Open AIR’s place-based Artist-in-Residence program connects artists from across disciplines with culturally, historically, and ecologically significant locations through partnerships across the state. From remote wilderness to historic communities, artists engage deeply with place, environment, and people.

This Fall, four Open AIR artists are in residence in Butte from September 29 – November 2, 2025: Olivia Berkey, Megan Karls, Aubrey Edwards, and Laurie Robins. During this special Brown Bag presentation, each will share their work, creative process, and experiences engaging with the Butte community.

About the Artists

Olivia Berkey – Artist-In-Residence at Hungry Hill

Olivia Berkey is an artist working in ceramics, performance, and choreography. Her dances, often solo in practice and presentation, are conceived of as an imagined duet with unseen and sometimes inanimate partners: the dreamt presence of other bodies, mountains, rocks, desert fields, herself in duplicate. Her ceramic work, too, investigates the relationship between body and earth, human and geologic time. Drawing from her experience working in museum and gallery archives, she is ever-exploring archiving the ephemeral. She holds a BA in Dance and Art History from Bard College (2020), where she received awards for her work in both arts scholarship and performance. Born and raised in North Carolina, she was first exposed to the region’s rich history of woodfired ceramics at age eighteen. Upon graduation from Bard, she moved to Taos, New Mexico, to apprentice with local woodfire artist Logan Wannamaker. In Taos, she has remained—digging, kiln building, walking, dancing. She can also be heard hosting a biweekly radio show on KNCE Taos. She has performed at the American Dance Festival (NC) and the National Arts Festival (South Africa) and premiered her choreography at Groundswell Series (NY) and the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts (NY). Her ceramic work has been represented at galleries and art markets around northern New Mexico, and she was a recent ceramic Artist-in-Residence with Arquetopia Foundation in Puebla, Mexico.

Aubrey Edwards – Artist-in-Residence at Clark Chateau
Aubrey is a visual artist, collaborative anthropologist, educator, storyteller, and memory worker with heartstrings tied to New Orleans and presently running wild in Wyoming. Her socially engaged practice spans the academic, creative, applied, and public spheres, exploring intersections of culture, history, and community.She has a deep love for collaborative storytelling practices that unearth buried labor narratives of the west, celebrating the folks who built the places we call home. She is presently earning her PhD in Public Humanities at the University of Wyoming.

Tess Fahlgren – Artist-in-Residence at Clark Chatteu
Tess Fahlgren is a graduate of the University of Minnesota MFA program. Her work has appeared in Montana Quarterly, Joyland, Blue Mesa Review, and elsewhere. She writes from her rural Montana hometown, where her nonprofit just donated a skatepark to the city.

Richard Opper – Artist-in-Residence at Clark Chatteu
Painting is healing. To observe a scene for its colors, values, and shapes is to see things in a new way. It helps strip away the judgements, preconceived notions, or biases I may want to project onto it. Painting requires me to see the subject for what it is rather than for what I might expect it to be. In that sense, it’s a way to get me closer to the truth and to observe more deeply the beauty that surrounds me – beauty I might have otherwise missed.

He has been an artist in residence at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin) and the South London Gallery (London), which culminated in a solo exhibition and publication. Other recent presentations of work include Transmediale (DE), New Wight Biennial (US), Temple Bar Gallery (IE), and a radio broadcast on KBMF Butte Montana.

The Brown Bag presentation will begin at noon on Wednesday, October 8th, 2025, and will last about an hour. The presentation will be held in the auditorium at the Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives, located at 17 W. Quartz Street. Guests are encouraged to bring a sack lunch. Coffee and water will be provided.

Brown Bag Lunches are held on the second and fourth Wednesdays of every month. Upcoming lectures will focus on topics of local interest. For more information, contact the Archives at (406) 782-3280.