Yellowstone Art Museum

The Yellowstone Art Museum, known locally as the YAM, is the main art museum in Billings and describes itself as Montana's contemporary art museum. It opened in October 1964 as the Yellowstone Art Center inside the former Yellowstone County Jail, a red-brick building put up in 1884 as the first act of the new county government and used as a jail until 1961. Some of that past is still visible: original jail bars survive in one gallery, and a carved "Yellowstone County Jail" sign remains.

The collection, now more than 8,500 works of historic and contemporary regional art and archival items, focuses on artists who lived or worked in Montana and the northern Rockies. Its Montana Collection includes ceramists and sculptors such as Rudy Autio and Richard Notkin and the modernist painter Isabelle Johnson. The museum also holds the largest gathering of work by Will James, the cowboy writer and illustrator, and the Poindexter Collection of New York Abstract Expressionism, with works by Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning among others. The main galleries host changing exhibitions, so what is on the walls varies through the year.

A block away at 505 North 26th Street, the Visible Vault, opened in 2010, is a publicly accessible art storage building: you look into the storage areas to see works not on display and how the collection is cared for. It also has an artist-in-residence studio.

The museum was renamed and reopened in 1998 after a two-year renovation and expansion, and it runs an annual art auction that it started in 1969 and Summerfair, begun in 1979 as the region's first outdoor arts and crafts fair. In 2009 it received 50 works of minimalist and conceptual art from the collection of Herbert and Dorothy Vogel.

Admission is free for Yellowstone County residents, through an Art Bridges Foundation access programme, and $8 for other adults, $6 for seniors, and free for anyone 18 and under or with a student ID. The museum opens Wednesday to Saturday, with late hours to 8 pm on Thursdays and First Fridays, and is closed Sunday to Tuesday, so plan a Billings museum day for the second half of the week. Free parking is on the east side of the building.