Until the last 100 years, women were not generally recognized in art history references. Before this, women were recognized for art forms such as china painting, quilting, and needlepoint. However, in this century women artists have taken their place of honor among their male counterparts. In 1981, the Montana Arts Council, the state agency responsible for fostering the arts in Montana, began a Governor's Arts Awards Program to recognize both outstanding artists and outstanding service to the arts. Dana Boussard won the Governor's Arts Award for Visual Arts in 1987. Dana Boussard has made art a major part of her life. She resides in Arlee, Montana where she is actively pursuing the artist's life. 

The Montana Chapter of the National Museum of Women in the Arts is pleased to sponsor this Suitcase Lesson. Part of the purpose of this organization is "to encourage the development and recognition of Montana women in the arts."  This Suitcase Lesson was created by students in the Art Methods class at University of Montana -- Western of the University of Montana. We hope that you enjoy using the lesson as an arts resource for your classroom. 

This art teaching resource is for the classroom teacher to have a visual art resource unit. The purpose for creating the unit is threefold: 

1 . To give students familiarity with a Montana artist 
2. To inspire students to make art and become artists 
3. To teach art methods 

This package contains the following materials: 
A biography sheet about Boussard 
Booklet: Dana Boussard: Transitions - Donated by Yellowstone Art Center Color transparency of Boussard's painting, "Big Sky Melody" 
Poetic description of Boussard's painting, "Big Sky Melody," written by Gordon O'Connell, Curator, Yellowstone Art Center, Billings, Montana 
Artist statement - Boussard Six articles about Boussard 
Art Lesson by Jim. R. Clark and Debbie Pratt - Art Methods students, Fall 1996 
Art Lesson by Steve Muhs - Art Methods students, Fall 1996 

USE OF THIS SUITCASE LESSON

It is suggested that you may wish to view the video first, as an introduction to the artist. Next, take a look at the reproductions of Boussard's art and read articles about her and the booklet about her art. These will give you a background on the art which Dana has done and is doing, and will help to introduce her as an artist and person to your students. 

The lesson titled "Form Lesson" by Steve Muhs offers some methods for introducing composition, space, shape, etc. Follow the instructions for that lesson, or adapt as you wish, as Steve says in the lesson introduction. After all, lessons are intended as "maps" or "patterns" which may be followed or deviated from. This is where your own creativity can come in.

Montana visual artist Dana Boussard creates expansive narrative murals of painted and stitched fabric. Horses. fire. drought, environmental. historical. and political references. and Native American cultural symbols are pieced together like chapters in some book of grand meanings. They play across the quilt like surface, beckoning the viewer into a world that is both very much in touch with the earth and at the same time beyond it. 

No miniature landscapes. these: the largest of Boussard's painterly visions stretches 60 feet across the Boise, Idaho city council chambers.  A work in the Anchorage-Alaska. International Airport consists of 14 panels each ten by six feet.  Boussard is one of a growing number of craft and visual artists who find exciting permanent exhibit opportunities in public and corporate places namely the walls of government buildings, hospitals, banks, hotels, law firms and numerous private businesses.  "At least half my work is corporate and public commissions" says Boussard who finds the space such jobs provide more appropriate for the large format work she enjoys. The rest of her work finds outlets through high-end galleries. 
Corporate opportunities, Boussard finds, are growing as much or more than gallery sales, but so is the competition for them. When she won her first commission in 1972, a sculptural hanging for a stairway at the University of Oregon, "there was nobody doing anything large" she recalls. Now, many more artists. especially those with the design and business skills to accommodate the more demanding commissioned art system, share Boussard's appreciation for the advantages of public work, exciting spaces, the challenge of collaboration abroad, new audiences and the security of the financial arrangement provided by custom work rather than by speculative work. 
"What I like about working for corporate settings is that they have wonderful spaces,"she notes it is important" she says "to see and understand the space before beginning the design."  Boussard also talks with a projects corporate relevance. 

Montana fiber artist Dana Boussard and assistant Karen Westwood check a fiber piece called "The Climb to the Big Sky" (6'4"x4'8'), destined for a home in corporate America.  Architects and designers about their expectations before pursuing her own vision for the work.  With almost two decade of commission experience behind her, Boussard has confidence in her own ideas, "They wouldn't ask me to do the design for them if my work didn't have a feeling that they like already," she says. Maintaining conviction and control of your work in the face of other creative forces is one of the challenges of corporate work. 
Boussard makes sure. however that her design is appropriate for the setting taking into consideration room size and materials, other design elements and the feeling of the space. Such constraints she believes can add to the artistic challenge or suggest a direction she may not have thought of.  Working in collaboration and being part of a project from the ground up can be stimulating,  Boussard says, comparing it to the solo and after-the-fact nature of speculative gallery work. 

