Hear the Whistle Blow! Art of the Railway
A new exhibition at the Hockaday Museum of Art will show train art from historic and contemporary railway artists.
Kalispell, MT
On September 27 the Hockaday Museum of Art will present a new train-themed exhibition, Hear the Whistle Blow! Art of the Railway, in Kalispell, Montana. The exhibit is part of the Hockaday’s 50th birthday celebration.
The show is curated by Montana artists Jack Dykstra and Rob Akey, who are both avid railroad fans and are excited to bring trainthemed paintings to the museum’s visitors. “We’ve both had a long love affair with railroads and trains. We were doing some paintings together a couple of years ago and we just kept coming back to this idea for railroad show at the Hockaday, which is all about preserving and promoting art around Glacial National Park and the region, and this whole area is very much tied to the railroad,” Dykstra says. “So we wrote a proposal and the board accepted it. It was pretty easy.”
The show uses the words “railroad” and “railway” frequently, but defers to “railway” in the title because the two main rail companies that came through the area were the Northern Pacific Railway and the Great Northern Railway. This might seem like a small point to many guests, but to train aficionados this attention to detail will be appreciated.
“The railroad industry in the early 1900s was one of the largest employers in the United States. Even today many families have grandfathers, fathers, uncles and others who spent their entire careers working on the rails. Today the railroad companies employ fewer people, but there are many people who still follow trains and are always looking out for trains when they travel,” Dykstra says. “Some of it is just the history, which is so fascinating. When some of us hear a train, it’s hard to not turn and look. Even children, they love trains.”
The exhibition will present work from both historic and contemporary train painters. Some of the historic artists are Otto Kuhler, Walter Hook, Robert Goodnough, Joseph Henry Sharp and the great train painter Howard Fogg. One of the pieces in the show is Ralph Decamp’s Jawbone Railroad from 1904, which shows a train passing through a narrow canyon with a
winding stream alongside the rails.
Living artists include Gil Bennett, Chris Oldham, Oleg Stavrowski and Tucker Smith.
“We hope the show will put the emphasis on the West, and how much the railroad contributed to it. Without the railroad the rate of expansion and settlement would have been much lower,” Dykstra says. “The railroads played a big part in bringing people out here and in creating the idea of the West as a place.”