Creative people are always looking for the right venue to show or produce their work. Aaron Rosen, Sherri Cornett, and Jane Deschner may live in Billings, but their work is seen in galleries across the U.S.
Sherri Cornett, with degrees in political science and art, has a long history of advocacy, activism and campaign work around issues of human rights, women's rights, environment, education and the arts, and in board leadership. She focuses on socially-engaged projects in her own art and the projects she directs. Cornett has created international exhibition opportunities for women artists as Director of the Women's Caucus for Art's Half the Sky: Intersections in Social Practice Art, an art-based cultural exchange in China, and as Co-Director of Women + Body, an exhibition in South Korea. She has also represented the non-profit and NGO Women's Caucus for Art at United Nations conferences.
Dr. Aaron Rosen is Professor of Religious Thought at Rocky Mountain College and Visiting Professor at King’s College London. He taught previously at KCL, Yale, Oxford, and Columbia, and received his PhD from Cambridge. He has curated various exhibitions, and written widely for scholarly and popular publications. He is the author of Imagining Jewish Art and Art and Religion in the 21st Century, named one of the best books of 2015 by The Times. He is the editor of Religion and Art in the Heart of Modern Manhattan and co-editor of Visualising a Sacred City: London, Art and Religion.
Jane Deschner is a Billings artist whose ongoing, multi-year project titled Remember me: a collective narrative in found words and photographs combines vernacular photographs with statements culled from obituraries written by family and friends. Hand-embroidering the text into the actual photos intimately merges the two. The photos “read” the texts and vice versa, teasing pretension, tragi-comedy and profound truths about the human condition from sentimental artifacts.