The design samples Boussard develops in a project's initial stages draw on her painting background (including training at the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from the University of Montana). "I show potential clients very beautiful drawings, colorful and to scale." she says. That way they know what they 're going to get; there are no surprises."  Sometimes the design phase results in disappointment. A long process often involving slides, samples, support materials and presentations, some projects end up being cut,  rescheduled or given to another artist.  Boussard is philosophical about such turns of events conceding "it will happen occasionally, it's disappointing, but its part of doing business." 

Upon completion of the design that Boussard wants, she draws up a contract to receive a design fee which is subtracted from the cost of the final work if the protect is approved, and compensates her efforts to design it if it is not.  Production and payment schedules are part, also set up at this time with staff continued, on page 24. 

Velvet appliqué presents a tactile experience for the eyes, shapes hemmed and sewn on stand out unambiguously, almost like relief elements or parts of a collage.

BIG SKY MELODY is enveloping picture that you could almost crawl into, wrap it around yourself like a garment. 

Another form in the lower foreground, swallow like shapes aimed along a snaking path, a striped stick, a snake.  The border travels a circuit, is a circuit, arrows point around it running counter-clockwise 
flame/autumn leaf-each fills up with red-a directional spurt they are little flames, like depiction's of the pentecost, flames above the apostles' heads, a female form too, this earth, sexual-a body, a mantle, a form clothed with crops. 

SPACE?

SONG QUALITIES? See Chatwin's THE SONG LINES 

Cross-cultural aspects are very important quilt/pictograph/beadwork/toy image's refraining from descriptive specificity her abstractions free floating a web of associations: arrowhead/bird leaf/flame bird/seed. 

Dana grew up in Choteau, Montana, where her father was a dentist for 50 years. Her mother, an artist, encouraged Dana's artistic pursuits. Dana studied art at Saint Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana, and later transferred to the Art Institute of Chicago before completing her formal training at the University of Montana in Missoula, where she received a Masters of Fine Arts degree.  Just after graduation, she applied for a sculpture competition at the University of Oregon in Eugene, later she would look back and see that as the first of more than 50 successful public art projects. Among her many public commissions are a 60-foot-long work in the City Council Chambers in Boise, Idaho; a 50-foot-long piece in an Alaska school, and a series of fourteen 6 by12-foot pieces in the International Airport in Anchorage not to mention a work in the Montana State Justice Building. 

In 1974 while working as Artist-in-Residence with the Great Falls public schools, Dana bought a small piece of land just outside Arlee for a summer studio. After brief stints in New York and San Francisco, she returned to that land, where she and her husband Stan Reifel put in hours and hours of hard work to build a home that is an "art place" for them and their daughter, Ariana. It reflects their personalities, with lots of hand built areas. 

The cover of James Welch's book Fools Crow was designed by Dana Boussard, as are a series of stained glass windows at a church in Choteau. It was said of Dana in 1967, when she was honored at the Governor's Awards ceremony, "[Her] work has provided thousands of us with a way to see another side of ourselves, and her work will continue to delight, instruct and enlighten us well into the twenty-first century." 

Variation: : For example, a walk in the natural environment could offer shapes and images which could then be incorporated into Boussard-like arrangements with the addition of patterns and motifs. You might wish to ask your students to choose a theme or an idea which they could then illustrate with simple shapes and linear elements. A written assignment might evolve with the Clark/Pratt lesson, in which students could write about an environmental issue connected with nature, then collect images which reflect their issue, and create shapes to then incorporate into a composition. 

