connection with artworks and important artists as vignettes on the wall labels accompanying many of the artworks.

Founded in 1975 and accredited by the American Alliance of Museums since 1987, MAM is emerging as the leading contemporary art museum in the Intermountain West. MAM is situated on the traditional, ancestral territories of the Séliš (Salish or “Flathead”) and Ql̓ispé (upper Kalispel or Pend d’Oreille) peoples in Missoula, Montana, USA. MAM is committed to respecting the indigenous stewards of the land it occupies. Their rich cultures are fundamental to artistic life in Montana and to the work of MAM. MAM is a fully accessible, free public museum boasting eight exhibition spaces, a library, and an education center in the heart of Missoula’s historic downtown.

Critical Eye: Selections From the Kim and Ruth Reineking Collection is on view at Missoula Art Museum through May 11, 2024.

The Whitney Western Art Museum, Cody, Wyoming, has acquired The Measure of a Wingbeat (2023).

2023, oil on canvas, 48 x 52 inches.

Notes on The Measure of a Wingbeat

My ongoing body of abstract paintings, Avian Witness, developed in part as a response to the growing divide between the natural world and the manmade environment. As wild habitats diminish, I turn to primeval forces—animal migration, magnetic pull, and wind—for inspiration. My work evokes natural patterns as they intersect with the human-modified landscape. Birds still migrate, yet often over vast built-up expanses of large cities.

Between and above gestural swooshes of color, the initial layers of my paintings are created by silkscreening facsimiles of 19th-century handwriting fragments. These bits of historical letterforms signal human culture. The layering is akin to archeological strata, the literal “ground” of the earth, the landscape. The paintings gradually become representations of historical time; the deepest buried layers feel ancient. On upper surfaces of the paintings, angular patterning represents road grids, agricultural fields, wind turbines, electric transmission lines, and other modern manmade infrastructure.

My pen and ink drawings of Western birds are the basis for large curvilinear traceries on the uppermost layer of the paintings. In The Measure of a Wingbeat, bird forms are not obvious; instead, it is the movement of flight that is transmitted.

In making these paintings, I envision how opposing systems of human development and natural forces might coexist in a harmonious ecosystem.

The title of this work suggests the impossibility of quantifying the wonder of watching wild birds migrate through our built environment.