For years, Park County's art crowd kept having the same argument. Somebody would suggest capping off the summer tourist season with one big community event. Somebody else would push for a proper live auction, the kind that puts a town on a map the way Great Falls' March in Montana or the Big Sky Art Auction already have. Nobody picked a side long enough to make either happen.
Last September, three directors who run three separate institutions got tired of the argument and did both at once. Storrs Bishop at the Danforth Museum of Art, Laura McCarthy-Coda at the Livingston Depot Center, and Kathy Bekedam at the Livingston Center for Art and Culture co-chaired the first ArtWeek Park County: a countywide week of open studios and workshops that closed with a ticketed live auction. That was the debut. This week, September 19 through 27, is the second one, and the second year of anything new in a small town is the one that actually decides whether it sticks around.
What's Already Hanging in the Danforth
If you drive past the Danforth Museum of Art this week, the live auction pieces are already on the walls. They've been up since September 11, and they stay through September 25, the day before the auction itself. The silent auction pieces are a few blocks away at the Livingston Center for Art and Culture, on view the same stretch.
That means the work is sitting in two buildings right now, mostly unseen by anyone who hasn't specifically gone looking. Last year's debut lineup ran close to thirty artists, spanning names locals already know from downtown galleries, like Derek DeYoung of DeYoung Gallery, alongside artists still building a following in the region. If this year follows the same shape, walking through the Danforth before the crowd shows up on auction night is the closest thing Livingston has to seeing next Saturday's results before they're announced.
The Nine Days, Mapped
ArtWeek isn't one event. It's a run of smaller ones stacked across nine days, and most residents only catch one or two unless they plan around it.
| Date | What's Happening | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Sept. 19–27 | ArtWeek Park County, full run | Countywide |
| Sept. 11–25 | Live auction pieces on display | Danforth Museum of Art |
| Sept. 24 | Community Painting with Hannah Uhde | Livingston Center for Art and Culture |
| Sept. 25 | Art Walk, downtown galleries | Main Street and side galleries |
| Sept. 26 | Big Bend Fine Art Auction | Livingston Depot Center |
That Friday-into-Saturday stretch, September 25 and 26, is the one worth circling. The Art Walk gets you into galleries you might otherwise pass without stopping. The auction the next night is where the week's work gets a price attached to it in front of a room.
Worth knowing if you're mapping out the whole nine days: ArtWeek's opening weekend overlaps with the Livingston Bluegrass Festival, running September 18 and 19 at the Shane Lalani Center for the Arts a few blocks south of the tracks. Locals splitting the week between a gallery opening and a flatpicking contest won't have to choose. They land on different weekends of the same stretch.
The Auction Itself
The Big Bend Fine Art Auction is the part of ArtWeek with real institutional weight behind it. Tickets have run $250, and the evening typically opens with cocktails and a catered dinner from Food For Thought before the live bidding starts, run by regional auctioneers Black and Associates. Proceeds get split between the artists and the ArtWeek fund itself, the same arrangement most fine art galleries use, so a sale on Saturday night does double duty: it pays an artist and it seeds next year's event.
That funding structure matters more than it looks. The whole operation runs through the Park County Fund for the Arts, a program under the Park County Community Foundation, and its startup money came from a single gift by the JAKET Foundation. That's not a town passing a hat. That's a foundation deciding a countywide arts week was worth funding before anyone knew if it would work.
In the debut year, open studios gave people a look at process, not just finished work. Lyn StClair of Soul Dog Gallery, for instance, spent the week working in four different mediums so visitors could watch pieces come together rather than just see them framed. Whether that same format repeats exactly this year is worth checking against the current schedule at artweekpc.com, but the spirit of the week, work you can watch happen in real time, has been the point since the beginning.
Why the Second Year Matters More Than the First
A debut year gets forgiven almost anything. People show up curious, the organizers are testing an idea in public, and even a modest turnout counts as proof of concept. The second year doesn't get that grace. By year two, the foundation money is already spent once, the artists already know what a sale at this auction actually paid last time, and the town has had twelve months to decide whether ArtWeek was a nice one-off or something worth clearing a weekend for every September.
Bishop said the goal from the start was building toward the kind of regional reputation Great Falls and Cody, Wyoming have built around their own auctions. That's not a small ambition for a county that had never run a live art auction before last year. Whether this week moves Livingston closer to that or further from it depends less on the weather or the crowd size at the Art Walk and more on something simpler: do the same artists come back, and does the auction sell through at a rate that makes the Park County Community Foundation comfortable funding a third year.
Nobody outside the three co-chairs' offices knows that number yet. It gets decided sometime after the gavel comes down Saturday night. But the fact that the debate over which kind of event to run is finally over, replaced by a real track record instead of a hypothetical, is itself the story worth paying attention to this week. Livingston spent years choosing between two ideas. Now it's found out what happens when you stop choosing and run both.
If you're downtown this week, walk past the Danforth before Friday. See what's hanging there before the room fills up. It's the same work that goes up for bid a few nights later, just without the cocktails and the crowd.
For residents who've lived through the town's slower Main Street stretches, this is the kind of week that reminds you why Livingston's small enough that a countywide art auction is still news everyone hears about, and small enough that showing up matters.
If you're weighing a move to a town where a week like this is normal rather than rare, Montana Property Brokers can walk you through what living here actually looks like, month by month, before you buy.