We hope that you enjoy using the resources provided in this suitcase lesson. Good luck and have fun! 
Art Methods students: 
Steve Muhs 
Debbie Pratt 
Jim Clark 
Sally Colburn EdD, Assistant Professor of Art/Education 

Yellow-wing blackbirds (?) males darting up from a coulee, a gap in the land, after females. Their wings the shapes of kernels of wheat or other grain, seed bearing, softly tinted, tie-dyed sky, amorphous/amorous clouds. The rhymes of a song suggested by the rhyming of forms. Identifiable elements reduced to a folk art minimum, schematic outlines of things that can be one thing and yet another, like the wings that can read as seeds, there are also stalks of wheat or grass peeking over the horizon that can be read as sun rays, or scattered leaf forms that also suggest flames, heat that ignites life. This rhyming of shapes is the lyric structure for Boussard's art, a directed pattern of associations akin to the experience she has looking at the land from her studio window, her awareness made up of experiences with nature, knowledge of geologic and evolutionary history, awareness of the changes different peoples have rendered on the land, whether living with it like the Indians or carving it up into tracts of private property, working it over, gardening it, domesticating it. Cattle succeed buffalo, summer fallow strip farms the open range. Her emblems define an inner narrative both relating to collective and personal history. 
The land itself is a quilt like patchwork of crops and summer fallow, fringed with a zig-zagging border suggestive of both the pointed forms of a star quilt or the fringe of a shawl or other garment. Solid forms and sinuous lines work through the composition, making it move, animating it. Bold graphics set off the more tentative, soft focus formations of field and cloud. Repetitions of form, ribbons and lines carry the eye across space, choreographing the movement of our eyes. Musical, dance, song like allusions capture the imagination in a welcoming-synethesia. 

Methods and Materials of Art 
University of Montana -- Western 
Jim R. Clark and Debbie Pratt 

These are "Suit Case" lesson plans for teachers who are teaching lessons which are influenced by Dana Boussard.  Dana likes to layer and use shapes and nature.  Those interested in Boussard's art as ideas for their art. These are some lessons that can be used for a lesson about Dana Boussard.

1. Drawing basic shapes of animals, trees, mountains, and nature.

1. Students can go on a walk into the forest and look for examples that they can draw in the field or in the classroom. The students create simplified outlines of the shapes of the things that they gathered, not worrying about detail. 

2. After drawings are complete, trace the images onto black construction paper with a pencil. 

3. Cut out the basic shapes, then glue the shapes onto a large piece of white paper. Allow the students to place their drawing were they want to on the piece of paper.

This lesson allows students to see the environment and nature as Ms. Boussard might have. The lesson also encourages students to see shapes in nature and understand how to draw them and make their own examples of nature images.

2. Making a large shape out of small shapes.

This project can teach students how to use little shapes and individual pieces of work to make a larger group work. The students can overlap and layer shapes as Ms. Boussard would in her type of work. 

1. Use the school setting as an art source. Cut out a 3ft. by 3ft. shape of the school that the students identify as their school, make sure to use a dark color of paper. 

2. Have the students depict items in the school such as people, computers, books, desks, pencils, or anything that has to do with the school. Have the students draw the items and color them if necessary. (see diagram) 

3. After the students have finished their drawing of the items in the school, cut the shapes out and paste them within the outline of the school. Do not let any of the drawings hag over the edge of the outline of the school. 

The drawings the students made will, then, fit together to create the shape of their school. This project may help the students to see the school as more of a whole. The students would then understand what is important to them in their school environment. 

What I depict are fractured moments of history and I try to express the conflicts as well as the blending between man and nature," says the Montana artist Dana Boussard, whose appliqued cotton velvet "tapestries" are currently on view at Modern Master Tapestries, 11 East 57th Street, through December 10. "I am anxious to say something about where I live and what I see there.  I want to show the communication and the passage of time.
Miss Boussard a former recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, is known for her Western and American Indian motifs, Teepees, buffaloes, canoes and geometric arrangements of her pieces. Employing these familiar images, worked in a contemporary vein, she creates textile quedctographs at the same time visually soothing and exciting. 

Miss Boussard works in cotton velvet, layer upon layer of the fabric applied to a base of canvas. She was trained as a painter and her palette abounds in earth tones: terra cotta, umber, sienna, hunter green. The cloth surfaces are accented with paint. Using airbrush, atomizer and flecking paint by hand she creates subtle color variations on the lush velvet. 

One of her themes is the conflict between a vanished, idyllic state of nature and today's rational, technological 
cal society. At the center of most pieta is a vision of calm, unspoiled nature, surrounded by geometric, an 
gular and irregular borders. The borders represent a modern consciousness that distances the viewer from the "dreams and wishes" (as Miss Boussard calls them) depicted in the center. Pieces such as "Seeing Comes Before Words,.. ..Long Sunday" and "Walking With Wishes ... Still as the Grass." exemplify these preoccupation's. 

