Yellowstone Summit features artist Parks Reece

Liz Kearney Special to the Enterprise, Feb 15, 2025

Parks Reece is the featured artist with the online “Yellowstone Summit’’ this year.

The four-day summit, now in its fourth year, was launched by Gardiner artists/educators George Bumann and his wife Jenny Golding. The event features presentations by, for just a few examples, Yellowstone National Park scientists in an array of specialties, policy experts, and others who share their expertise in park history and biology and wildlife science, as well as local writers, artists and guides.

Bumann said the idea came from a program the National Park Service holds before the start of each summer and winter tourist season for guides, naturalists and other staff. The day-long program usually features subject experts in, for examples that Bumann noted, fire ecology, snowmobile history, policy issues and other topics likely to come in during interpretive programs and tours.

Bumann said the NPS program for staff was phenomenal, and it gave him and Golding the spark to start the Yellowstone Summit.

“Why not make it a more well-rounded experience that was open to everybody who had Internet?” he said.

And how did Bumann choose Reece for this year’s summit?

“He’s just a crazy, cool guy,” Bumann laughed.

“He does great work, and we always love artists who are willing to use their voice in a visual sense and their actual voice, too, to stick up for this place—and raise awareness of issues and challenges that we honestly need to deal with,” Bumann said. “And Parks both makes you laugh and makes you contemplate some of those very important things about this place.”

Reece said he thinks Bumann chose him because his work is about nature, “Although I twist it and juggle it around some,” he said in the signature drawl of his North Carolina roots.

“I like to do issues,” Reece said. “One [painting] I did was for a magazine, two trout in water, looking up at about 500 flies with hooks in them with fishermen floating above them. It’s called ‘Yellowstone Summer.’ It’s about how we’re loving our rivers and our beautiful places to death—but with a humorous showing of that.”

North Carolina to Montana

Reece came west from North Carolina more than 40 years ago as so many young men before him—he followed a girl who came out to attend Montana State University in Bozeman. She later moved to Gardiner, so he did, too.

Reece loved the Western outdoors—the wide-open spaces, the much fewer people, and the wildlife not found in the East. Including that most elusive of Western creatures, the jackalope.

“People got me on that jackalope thing when I first got out here,” Reece chuckled.

He still loves the Western outdoor experience.

“You have a chance to go out and get attacked by a bear while you were fishing,” Reece said. “That didn’t happen back East. Not that I wanted to be attacked by a bear, but I like that excitement. It’s just exciting. I loved it. I still do love it.”

Reece was happy to live minimally, hunt and fish for his food, and paint. He wanted to be an artist. He got his start as a youngster taking art classes with Ruth Faison Shaw, who is credited with inventing finger painting and later incorporating finger painting in art therapy. Reece still incorporates finger painting in his art today.

But as a young man, his family was dubious about his artistic goals. They figured he would join the family business, Meadows Mills, which makes mills for, among other things, grinding flours.

Meanwhile, Reece had made the acquaintance of a fellow who worked at the Livingston Job Service office. Reece was taking day-labor jobs for extra cash. He liked that he could try out various jobs for one day or a couple, without having to commit to them long-term.

Art gallery job

One day the fellow, noting that Reece had told him he was an artist, told Reece about a job in Livingston—a small community art gallery needed a director. It was the Danforth Gallery, now the Danforth Museum of Art.

“He said, ‘You want to run an art gallery? You know anything about that?” Reece recalled. “I said, ‘Oh, yeah, I know all about that.’

Spoiler alert: Reece did not “know all about that.”

But on his first day of work, a famous—now deceased—Livingston artist was hanging a new show of his work.

“There’s Russell Chatham in there and there’s Jeff Bridges sitting at my desk,” Reece said. “And then there’s all these photographers around and writers. It turns out ‘People’ magazine was doing a story on the show and Russell and the fact there were so many movie stars in town, and I just started helping Russell hang the show.”

And wouldn’t you know it, when the magazine came out, there was a photograph of Reece, front and center.

“And it just so happened my friends and my grandmother had a subscription to ‘People’ magazine, and I started getting messages like, ‘We just saw you in People magazine’!”

The magazine story restored Reece to his family’s good graces.

“And so it was doubly wonderful that I was in ‘People’ magazine,” Reece said. “Not that it made any difference in the world, except to my grandparents and parents and friends it legitimized my choosing art— which was irrelevant—but it did.”

And the rest is, as they say, history.

You can often find Reece in downtown Livingston at Parks Reece Gallery, 119 S. Main St., www.parksreece.com.

You can see more about the online Yellowstone Summit, taking place online Feb. 20-23, at www.yellowstonesummit.com.

Contact Liz Kearney at ekearney406@gmail.com.