Collection: Manette Rene Bradford: Great Flood

June 5 - July 25, 2026

Kirks’ Grocery is proud to present a solo exhibition by Manette Rene Bradford, Great Flood. Using painting, sculpture, and intaglio prints, Manette Rene Bradford invents a fictional ecological history for Butte, Montana. Great Flood combines historic and ecological realities with myths and allegorical figures. The viewer is invited to reimagine the environmental devastation from the copper mining and smelting industry on the land and waters surrounding Butte and the Clark Fork river system. 

Imported to Butte along with the colonialist European settler mindset, these mythic elements are the inevitable shadow of Butte’s copper extraction industry. Monstrous and feminine, they are calamitous outcomes. This primary manifestation and embodiment of opposition to the civilizing needs of the industry give voice to the non-human world and the agency of its inhabitants.

Manette Rene Bradford earned a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She was awarded the Montana Art Gallery Director's Association Exhibition Sponsorship in 2022 for Unsettled Lands, which toured Montana museums from 2024-2026, including the Montana Museum of Art and Culture, the Paris Gibson Square Museum of Art, and the C.M. Russell Museum. Additionally, she has exhibited in solo and group shows in San Francisco, Chicago, and across Montana. Manette was interviewed as the subject of an episode of Resounds: Arts and Culture on the High Plains, which aired on May 22, 2023, and of the Art House podcast, The Makers, Episode 3, which aired on May 15, 2025. She was the Artist in Residence at the Yellowstone Art Museum in 2025. Manette currently lives and works in Billings, Montana.