"Birds Near an Unentered House," has fewer borders and more abstract shapes than most of Miss Boussard's works, yet the message is clear here, too.  Despite a tension in the rouges, man, nature and technology are united "Ide the Clouds" tempts the cloud forms enonto one of the closed in one t of the many borders. In pieces such as "No Bonnie Lass in This Camp" and "These 'Elephants Spoil the Teepee Party," Miss Boussard displays her sense of humor. The latter work is quite playful and features cavorting elephants dancing across the top of the canvas, apparently in harmony with their environment. 
Although Miss Boussard has under. taken many large-scale commission piece (one over 60 feet Wag), her most ambitious piece here is a nine. panel series of minilegends entitled "The Centuries Throw Back Their Past." It depicts man's movement through the centuries, each panel's lavish velvet textures and tones de. picting a moment in time that cap. tuna the feeling of an era. 

The gallery is open daily Tuesday through Saturday. 9:30 A.M. to 5:30 P.M. Prices for Miss Boussard's works range from $3.400 to $15.000. For further information, call 838-0412.
Your Money Saturday in business Day The Now York Times

My husband, Stan Retfel, our small daughter, Ariana, and I live on 60 acres in western Montana in a 1915 homesteader's cabin and barn that we reconstructed six years ago. In this space of changing seasons, acres of daisies, harvested hay and snow on the pines, I get my inspiration and put it into form and fabric. My images and symbols reflect this land and the Montana where I grew up. In so many ways I feel that the land feels now the way it has for centuries: still virgin. I turn often in my fabric wall hangings and murals to the relationship of the past, to the present and to our expectations of the future.
I have always been interested in producing large-scale work. Even when I did painting sat the University of Montana, Missoula, where I received my MFA in 1968-they were always a few inches taller than the studio door or wider than the station wagon tailgate. After I graduated, I continued to paint and make large color drawings. Since I wanted these drawings to be sculptural, not flat, I started making relief's. This transferred easily into the fabric medium, in which I have been working ever since. 
My first major commission, the result of a competition 10 years sip, was a 25-foot three-dimensional fabric hanging for Erb Memorial Union, University of Oregon, Eugene. Creating art for architecture poses challenges both in design and installation. The drawing, the design, is the most creative part, where all the major decisions are made. Translating from the drawing to the actual piece comes easily to me, I keep many bolts of fabric on hand mostly cotton velvets purchased directly from the mills. After drawing, I fill out a host of fabric in the color I have chosen as the ground, then "push" some colors around to get the basic combination I want. Because of the large scale, I work in sections which are later assembled to form the whole. Once colors are chosen, I cut out the images. Then I lay them on the background in the positions already determined by my scale drawing. When all the images have been laid out in a given section, I take them off and that air 
brush paint or hand dye them.
I do the design, cutting, layout, painting and dyeing myself; one or two assistants do the sewing and construction. When the appliqué is done, a canvas backing is attached to a mahogany stretcher bar and the work is stretched over that. The entire piece is framed. Stan, a consultant exhibition designer, works with me in framing and installation.  
My most recently installed commission for the new wing of the Anchorage International Airport Terminal contains symbolic depiction of Alaskan wildlife. The curvilinear frame construction of the panels was demanding to execute but aesthetically necessary because of the shape of the walls. 
I have been pleased with the willingness of state agencies and corporations to effect a marriage between art and atcbitectu re. I believe that art should be accessible, and I am gratified to think that my pieces momentarily touch the lives of a variety of people who might otherwise not see art. Such works forge a link between our everyday existence and the art wood. They tell us that our land, our buildings, our surroundings are our artworks. -DANA BOUSSARD

On the Land of Giving
1982. applique mural, velvet, painted, dyed, commissioned  through the Washington Art in State Buildings project for the Spokane School District. 

