Untitled, monoprint, 2006

Armstrong’s solo exhibition, Engaged Abstraction, highlights John Armstrong’s strengths as an artist and printmaker. The exhibition features twenty-one abstract monoprints that illustrate, as fellow artist Jim Todd notes, the artist’s “purity of visual form, color and design unhampered by wordly content.”

An accompanying exhibition, Prints from the Armstrong–Prior Studio, features forty-five prints by internationally acclaimed artists—including Rudy Autio, Akio Takamori, and Patti Warashina—who have relied on Armstrong’s expertise to create prints at the Armstrong–Prior Print Studio in Phoenix, Arizona. The exhibitions were organized and curated by Stephen Glueckert, Curator of Art, Missoula Art Museum.

Born in 1943 and raised in Laurel, Montana, John transformed his high school interest in stagecraft into an MFA in painting and printmaking at the University of Montana-Missoula. After several curatorial and public education positions in the West and South West –Yellowstone Art Center in Billings, Arizona Commission of the Arts, Scottsdale Center for the Arts — John returned to the studio. In 1980, in partnership with his future wife, Joan Prior, he began Armstrong-Prior, Inc., a vertically integrated business that functions as a fine art publishing company and offers art consulting services for investment collections.