2 . A Timeless Legacy 2022：Artists of Glacier, Past and Present

Exhibition time：August 27~October 29，2022

Since the first A Timeless Legacy exhibition in 2015, our beloved annual and now biennial (两年一次的) exhibition celebrating the history, life and works of Glacier National Park artists has taken many forms. For the 2022 exhibition，we feature works from both contemporary (当代的) artists working in and around Glacier National Park, as well as historic artworks from the Hockaday Art Museum’s collections.

Nancy Dunlop Cawdrey

Nancy Dunlop Cawdrey lives in a world of color. And she likes to paint that way as well. After living for some years abroad in England and Europe，she eventually returned to the United States and settled down in Montana.

Carole Cooke

Artist Carole Cooke writes, “When I paint on location in remote areas, I feel a sense of excitement beyond description. It is my hope that sharing images of the land, trees and waters will give the viewers a strong sense of connection to nature. ”

Michelle Grant

Born and raised in Calgary, Alberta, Michelle Grant has been working professionally as an artist since 1994. She currently works in a contemporary realistic style. Her inspiration comes from owning horses and attending lots of horse-related events, which provide reference for her paintings.

Julie Jeppsen

Wildlife artist Julie Jeppsen is known for her paintings combining realism and atmosphere of wild animals in landscape. Julie is a self-taught artist, whose subject matter is a wide range of animals. She has been involved in art all her life and will continue doing it because it’s a major part of who she is.

6 . Not only was Gene Stratton-Porter one of Indiana's most well-known authors, but she was also an environmentalist, photographer, and artist. Gene shared her passion for the environment and wildlife in her writing and used her influence to fight for the preservation of nature and alert others to the importance of their natural surroundings.

Born in 1863 in Indiana, she grew up with a love of nature and spent most of her innocent childhood wandering through farms and forests, catching butterflies and observing birds like doves and small animals like geese. In 1886, Gene married Charles Porter. Although she expressed happiness with her family life, Gene lived a more independent life traditionally unavailable to women in the late nineteenth century. Gene insisted on writing and photographing wildlife around her cabin near Limberlost Swamp. There she expressed her passionate feelings towards nature and its preservation. She spent much time in Limberlost, and later the cabin became the site where she conducted field studies on Indiana's natural environment.

Early in her life, Gene studied nature in the Limberlost Swamp and recorded her thorough observations through photographs and detailed writings. Gene published dozens of books—novels, nature studies, poetry collections and children's books. Her books mainly connect readers to natural settings and earn her a high reputation. One of her best-known novels, A Girl of the Limberlost is about a lonely girl who lives on a farm and escapes from her sufferings in Limberlost.

Gene's legacy (遗留物)is visible not only within her books, photography and films but also within the Limberlost Swamp, which eventually faded away to the farmland. Fortunately, through her hard work and dedication, the land is slowly being restored to its natural state, with over 400 acres preserved for nature study today.

Qiao Yu is a songwriter who penned timeless classics that     1     (sing) from generation to generation in China for decades. He wrote more than 1,100 lyrics all his life, many of     2     are being remembered even today.

Qiao is said to have started his     3     (enthusiastic) with words from the early age of 4. He could also recite ancient poems from the Tang and Song dynasties. But it wasn’t     4     his late teens that he penned his first own poem.

Qiao rose to fame in 1955 after writing “Let’s Pull on Our Oars (桨)” known to most Chinese children. “Our boat is     5     (gentle) drifting on the lake/ A cool breeze is rustling for our sake/ Our homework has been well done/ Let’s heartily have a lot of fun,” says the song.

But Qiao’s greatest hit came in 1956,     6     “My Motherland” becoming a patriotic tune in the movie Battle on Shangganling Mountain. “A great river     7     (flow), its waves are wide/ Wind blows the scent of flowers to both shores/ My family lives on the shore/ I am used to hearing the punters’(艄公) call/And seeing the white sails on the boats,” says the start of the song.

Genius as these lines now are,     8     movie director at first asked Qiao to clearly spell out the “great river” as the Yangtze itself. “However,” Qiao said, “the ‘great river’     9     (refer) to in the lines is always there in front of your home, and the stories and memories along the river make up     10     it is to make you feel close to your hometown.”

