Touching the Earth at Tippet Rise Art Center

A ranch becomes the canvas, and much more, at Cathy and Peter Halstead’s immersive art center in Fishtail, Montana.

Kelly Bennett and Carolyn Quan, in conversation with Cathy and Peter Halstead

Kelly Bennett and Carolyn Quan (KBCQ): Let’s start with your background. You two have an incredible history and journey together that has culminated in Tippet Rise. How did your union and this venture come to be?

Cathy and Peter Halstead (CPH): Tippet Rise was a dream for most of our lives, a way to think about all of the things that we are extremely passionate about and bring them all together. It started before we were even married, with visits to special places like the Fondation Meaght in France and Storm King in New York. You must realize that we met in high school – we had mutual friends and ended up in so many of the same places. We saw each other every month of our lives starting when we were 16 and after many years of friendship, found ourselves in love and got married in our early thirties. 

When our younger daughter graduated from high school, we knew we wanted to move to the mountains. We moved to Edwards, Colorado, to a rural property up against the wilderness. Over the years, it became clear that it was very challenging to find the kind of landscape that would allow us to create an art center. We wanted to be rural and private but so many places, like Steamboat, felt like they would become suburban very quickly. We focused on Montana and bought the first property and immediately, many neighboring properties were available. Getting on the land here, you could just feel it in your cells. It’s so primitive and visceral and beautiful. 

KBCQ: Tippet Rise encompasses a landscape that has a very special nexus with Montana art. Take us through the intermingled history of fine art and the landscape that now makes up your ranch.

CPH: The artist Isabelle Johnson is a very important part of the Center’s history. She was Montana’s first modernist painter and one of the eleven ranches that combined to make up Tippet Rise was a ranch that she owned and operated with her sister. During the week, she was a cattle rancher, and on the weekends she taught art to all the local kids. In the winter she painted. When you look at the land around us, you have to see it through her eyes. Isabelle studied Cezanne and Ed Motherwell and many modern Montana painters studied with her. She painted Fishtail the way that Cezanne painted Provence, and you see it so clearly in her art. You see the strong lines and feel the fierceness of that landscape in her paintings. You realize in her art that she saw the area around us not as ranches and hay rakes and bales and falling-down barns. She saw it as enormously warm, yet very powerful and with a sense of everything having its own survival techniques. You feel it coming through paintings from a hundred years ago. There is an incredible collection of her art at the Yellowstone Art Museum and so many of her paintings were painted where Tippet Rise now is or in our area. 

KBCQ: How do you choose the art that resides at Tippet Rise?

CPH: Only certain kinds of sculpture can live there. Think about the vastness of this place. The landscape is so enormous that it isn’t a question of size, but of inner power. It has to have that inner strength and magnetism that relates it to the land without it being in some kind of strange separation or contrast. Sculpture must be seen in the landscape in a way that is very powerful but feels right. It’s not quantifiable, but hat’s how we think about it. The very first work here was Patrick Dougherty’s Daydreams. In that piece, there is a feeling of a transition from something we know that’s more domestic in the form of the schoolhouse to something that is wild and of the landscape in the form of the willows. The willows grow in the streams around us but suddenly are in the house, weaving out of it and trying to escape.  When we told Patrick that we remember always wanting to escape school and play in nature, he said those were our daydreams and that’s what he sculpted. We thought about it as a progression from things you know, to things you know less about, to things you know nothing about. It echoes so much about the power and mystery of these landscapes.

Music is also part of the art and magic at Tippet Rise. It’s important to us that we blend the visual arts with music and poetry on the land. Our musical performances routinely bring tears to many people’s eyes. Over the years, we have been fortunate to host renowned sculptors, painters and composers in residence. For example, composer John Luther Adams was at Tippet Rise for a year and a half and wrote such amazing music at Tippet Rise, including his Fifth String Quartet, Lines Made By Walking, which you can hear part of on our website. He also wrote part of In the Name of the Earth at Tippet Rise and hearing it was a life changing experience.

KBCQ: How do you manage the landscape full of art in the context of a working ranch?

CPH: We are fortunate to have a wonderful manager who lives at the ranch and an incredible team that helps coordinate the art and events. The property is around 12,500 acres and we have about 500 head of cattle and sheep herds totaling 3,000 on it. Most of the animals belong to other ranchers who manage them, but we run some of our own cattle. We contend with the typical issues you associate with ranching – fire, irrigation, managing wildlife, noxious weeds, etc. – and then the sculptures on the landscape and the people visiting and the artists that take up residence make it all more interesting and interconnected.

