Holter Museum of Art

An abandoned playground merry-go-round listing into the grass.

A grain elevator slowly falling apart.

A graciously graying old house whose wrap-around porch overlooks the prairie.

These were all once-loved places that have a story to tell.

And they’re among “the portraits” featured in a new exhibit, “Bypassed,” by Helena artist Helen L. Rietz, now showing in the Holter Museum of Art’s Bair Gallery.

Rietz was inspired to create the exhibit after a chance encounter with an abandoned roadside market, she wrote in her artist’s statement. “So much of the history of the West is about being bypassed.”

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