8 . Jan or Johan Vermeer was a Dutch Baroque painter from the “Golden Age of Dutch Painting”. He was obscure during his lifetime; but in the nineteenth century, his work was brought to light, and he is now regarded as one of the greatest figures of Baroque painting-with his focus on simple portraits and household scenes. He is admired for the ability to present everyday objects with great dignity（庄重）and light.

There is not much information about Jan Vermeer’s early life, He didn’t travel much outside Holland, and most of his paintings were bought by a local man. His father was a dealer of paintings and also a local inn owner. When his father died in 1652, Jan took over the business of selling pictures and ownership of a small inn. When his mother died in 1670, he also inherited her local restaurant, and he often worked there at night selling alcohol and dishes to customers.

In 1653, Jan married a young girl named Catherina Bolies. Together they had fourteen children, though four died soon. Jan did a significant portion of his painting within his large house. He liked to paint in his own studio, even though household life may have been noisy with 14 children and his mother-in-law, whom he often argued with.

Jan was a slow worker, producing only three paintings a year. This was partly due to his technique of granular（似颗粒状的）painting. He was careful in capturing the light and colour of his various subjects. Unusually for the time, Jan often focused on simple household scenes such as “The Milkmaid” or the “Music Lesson”.

An important aspect of Vermeer’s paintings were his portraits--often of women. The portraits capture a style of reassuring calm, dignity and contentment with everyday life. To Vermeer, they may have represented an idealized view of life and women, which did not always match reality. “The Girl With A Pearl Earring” is widely considered a Vermeer masterpiece-It is also regarded as one of the greatest portrait pictures ever painted and is sometimes referred to as the “Mona Lisa” of the North.

9 . This year sees the third edition of Zhu Yujie’s group female art exhibition, a project hosted annually with the aim of offering more opportunities to women artists. The exhibition Metaphor and Gaze opened in Shenzhen’s La Vie Art Center, on Feb 27.

“Women artists still have relatively fewer opportunities to show their works at art museums and galleries, and few group exhibitions concentrate on female topics,” Zhu says, “Only by constantly exhibiting works by female artists and writing about these artworks, can they be known by more people and be written into art history.”

The exhibition contains videos, paintings, and performance by 17 female artists. According to Zhu, the title Metaphor and Gaze is about artists expressing women's real desires, confusion and anxieties from different perspectives, and exploring the love, healing and growth shared by humans.

“In these unique times of the pandemic(疫情), we have had new life experiences and understandings, and I increasingly realize that art is the best medium to break down barriers and to bring people together. And for artists, their creation and thinking never stop,” Zhu says. “In art history, the images of women are often just objects to be gazed at. In our exhibition, women are the subject of creation.”

Zhu says that she feels an increasing amount of people are supporting female art. While she overcame various difficulties hosting previous exhibitions with a limited budget, this year she was invited by Xiao Yu, founder of La Vie Art Center, who provided the place.

The art center is an industrial space with rough concrete walls, which, according to Zhu, contrasts with the fixed impression of women being frail, and allows the artists to communicate with the viewers through powerful artworks.

The exhibition also features a reading room section entitled Writing Her Power- Women’s Situation and Writing, displaying books from 20 publishing houses on themes including female power, self-identity and relationships. Zhu says that books have played a major role in her learning.

10 . At just 21 years old, Nija Charles is one of today's most popular songwriters.

She has been ________ with Beyonce, Jay Z, Cardi B, and many other today's popular music artists. Their works have been ________ . And she was even included in three Grammy nominations（提名）.

But just a few years ago, Charles was only a（n） ________ in the crowd. She was ________ in a musical family. "My dad is a DJ. My mom is a dancer," Charles ________ . "So growing up in this family, I was always ________ by music and crazily chased after musicians."

Charles said she first ________ music at age 13, when she asked her mom for a mini keyboard because she was ________ to produce. "So she got one for me, and I started tapping on the keys," she said.

Charles continued to learn music at New York University, where she'd make songs in her dormitory and post them online. Soon she was ________ in flying across the country on weekends, performing on stage and then studying at school.

"It was tough for me. There were some classes I ________ had to skip. But yeah, it was must time management and 1 had to ________ and finish my homework before I got on the plane or I'd finish the ________ on the plane. I wrote songs during the weekend. I made sure I studied hard so I could finish ________ that year," she said.

Talking about her success, Charles said, "It's ________ that my favourite artists are now the people I cooperate with. Several years ago, I was at their ________ but now I'm in the studio with them."