Dana Boussard has professionally collaborated, fabricated and installed over 35 commissioned works for corporate and state buildings including: fourteen 10' by 6' pieces for the Anchorage International Airport; The Denver National Bank; Beneficial Corporation, Delaware; Wells Fargo Bank, Los Angeles; SAFECO Insurance, Seattle, and the largest, a 10' x 60' wall, Boise, Idaho City Hall. Professional drawings included, completion of the painted fibber constructions takes from 3 months to a year with time proven durability. 
She has exhibited extensively, with works in private and museum collections. 
Please contact the artist for information about commissions and slides of available work. Prices: $3000, up. 
"We Met With Oh Such Separate Dreams", 53" X 116 
X Marks The Spot", 78" X  58"
"Between Places",  63" X 47"

The following exercises are meant to excite students about organizing a composition and introduce organizational concepts to them. These exercises cover only a handful of the possibilities that could be explored in this area. The idea is simply to create a pattern out of card stock or similar material and then create and explore the concepts of organizing a composition. The idea is fairly straightforward and should be simple enough to understand without much elaboration. 
The reason for using simple shapes and a pattern stem from the artwork of Dana Boussard. You will notice in her work the use of shapes repeated over and over. She employs in much of her work a decorative approach to design. The following exercises are meant to create a similar approach. 
The instructor of the following exercises is strongly encouraged to explore new avenues of thought and be as creative as possible, and shouldn't be afraid to deviate from the lessons. Use the lessons as a springboard for other ideas. Add ideas to the lessons. 
Other concepts that could be explored in the following manner but not covered include; 
harmony variety dominance proportion motif economy space overlapping and background treatment 

Negative/Positive Shape
The positive shape becomes the pattern for all of the following activities. Any shape can be used as long as it is proportional in size to the paper being used. Also take into account that the shape shouldn't be too complex, or too simple. The shape should be exciting enough to use over and over again on the different projects. After you have completed your drawing of the composition, color, texture and other decorative elements 
can be added to make things a little more exciting. Have fun. 

Symmetrical (Formal) Balance
Imagine a line down the middle of the page. Imagine one side reflecting the other side in a mirror like fashion. That's symmetrical balance. Have students use their pattern to create a composition balanced symmetrically. Added color, texture and values should be balanced symmetrically also. 

Asymmetrical Balance
Asymmetrical balance is felt "intuitively", like matching a shirt with a pair of pants. Have students create a composition with "felt" balance. Have them keep in mind that color, value and texture can affect their composition. This type of exercise will develop as it goes along. Balance will be created as the students add color, value and texture to their composition. 

Radial Symmetry
Everything radiates from a central point. Have students create a radically balanced composition and then experiment with color and the other elements. 

Repetition and Rhythm
Have students create a composition emphasizing repetition and rhythm. Use shapes to create repetition, then color, value and texture to create a sense of rhythm. Repetition is created by using the same element over and over, while rhythm does likewise in a measured manner similar to music.

Movement
Have students create a sense of movement in their comosition.  Add decorative elements.

Choteau native Dana Boussard, creator of huge plush pictographs in fabric, will receive the Governor's Award for the Arts, along with five other artists, in Helena this week from Gov. Ted Schwinden.
Ironically, Boussard achieved international recognition as an artist outside Montana (although that is changing, drastically), yet her universal vision stems, in part, from the Montana landscapeitself.
And in a way, Boussard belongs with as all western mythic tradition-the lone individualist. The Puritan ethic of hard work. 
"Keep being prolific and keep turning it out.. Some of it will rise to the top,'says Bouaard, 42, of her approach  to her work. "If you wait until it's perfect, you're grounding tit to die."
"In one way I'm a perfectionist, really pushing, pushing each one to be right," she said. "On the other hand. I'm not getting ulcers over it." 
Boussard credits her father, former Choteau dentist Charles Boussard, now deceased, and her mother, Dorothy, for her early interest in art.
"My parents were both very artistic. My father was real musical. My mother is an artist and writer. They were culturally oriented people. I think that made a huge difference." 
Boussard, who studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Chicago and St. Mary's College of Notre Dame, Ind., received bachelor and master of fine arts degree from the University of Montana. Her MFA degree in drawing,  painting and print-making was earned in 1968.
"Fabric was the thing that appealed to me. I've always wanted to do large works for large spaces. I've always liked working in a large format."  From 1973-75, Boussard worked as an Artist in Residence in Great Falls, which she said was a nice bridge in her career. After completing Artists in the Schools, Boussard moved to New York, got a loft and worked as an artist. She did a six-month stint as an Artist in the Schools in New York and had gallery shows in Seattle and San Francisco. 
In New York, she met future husband Stan Reifel, director of a Madison Avenue gallery where Boussard had shown work. 
"He was a gallery director, a fine craftsman and designer. He helped push me over the humps. We lived in Now York for a while and then we got married."  When her husband became a designer on a two-year project   for a fine arts museum in San Francisco, the couple moved there. Boussard said  her art suffered a dry spell in San Francisco. 
"That's when I started remembering back to the land. Sometimes you have to go away and be gone to appreciate what you have at home. You can take your life too much for granted."
The couple finally decided to move to Montana to 60 acres Boussard owned in the Jocko Valley, six miles south of Arlee. They built a home onto a 1915 one room log cabin, and a studio, the interior of which had to be rebuilt after it was gutted by fire last fall.  Reifel, a California native who had lived in New York seven years, likes Montana. But Boussard sometimes misses the cultural opportunities of cities.
"Stan doesn't feel that way so much.  I haven't lived long enough in big cities to be tired of them."
We need to travel, and we find it necessary. You don't expect the world to come knocking at the door."
Yet Boussard admits that looking out her window at a bunch of cows is important to her. "That relationship to the environment is important. By living on it, you see what the (Flathead) Reservation used to be once."' Boussard may be concerned with landscape, but she is also no consider herself a Western artist.
"It's hard to sort of label anything.  I would call myself a regional artist, an artist with universal ideas."
In the early 1970's, Boussard was a pioneer in fabric construction.  She has since covered all the bases with gallery, corporate and public art.

