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Ongoing Events

SASS has two major ongoing community arts events -- The Stevensville Scarecrow Festival and the SASS Artists Showcase.

The Scarecrow Festival is a public art event where individuals/families/teams/schools/business, etc create scarecrow theme sculptures for display and judging.

The SASS Artists Showcase opens on First Friday in May to display the work of artists in the Bitterroot Valley.

Upcoming Events

 

Past Events

The first Stevensville Scarecrow Festival
was held on
First Friday in October

 

Click here to see
the scarecrows

Christmas Art Show

Fourteen artists participated in our "Show Your Finest" group show at the Stevensville Hotel on December 2, 2005. including five new members. Those participating were: Dorsie Jones, Pete MacLachlan, Robbie Springs, Helen Strange, Toddy Perryman, Sue Lyons, Kiana Fecteau, Caren Goodrich, Laurie Anderson, Katy Majors, Kate Davis, Celia Grohmann, Alison Mim Mack and Jean Sample.

There is also a display of drawings from Mrs. Pateman's 2/3 Combination class at Stevenville Elementary. The students drew their interpretations of the recently acquired "Two Left Feet Dancing Free" sculpture by Jay Laber.

The Stevensville Hotel is a wonderful venue for showing art and the show looked great thanks to the efforts of Robbie Springs and Gene Mim Mack, hotel owners.

 

Mailbox Contest

S.A.S.S. was founded with the First Annual Stevensville Rural Mailbox Art Contest in May, 2001. This contest was always a lot of fun. We would give the rural mailbox holders about a month to paint, sculpt, paper mache, mosaic, feather, and fur their mailboxes, then send out a panel of judges to check them all out.

The contest was aided greatly by the Stevensville Post Office, who publicized the contest for us and volunteered to have the rural postal carriers identify boxes to include in the contest. We took their lists and drove around to the contestants homes, usually a two-day, all-day event, to judge the boxes on use of color, aesthetics, originality, and other factors. The box that received the most points won, and we also awarded second, third and honorable mention prizes.

The first year of the contest we were accompanied by a reporter and photographer from the Missoulian newspaper, and we landed on the front page two days later! The judges recall pulling up to various mailboxes around the Stevensville area and laughing at the delightful variety of decorations the public came up with.

This event was what put S.A.S.S. on the map, but after four years of running the contest we decided to give the mailboxes a break and move on to birdhouses. Both are types of art that are easy for the public to be involved in creating, which is one of the goals of S.A.S.S. Our first birdhouse contest took place in 2005, coinciding with annual Migration Mania birding festival.



S.A.S.S. is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization. Tax-deductible donations accepted at:

S.A.S.S.     P.O. Box 808     Stevensville, MT, 59870       Email Us