Meet the Board
Mary Tidlow - President
Mary Tidlow is a former architect and currently an artist, mother and devoted kayaker. Her federal career focused on green architecture and energy reduction in a truely aesthetically pleasing manner. With a formal background in art history and anthropology as well, she and her family have traveled the world appreciating architecture, paintings, sculpture, music and dance. She currently paints acrylics for family and friends but may one day do more. Her dedication to the arts and community involvement has been a lifelong motivation and she brings that interest to the Park County Council for the Arts (PCCArts).
Steve Harvey - Vice President
Steve brings a breadth of business and community service experience to the Council tapping into his desire to make positive change for the residents and visitors of Park County. Founding and co-chairing the Forget Me Knot Fest, music and arts festival in Colter Pass, Cooke City, Silver Gate, brought together his leadership skills with his passion for art for flood relief after the 2022 Yellowstone floods. Between his variety of personal and other community service projects, he can be found using his decades in technology leadership helping businesses, teaching, and enjoying all that the surrounding mountains and streams in southwest Montana offer as inspiration.
Robin Hoggan - Secretary
Robin Hoggan Ebinger, Secretary, Park County Council for the Arts was born in Hollywood, California and after graduating high school, spent a couple of years living and working on an island off the coast. Finally buckling down she talked herself into the accounting departments of various government subcontract research firms and independent movie companies. But one look at Livingston in the 1990s made her realize it was time to leave home. During her time here she has made a habit of volunteering - helping create the original Livingston/Park County Library website; and being a founding member of the Livingston Center for Art and Culture, the Montana Film Office (in Livingston, MT), and the Sixth Judicial District CASA program. Robin helped create displays for the Livingston Depot Foundation, advertising for the Livingston Gallery Association, and she curated the original artwork for Livingston’s 25-room critical care hospital. Robin says, “I am not an artist, but I believe in the energy of art and an artist’s ability to transform our community.”
Traci Isaly - Treasurer
Traci Jo Isaly is a multidisciplinary artist based in Park County, Montana. Isaly is known for her sculptural figures made from native grasses, which she has been creating for over two decades. These figures are archetypal in form, explore ritual, memory, and our relationship to land and lineage.
Her practice also includes leatherwork, fiber arts, and reclaimed textiles, with a focus on handmade leather bags and accessories produced under her studio label Traci Jo Designs. Every piece is built by hand using traditional techniques and meticulously sourced materials, combining form, function, and storytelling.
Laura Bray
Laura grew up in Livingston and moved away for college and graduate school in biology, chemistry, and immunology. She started doing art in a variety of media seeking to balance life with her intense science pursuits and began selling her willow baskets and carved wooden boxes in a Bozeman gallery. She took a sabbatical from her science life to temporarily pursue art and worked in a frame shop to learn how to frame her own pieces. Laura moved home to Livingston and opened a gallery and frame shop in 1998, with the notion that in five years she would return to immunology. It is 27 years later, and she is still happily framing, sharing local artists work in her gallery, and making silver and raw stone jewelry. Over the years Laura has lived in Seattle, Alabama, and New Zealand, but most of her time has been spent in Montana. She has been on many boards, everything from Big Brothers and Big Sisters to state and national framing leadership roles, to the Livingston Gallery Association, and she is currently active in a number of other organizations. In her free time, Laura enjoys life as a single parent, getting out in the amazing wild places in the area, gardening in the months without much snow, and volunteering.
Dalton C. Brink
Dalton C. Brink is an artist, writer, filmmaker and musician based in Livingston, Montana. He is the founder of The Cottonwood Club, plays with the band The Beagles, and has published four novels alongside several stage plays. His work spans many mediums and projects that strive to strengthen community, especially among fellow artists.
Barbara Green
Dr. Barbara Green is a practicing clinical and community psychologist with many years of medical and general non-profit board experience. She has also held multiple mental health leadership roles in the Boston area. She is a board member of the Park County Community Foundation, where she has served as the liaison to help launch the Park County Council for the Arts, a transformational art initiative in Park County funded by the Jaket Foundation.
Green has deep, enduring roots in Paradise Valley. She was one of the former owners of the Yellowstone Valley Lodge, where she hosted plein air painters along the banks of the Yellowstone. She has always believed that art plays a critical role not just as an expression of beauty, but also of humanity and is a vital part of a vibrant community.
