(UM News Service) Kristi Hager was many things: Painter, performance artist, photographer and arts advocate were just a few.
She was also a longtime friend and supporter of the University of Montana, and when she lost her struggle with cancer last November, her significant art collection was gifted to UM’s Montana Museum of Arts and Culture.
A longtime friend of the museum and University, Hager bequeathed an impressive portion of her personal collection to MMAC, including masterful examples of her own works and those of contemporary artists like Matt Hamon, Amanda Jaffe, Kathleen Herlihy-Paoli, Kathryn W. Schmidt and Leslie Van Stavern Millar.
“Even as we mourn the loss of Kristi Hager, we celebrate her colossal achievements and generosity,” said Rafael Chacón, the MMAC Suzanne and Bruce Crocker Director.
The UM museum will share the work of Hager in an exhibition titled “Homage: The Legacy of Kristi Hager.” The show opens at noon Wednesday, Feb. 19, with a museum member preview. It opens to the public at noon Thursday, Feb. 20, with a free public reception at 5 p.m.
Hager was born in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1946. She received a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and two art master’s degrees from the University of Delaware and University of Wisconsin.
Arriving in Montana in 1981, Hager opened a studio in Butte’s Metals Bank Building. For 12 years she never complained about working in the cold and drafty building. She loved her tall ceilings and windows, as well as the expansive views of the Berkeley Pit looming over the Mile High City.
In Butte, Hager began a series of paintings and prints, including isolated objects like a decorated wedding cake or a cake tin. These austere still lifes in relatively empty spaces evoked Baroque memento mori – the realization that everyone must die – and she left them with characteristically dry, unvarnished surfaces.
“These paintings were depictions of carefully selected symbolic objects – emblems that represented the individual’s journey in life and increasingly the domestic roles prescribed for women in society,” Chacón said.
Living with the country’s largest Superfund site in view, Hager was taken with the Berkeley Pit’s magnificent scale, strange colors and transcendent beauty. The Pit inspired two great themes across her career – out-of-door painting and environmentalism – and it catalyzed a lifetime of defending the world’s precious natural resources.
Years later, those pit paintings led to the “Cool Water Hula,” a public performance and ritual that brought many friends to advocate for clean-up of the site. Donning flowered leis, blue sarongs, T-shirts and head scarves, Hager and her community danced a prayer at the edge of the Pit. Hager’s restaging the hula near the Milltown Dam east of Missoula arguably tipped public perception in favor of its removal and clean-up.
By 1994 Hager moved to Missoula. She occasionally taught design, painting and printmaking in UM’s School of Visual and Media Arts as an adjunct faculty member. Hawaiian-style hula and storytelling with a point of advocacy became integral elements of her performances.
Chacón said outdoor painting and drawing allowed for a continuous exploration of both formal preoccupations with light and color in the landscape and concerns over extraction, environmental degradation and sustainability.
This 2006 painting by Kristi Hager, “Soft Target,” is part of the recent gift to UM’s Montana Museum of Art and Culture. (Photo by Eileen Rafferty)
He said Hager embraced the challenge of rendering objects, people and water in images such as a backyard bird bath in strong sunlight; empty canoes floating on glimmering lakes; dappled light on the rocks, cascades and eddies of her beloved Rattlesnake Creek; moody islands on Flathead Lake; and bathing swimmers in dazzling sunshine at Missoula’s municipal pool or the Clark Fork River.
The nude figure, particularly the female form, was of equal importance to Hager. She transformed this traditional subject of American and European art into a politically and socially charged critique of contemporary culture. Whether in aesthetic, erotic or political settings, she saw the female body as a battlefield. Her treatment of the nude, both female and male, was arguably the most radical and innovative aspect of her career.
Hager based her figural studies on years of drawing the female nude with Missoula’s Pattee Canyon Ladies Salon. This work was fully on display during a 2022 MMAC exhibition titled “Focus on the Figure: The Pattee Canyon Ladies Salon, 1989-2022.”
Hager reflected on the development of the female figure in a public lecture at the museum and in the exhibition catalog.
“While I may have no signature style, the core of my figure work remains the messy convergence of body and mind,” she said. “Within my paintings, it suggests a transitional place to pause and feel alive in this world.”
Her figure studies were not attempts at accurate representation, but rather sensitive questionings of the human condition and gender relations. Covering them in camouflage introduced a degree of threat to the subject.
“My paintings of figures with camouflaged skin started as an antiwar statement that expanded to reflect unconscious chronic hyper-vigilance and lowering visibility in response to gender bias, sexual harassment and assault,” she said.
Hager’s feminism came to the fore in 2018 in her installation “Equal: A Work in Progress.” Comprising 21 portraits honoring her great-grandmother, mother, goddaughter, friends and hero Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the large portraits were painted on cotton scrim and hung in space so they could be viewed from either side and in relation to each other. The project, bequeathed to the Missoula Art Museum, was Hager’s “counter offering to the ‘dude wall,’ institutional portrait galleries venerating great men.”
Photography paralleled painting and performance for Hager. Confined mainly to pictures of bridges, nuclear installations and other government facilities, Hager’s black-and-white photographs were intended as archival records destined for the vaults of the Library of Congress. Even as they revealed loyalty to the craft within strict technical parameters, they were also a venue for her concept of the singular object in the landscape as beautiful.
