Tinworks Art in Montana Inaugurates Newly Acquired Theater with Matthew Barney Film

Tinworks Art, an enterprise that garnered attention last year with an ambitious resurrection of Agnes Denes’s storied Wheatfiled Land art work in Bozeman, Montana, is making its next move with a newly acquired historic theater to be inaugurated with screenings of Matthew Barney’s 2018 film Redoubt. The program begins Friday at the Rialto theater on Bozeman’s picturesque Main Street and continues, with two showings a day Thursdays through Sundays, through February 1.

Built in 1908 as a post office and transformed into a theater in 1924, the Rialto was donated to Tinworks and joins the organization’s two-acre complex of former warehouse space and agricultural buildings nearby. Those have been the site of exhibitions featuring such artists as Stephen Shore, Lucy Raven, Layli Long Soldier, Theaster Gates, David Drake, James Castle, and others.

“Bringing Tinworks into the heart of downtown strengthens our connection with the community and ensures that ground-breaking contemporary art is part of Bozeman’s daily life,” said Tinworks director Jenny Moore, who joined the nonprofit in 2023 after nine years at the helm of the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. The choice of Matthew Barney’s Redoubt to inaugurate Tinworks at Rialto resonates in the bastion of the American West that Bozeman has become in recent years.

Filmed in the Sawtooth Mountains in Idaho, the quiet, contemplative movie about what ARTnews described as “animals, alchemy, and the astronomical alignment of earthly bodies and heavenly stars” engages a subject that remains a source of controversy in the region: the reintroduction of wolves into areas including nearby Yellowstone National Park. The Tinworks screenings mark the 30th anniversary of the undertaking in 1995. Matthew Barney, Redoubt, 2018. Photo: Hugo Glendinning/©Matthew Barney/Courtesy the artist; Gladstone, New York, Brussels, and Seoul; and Sadie Coles HQ, London Moore said she is excited to expand Tinworks programming at the Rialto, which served as the site last year for an “In Conversation” talks series about food and farming that the enterprise organized around Denes’s Wheatfield—An Inspiration.

The seed is in the ground. She said she imagines music and performances of different kinds, as well as screenings to engage the active film industry in and around Bozeman. One program in the works is “Film School,” a series of screenings to be accompanied by lectures from filmmakers and technicians involved in different aspects of cinema, organized by local musician and filmmaker Ted Robinson.

The theater will also be shared with other nonprofits and creative organizations, said Moore—who added, “We re really excited to think about the Rialto as a place of experimentation.”