The Missoula Community Foundation is delighted to announce that The Clay Studio of Missoula, Missoula’s Annual Festival of the Dead and Missoula Interfaith Collaborative were awarded LoLA (Legacy of Living Art) grants to support their programming in 2025.

LoLA support will allow The Clay Studio of Missoula to expand its outreach program, which provides free after-school arts programming for kids in need at CS Porter, Franklin, and Lowell Schools. The Clay Studio of Missoula Outreach Program (CSoM Outreach) currently partners with Missoula Parks and Recreation, Watson Children’s Shelter, and Soft Landing to give children creative opportunities to learn about clay without socioeconomic barriers. With LoLA funding, The Clay Studio of Missoula CSoM Outreach will serve a wider constituency through new collaborations with the YWCA, Missoula Senior Center and the Missoula Food Bank and Community Center, so more people can experience the healing creativity of clay.

Missoula’s Annual Festival of the Dead has brought our community together for 32 years, providing a meaningful space for remembrance, healing and connection through art, music, and shared experience. The festival will use LoLA funding to compensate Missoula artists for their time and support the numerous workshops, lectures and events that are held in Missoula leading up to the beloved, all-inclusive procession down Higgins Avenue. According to Festival Co-Director, Tarn Ream, the festival “is somber for some and a jubilation of life for others. It is a collective honoring of each person’s pathway through the eddies and waves created in the wake of death … of remembering those who have gone before us.”

Missoula Interfaith Collaborative will use LoLA funding to support a new art cart program. Many of their clients use expressive arts and sensory based experiences to work through trauma – and a mobile art cart will be a valuable new tool in both group and individual settings. As they move forward with making art integration a larger part of their program, the art cart will be a centerpiece of activities and will frame engagement with staff and participants.

LoLA grants are awarded yearly to artists and organizations that seek to engage creativity to nurture and support healing. This grant making honors the mission of Living Art Montana, a nonprofit organization envisioned and created in 1993 by Beth Ferris, Dorrit Karasek, Linda Swab and Youpa Stein. Living Art offered free art workshops for twenty-seven years to people in Western Montana who had cancer, an acute or chronic disease, were suffering the consequences of treatment, or had a significant loss in their lives. Living Art shifted their resources exclusively to grant making in 2020, and now lives on as the LoLA Fund held at the Missoula Community Foundation.

The LoLA Fund has awarded $51,000 in grants since 2020 – encouraging organizations and individual artists to bring their unique talents and visions for healing through the arts to Missoula in new ways.