Green studied art history at Penn State University and spent time in Italy immersed in Renaissance art. Her passion for photography began when she was gifted her first Kodak Brownie camera as a child. She can be frequently spotted in the Valley capturing the otherworldly views.
Melissa Ragain
Dr. Melissa Ragain is an Full Professor at Montana State University, where she teaches courses on modern and contemporary art history, specializing in environmental aesthetics and the intellectual history of art. She is the author of Domesticating the Invisible: Form and Environmental Anxiety in Postwar America (University of California Press 2021), and the editor of Jack Burnham’s, Dissolve into Comprehension: Writings and Interviews, 1964-2004, (MIT Press 2015). Her writing has appeared in Art Journal, Art Journal Open, Hyperallergic, X-tra Contemporary Art Quarterly, ARTLIES, Criticism, and American Art.
She was a 2010-11 Core Critical Studies Fellow at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, a 2016-17 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University, and a recipient of a 2016 Art Writers Grant from the Warhol Foundation/ Creative Capital. Based in Livingston, Montana, her new research considers the importance of environmental emplacement to artmaking in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains.
In addition to her work as a scholar, she curates independent projects and has been a consulting curator for Tinworks Art in Bozeman, Montana, since 2020. She has curated projects with artists such as A.K. Burns, Gregory Crewdson, Kota Ezawa, Avram Finkelstein, Karolina Halatek, Raven Halfmoon, Tracy Linder, Suzanne Kite, Tucker Nichols, Macon Reed, Wendy Red Star, Layli Long Soldier, Laurel Sparks, and others.
Karen Reinhart
Originally from central Montana, Karen began landscape painting, and playing the piano and other musical instruments at an early age. She was drawn to willow basketweaving in college and after moving to Livingston in 1982, showed her work at the Danforth Gallery and the Wade Gallery, as well as regional galleries. Karen taught hundreds of people how to weave using natural materials gathered locally.
As an outgrowth of her 15-year career as a park ranger interpreter in Yellowstone National Park, she published two books, Old Faithful Inn: Crown Jewel of National Park Lodges and Yellowstone’s Rebirth by Fire: Rising from the Ashes of the 1988 Wildfires. From 2007-2012 she worked as curator at the Jackson Hole Museum and from 2012-2025 at the Yellowstone Gateway Museum in Livingston. Karen enjoyed working with local artists and curating art exhibits at both museums.
Pamela Kendall Schiffer
Acclaimed artist, and native Californian, Pamela Kendall Schiffer has made Livingston and Paradise Valley her home for the past 10 years. For over forty years her work has been exhibited in Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, and Montana. In addition to other awards and grants, Schiffer received an artist-in-residency at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming in 2008. In 2009, she collaborated on a series of original lithographs with master printer Geoffrey Harvey of Sunlight Graphics and was drawn to the creative environment she found in Livingston. Schiffer’s paintings are simplified, quiet portrayals of the play of light upon the land and reflect a “sense of things beautiful and profound, joyful and optimistic, quiet, still, and timeless.” The spring of creativity that surrounds Pamela includes her three daughters—a jeweler, a musician and a poet!
Nikki Todd
Nikki Todd is a gallerist, curator, and business leader with over 25 years of experience in the art world. As the owner of Visions West Contemporary, she has successfully built a unique and thriving niche market focused on contemporary naturalism, bringing the natural world to collectors through art. She has served on various boards, including the Yellowstone Art Museum for 7 years and she has co-chaired the MCA Denver’s Gala, Luminocity, helping to raise funds for the museum.
With locations in Montana and Denver, Colorado, Nikki's expertise lies in her keen ability to identify emerging talent and build long-lasting, successful careers for artists. Her curatorial vision is driven by a passion for artists who use nature and animals to explore complex, contemporary themes. This approach has positioned her gallery as a leader in the field, attracting a loyal clientele and earning her a reputation for artistic integrity, providing an interesting and fresh platform for art in the Rocky Mountain region.
Beyond the gallery, Nikki's work is an extension of her personal passion for the wild places of the world, nature, and animals. She is a dedicated advocate for the environment, and her gallery's philanthropic program actively supports causes that protect the natural world.