When Leslie Van Stavern Millar was growing up, her family moved around with her father’s job as an oil company executive, including time living in Iran and Libya. After Moammar Gadhafi rose to power in the latter in 1969, they returned to the U.S. While leaving, Millar, then a college student, had packed some of her artworks. Security personnel at the airport smashed them. 

Brunswick Gallery curator Leslie Van Stavern Millar, pictured at Brunswick Gallery in downtown Missoula on Monday, Sept. 16. Millar has put together a show of 28 artists titled “We the People,” exploring issues like democracy and free speech through mixed media.

“Unconsciously, that has always sort of been in the background with me — like you could lose this, this could happen,” she said.

While an extreme outlier, the memory lingers with her as an example of the importance of our rights under a democracy and freedom of expression, the subject of a group art exhibition she’s curated along with some accompanying talks.

“We the People” includes 28 artists, mostly from Montana, including nationally exhibiting creators like Monte Dolack, Beth Lo and more. Millar owns the Brunswick Building, a historic hotel on Railroad Street that she’s rented out as artist studios since she bought it in the 1990s. (The previous owners had rented its spaces to artists as well, and she carried on the tradition.) The building also has a gallery that she takes advantage of to display works annually by the Pattee Canyon Ladies Salon, a long-running figure drawing group of which she is a member.

Kathleen Herlihy-Paoli’s “Pop Goes the Weasel!” on display at Brunswick Gallery in downtown Missoula on Monday, Sept. 16.

In 2017, Millar organized a group exhibition on this same theme — issues like democracy and freedom of expression. She decided to revisit the idea this year, several months before the presidential election. She invited an initial pool that gradually grew to almost 30 with, fittingly, a large amount of freedom.

“I didn't even really spell it out. It was more like, ‘I trust you.’ I have a size limitation. I don't care if it's old. I don't care if it's new. I don't care if it's for sale. I don't care if it's in a collection. I just need a piece. I'm more interested in the content. But other than the title and that broad concept of freedom of expression, I did not give them guidelines,” she said.

Free prints by Kristi Hagar at Brunswick Gallery in downtown Missoula on Monday, Sept. 16.

She did ask for everyone to write an artist’s statement, a sometimes unwelcome task, but she received statements for each and every one.

The show ties in to a broader push on Millar’s part to engage arts with current events. She arranged a panel earlier in September at the Missoula Art Museum with Mayor Andrea Davis and Mae Nan Ellingson, who helped draft Montana’s Constitution in 1972. (Missoula Community Access Television recorded the talk, and will screen it on Oct. 15 at 7 p.m. and Oct. 18 at 8:30 p.m.)

The Brunswick show will also play into a talk she’s giving in Munich, Germany, at a symposium called “The arts and socio-political change: A powerful interplay at the heart of democracy,” which is sponsored by her alma mater, the Mount Holyoke College European Alumna Association.

Millar’s contact list includes many well-established artists.

“Red White and Blue Fortune Cookies” by Beth Lo on display at Brunswick Gallery in downtown Missoula on Monday, Sept. 16.

Lo, a retired art professor from the University of Montana, is known around the U.S. in her field by other artists and collectors. She contributed “Red, White and Blue Fortune Cookies,” a clay sculpture of a Chinese take-out box filled with colorful fortune cookies, each printed with a statement. She writes that it was made to “express the values of my immigrant parents who came to this country with hopes for freedom, opportunity and tolerance for their family.” Some of the “fortunes” that were invisible include “Women need control over their own bodies,” “Lower Housing Costs,” and, simply, “Do Something!”

Megan Marlatt lives in Virginia with a local connection through family. She painted a serene-looking garden occupied by drones and other airborne tools of war, rendered in a loose and realistic style that makes its imagery more unsettling. (It dates back to 2014.)

“Democracy — The Right, the Promise, and the Lie …”  by Shari Montana on display at Brunswick Gallery in downtown Missoula on Monday, Sept. 16.

Jonathan Marquis contributed a color pencil work, “Public Lands Drawing: Hart Lake,” that brings the environment into the conversation. He’s currently exhibiting “Something to Hold: The Glacier Drawing Project,” at the Missoula Art Museum, which includes drawings from visits to all 59 named glaciers in the state, an undertaking that took 11 years to complete. The MAM’s senior curator, Brandon Reintjes, also has a piece relating to the land: a stark black rendering of a bison enclosure.

Millar included a two-part piece from her now decade-long “Burnt Offerings” series. A female figure is seen reading a book, near a pyre that has a stack of books. (She clarified that it’s burning a patriarchal past rather than literature.) She sculpted a small “bonfire” from sticks dipped in white that rests on a small shelf at the base.

Among the pieces that are less direct is Stephanie Frostad’s graphite and oil painting, “Against the Current III.” A woman is waist-deep in water, carefully looking downward as she proceeds ahead, her steps as deliberate as Frostad’s, a classically trained painter. In her statement, she writes that “while the water’s force may represent a host of challenges, it also symbolizes the tide of misogyny washing through our culture and politics today. Around the world, women continue to struggle for bodily autonomy, access to health care, education and economic opportunities.”

Leslie Van Stavern Millar’s “Transformation” on display at Brunswick Gallery in downtown Missoula on Monday, Sept. 16.

Some have a playful air. Joe Batt sculpted three figures collectively called “Stand,” after the album by Sly and the Family Stone.

“It can be easy to forget that we are more than consumers of news, technology, cars, and houses. Sometimes we have to take a risk and assert ourselves,” he wrote.

The Brunswick Gallery is located at 223 W. Railroad St.