MIAD professor Lee digs dinosaurs to paint human condition

For 10 years, MIAD First Year Experience Assistant Professor and painter Matthew Lee has visited and worked in a 66-million-year-old dinosaur bonebed near Ekalaka, Mont. On three occasions, he’s taken MIAD students with him as part of MIAD’s Study Abroad Programs, to dig and create art there.

Lee’s latest endeavor was made possible through the Ruth Arts + MIAD Grant program, allowing him to produce a series of drawings and oil paintings about Montana, install a solo show, conduct workshops on local flora, fauna and landscapes with the local community and attend a scientific conference. Lee was one of 10 MIAD faculty and staff to receive the grant for the 2023-24 academic year.

“Ekalaka is one of the most remote rural communities in the lower 48 states,” says Lee in a recent presentation to the MIAD community about his yearlong and ongoing project. “About 300 people…. But they have an excellent dinosaur museum, with one of the best collections in North America.”

“I wanted to connect with the local community through the Ruth Arts Grants a little more.… You don’t necessarily have tons of interaction with them because you’re out in the field camping and excavating dinosaurs the whole time.”

Lee says that he “was trying to distill in paintings my feelings about this place. It’s kind of in a conflicted space. It’s a 66-million-year-old prehistoric bonebed; it’s also a post genocidal landscape from the 1800s. And then it’s this site of contemporary rural life.”

“In terms of materials,” says Lee, “I wanted … a studio that was capable of producing oil paintings using only technology from before the death of Rembrandt…. I was stretching Belgian linen and cooking up rabbit glue in my kitchen and learning how to make paint.”

Lee’s paintings are especially influenced by the life and work of Carel Fabritius. “Of all Rembrandt’s disciples he’s the one that turned off the light the most,” says Lee. “This is also another sort of harkening back to this idea of extinction and things being really temporal.”

“Fabritius is the greatest painter that never lived,” explains Lee. “When he was 31, he was struck by lightning and vaporized. In 1654, this lightning bolt hit [Delft’s gunpowder magazine reserve], one of the biggest man-made explosions of the pre-atomic age. When the dust settled, one fourth of the city was gone….”

“My work isn’t paleo work,” says Lee. “It’s an investigation into us, through the dinosaur thing.”

Lee noted that he donated much of his works to “the Carver County Museum’s annual charity auction to help fund their new dinosaur hall.… They also donated 50% of the sales from the show to the Kenosha Public Museum, which cuts, studies and exhibits bones from the digs.”

In addition to his work at MIAD, Lee has worked in science support for the United States Antarctic Program. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States and his paintings and arts writing have been published nationally in “New American Paintings” and “Manifest.”

Learn more about MIAD’s First-Year Experience and Study Abroad Programs.