"Long Climb to the Big Sky" depicts the '85 drought. 

Her first big work, in 1972-3, was a 25 foot fabric hanging for the University of Oregon in Eugene. "I had never really done anything like that.
She became involved with "percentage for art" commissions for public buildings, including the commission for the Justice Building In Helena last year.
The Justice Building work, "Save A Piece of Sky," is a long horizontal piece divided by a section of sky in the middle.
"It's an environmental piece, about how we treat our environment. The center section exemplfies 'Keeping Montana,' " Boussard said. 
"I  hink it turned out very successfully. It's to Montana's credit that they have percentage for art." 
"I've done an awful lot of them. I did a huge piece, fourteen 6 foot by 10  foot panels for the Anchorage International Airport." The $46, 000 commission was hung in 1982. 
"Few people work on a such a large scale," she said. "Recently In the past four or five years, I've done some projects here I feel very good about. Corporate projects include the Sheraton and First Bank West in Missoula, St. Vincent Hospital in Billings and others. 
In "Skyline," (see cover) The 9-foot by 7-low-9-inch piece commissioned by St. Vincent Hospital, cotton velvet was was stretched on canvas, then textile paint applied. In some of her works, an appliquéing process is used. 
"Long Climb to the Big Sky," another 1986 piece (6- foot by 4-foot 8 inch), depicts hard times of drought in dun, rust and pale gold colors with a grayed sky. 
"'Long Climb to the Big Sky' is based on the drought that happened last year. You see the land becoming dry, the magpies eating grain. The ladder image is an image to try to see what's there and look positively." 
In Chateau last year, Boussard departed from fabric and applied unusual techniques to stained glass, creating a work hailed an "historic milepost" in stained glass. The 14 windows for St. Joseph Catholic Church, depicting the creation story, are a memorial for her father. Parishioners paid for their design and execution, in memory of their families.  Boussard also illustrated the new novel by Missoula author James Welch, "Fools Crow." 
At home and tut work on new projects, Boussard is in her studio from 9 to 5 daily, daughter Ariana, 5 and her husband nearby. Refifel helps with framing, packing, crating and installation of Boussard's work. 
Future projects include an exhibition at the Yellowstone Art Center in Billings next February and a commission 
mission for Carroll and Nancy O'Connor of California. Meanwhile, Boussard has pieces to do for other shows. 
"You have to pace yourself. Some weeks you're really enthusiastic. Other weeks, it's just not coming too well. Those weeks, t do a lot of paperwork."  "First and foremost, art is something I love and want to do. Second, it's a business." 
Karrie Westwood has sewn for Boussard the past six years. She's wonderful, she's a weaver and artist in her own right. I can sit down and design the piece, and I can go on to another." 
The whole artistic process extends to lifestyle, Boussard explains. "You have to live your aesthetics and have a positive outlook to helping the world. You can make some point and get people to think about their world." 
Boussard said she did not know she was nominated for the Governor's Award. "I got the letter informing me of the award. I was tickled. I was so thrilled. It's the highest honor the state can give." 
Asked if she can now rest on her laurels. Boussard reflects:  "I think I can say I'm pleased with the way things have gone. But I'm never satisfied.  There's lots and lots more to do and say. I need to delve further into myself, to make my work more productive."
It's never all the way.  If it's OK, you might as well give up."