We try to do interesting things with irrigation, developing wells to irrigate the rises from the top to create better grazing by distributing water all around hills on the ranch. It keeps the cattle moving, which benefits the landscapes greatly, and in so doing, also helps keep the broad canvas for the sculptures and musical performances beautiful. We are developing a reservoir to provide more water storage for local firefighting and a watering hole for elk and other wildlife to have better access to water.

We have to fence the animals away from some of the art, but some of the pieces are safe with them. It is amazing to see how the animals interact with the art. Sometimes it provides shade and shelter – the cattle love the shade provided by Ensamble Studio’s Domo. When we have music outside, the sheep often slowly creep up and their curiosity and presence adds to the experience. 

KBCQ: How does having so many different things going on at the ranch affect your notion of stewardship?

CPH: It probably makes it more complicated. Our manager came to us with a 300-page bible, documenting every square foot of the ranch, what happens there and how we should manage it. Some places need rest, others need animals; it’s a lot to manage well. Some of the ranches that we purchased needed a lot of care. It has been so satisfying to know that our management of this property, particularly our weeds, which were very problematic, has helped our neighbors. It has helped us to become more integrated in the community, which was understandably skeptical of us for a time.

KBCQ: Your passion and love for Tippet Rise is so energizing and contagious. What was it like the first time you had people to Tippet Rise and you shared your vision with the public?

CPH: We were terrified, thinking, ‘what if no one comes?’. The first season started slowly when we started putting tickets on sale, then they all sold out. By the second season, our site crashed within three minutes. We have gone to a lottery system for our events now because it feels fairer. It is so moving to be there for everyone. 

When you think about it, ranchers out here love the land so much but many may never have given a single thought to sculpture or thought that classical music would be of any interest whatsoever. It means so much to us that we can surprise them with what these things will mean to them after they are all connected. Not because they are things that they should like, but because they are universal and you can experience them in a place that resonates with something primal and deep in the soul.

If we never touched anything, the place is magical. But then you have the music and sculptures and sense of community, and it touches people’s souls. There have been times when an incredible musician is playing and weather comes in – imagine the distant sky turning black while listening to a powerful composition amongst powerful sculptures. John Luther Adams had a piece that featured a piccolo followed by a pause, then a flute, then a silence. In the silences, the wind blows and the birds sing and you understand that it’s all part of the concert. You’ve been tricked into listening to nature and he has brought you to the land. It starts with the land, it’s so beautiful that you can’t resist it, particularly if you are coming from a big city and the vastness is so new. You may think you are coming for the sculpture or a composer, but really, you learn that you are here for the land.

KBCQ: Since purchasing the ranch and executing your vision for Tippet Rise, how has your role in the fabric of your community changed? Where do you see it going?

CPH: It is important that so many of our visitors come from our local community and surrounding towns. It has taken time to prove that we care about this place even though we ‘ranch’ in a different way. A couple of years ago, one of our neighbors came up to us at the local diner and told us that he finally gets what we are doing and called us ranchers. It sounds so silly but it meant a lot. It’s easy to understand the skepticism. It is touching now to talk to people from our community about the experiences they have and how they relate to their own histories. Some may have a passion for a classical instrument or have learned to sing in their childhood. We found out a local shepherd sings medieval songs as a hobby, for example. Being able to bring that magic to this landscape is humbling.

People used to go to community meeting halls and church to get together. As society changed and those places changed, a lot of that has stopped. At Tippet Rise, we get to be a place where community convenes. It is diverse, from local ranchers and residents to art lovers traveling from across the world. Tippet Rise is not just a collection of art, it’s a work of art itself where things just happen – incredible art and music and experiences are features in a tapestry that add meaning to this place. We have made new friends, unbelievable friends, because of Tippet Rise, which is special at age 80. We see endless promise and future in young people and the center is a means to support a new generation of artists and lovers of these landscapes.

Someone once said that if you don’t touch angels in your sleep, you wake in the morning ill-at-ease, unrefreshed. This is because you haven’t touched the world that you need to as a poet, artist, musician, rancher. You need to speak with the angels, to touch the earth, to know it’s all real and you’re part of a greater reality that gives you identity. ‘Oh give me a home, where the antelope roam’ is one of our oldest mantras and it’s totally true. Once you have been to these places, you know a different kind of wildness and identity, a different kind of soul even. Our best selves take identity from the land and you feel it in ranching communities. Even with our slightly different approach, we are united with the broader community around us because we all love the land and respect for the land is our shared primary value.