About this Exhibition:

Lee Steen: A Montana Original is a permanent installation in the Outsider Gallery of The Square. After their arrival in 1976, the sculptures were stored in the museum’s attic for years until conservation, cataloging, and exhibition design began in 1999 with support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Montana Cultural Trust, and the E.L. Wiegand Foundation. Along with John Armstrong’s foundational donation of more than 150 Tree People, Lee Steen’s former neighbors, Virginia and Dean Howell, contributed an additional 10 sculptures. In September 2001, after decades of anticipation, the museum proudly opened Lee Steen: A Montana Original to the public, bringing Steen’s imaginative world to life for generations to come.

Born in 1887, Steen transformed cottonwood branches into unforgettable characters using coffee cans, bottle caps, flowerpots, and scavenged odds and ends. Though he refused to exhibit them during his lifetime, his Tree People—now preserved in a museum rather than the Montana landscape that inspired them—continue to spark awe and imagination more than 50 years after his passing.

About the Artist:

Lee Steen (1887-1972) and his twin brother Dee (1887-1966) were born in 1887 in Horse Cave, Kentucky. Their father moved to Montana in 1894, and the twins followed in 1898. After spending his childhood in Roundup, Lee Steen traveled to Washington State as a young adult and may have worked on the railroads there. After two marriages and subsequent divorces in Washington and in Shelby, Montana, Lee moved back to Roundup, living in a small home next door to his twin brother, Dee. The objects that surrounded the Steen homestead, which was composed of two small “twin” houses, fell into two categories: mechanical constructions (created by Dee Steen) and wooden sculptures.

Dubbed the Steen “Tree People”, Lee’s sculptures range in size from six inches to 12 feet high. Fanciful, engaging figures, the sculptures created a seemingly endless tableau of frozen theater in the brothers’ yard. Lee Steen did not sculpt the figures in the traditional sense but chose instead to modify cottonwood branches he felt were suggestive of human anatomy, using whatever leftover bits and pieces he had available.

Lee and Dee lived together in Roundup until Dee passed away in 1966. Lee continued to live in the home until advanced age and illness required his family to move him into a Missoula nursing home in 1972. He died in a nursing home in 1975. Thanks to the efforts of a small group of dedicated individuals, Lee Steen’s creations have been preserved for future generations at Paris Gibson Square Museum of Art.