Yellowstone Art Museum: Jail Cells to Gallery Walls

The Yellowstone Art Museum occupies one of the more unusual buildings in the American West: the former Yellowstone County Jail, a sandstone structure whose first cell block went up in eighteen eighty-four as the very first act of the newly organized county government. For decades it held horse thieves, rustlers, and the ordinary desperados of a frontier boomtown. In nineteen sixty-four a group of stubborn local artists and volunteers persuaded the county to hand them the keys.

Volunteers converted the old cell blocks into gallery space. The museum staked out an identity focused on contemporary art from the northern Rockies, a regional vision that drew national attention. Today the Yellowstone Art Museum holds a significant permanent collection of Montana and Western art and is the largest contemporary art museum in Montana.