By Roberta Morrow, Box Elder AP English student
Recently, I had the pleasure of being one of the Box Elder High School students to attend the various art shows in Great Falls during Western Art Week. The trek started with a two hour ride on one of the school's big yellow cheese boxes. During the ride, a few friends and I took the opportunity to finish some of our art projects that we would be displaying while in Great Falls. The other students were either sitting back waiting for the long ride to be over with, or laughing and telling jokes, attempting to make the time pass a little more easily.
As we approached Great Falls, I was just finishing one of my projects, and the other students were getting antsy, knowing that we were finally there. The bus pulled into the parking lot of the fairgrounds. Box Elder had arrived at the 19th Annual Native American Art Show.
Once inside, we noticed that many artists were still setting up their displays. My thinking before going to the show was that it was going to be your typical display of just paintings. To my surprise, though, it was much more than that. There were artists displaying everything from paintings, small sculptures, jewelry, Indian crafts, pottery, drawings and many other different styles of beautiful artwork.
Our next stop was a short walk over to the Four Seasons Exhibition Hall, thinking it would be just another stop on the trip. However, it struck me as far more interesting. As I stood there, looking at the spectacular pieces of artwork on display, I was impressed by the many different ways the artists here expressed themselves. I took the opportunity to speak with as many artists as I could, curious to learn as much as I could from them.
From there, we crammed back onto the bus and continued our journey across the Falls. Our next stop was the Holiday Inn, where we scattered like the paint across an artist's canvas to the various rooms that displayed paintings and bronzes by a number of different artists. After our short visit there, we were off again, this time to the Heritage Inn.
The Heritage Inn was very similar to the display at the Holiday Inn, in that it was mostly paintings and bronzes displayed in a number of rooms. Our time in Great Falls was slowly fading away. After seeing so many beautiful pieces of artwork throughout the day, it was time to roll on back to Box City, but not without ice cream.
We walked across the street from the Heritage Inn to DQ, where we rewarded ourselves for a long, hard day of admiring marvelous artwork.
