The Edith Freeman collection at the Yellowstone Art Museum consist of over sixty woodblock prints, the majority of which were given by the Edith Freeman Estate in 1993 with the cooperation of her brother and estate executor, Floyd Maxwell.

Edith Freeman was born on May 1, 1913 near Broadview, Montana and died December 22, 1992 in Billings, Montana. She received a Bachelor of Arts from Eastern Montana College in 1954 which followed with her Masters of Science in 1961. Over the years she taught at many elementary schools in eastern Montana. retiring in 1971 after teaching for over thirty years.

Edith Freeman was originally a painter who experimented with woodcut techniques in the 1960’s at a class taught by Isabelle Johnson. The rest as they say is history. In the last three decades of Edith’s life she became prolific in woodblock printing using the view outside her window and the Eastern Montana landscape as her favorite subject.

Few artists have been as deeply attuned as Edith Freeman to the austere beauty of Eastern Montana. Mastering reduction block woodcut printing, a challenging technique by which multiple, colored prints are achieved using a single block of wood, she based her strong compositions on study of the prairie and rimrocks, the river valleys and wildflower meadows, her backyard garden and household plants.

The Edith Freeman collection at the Yellowstone Art Museum consists of over sixty woodblock prints the majority of which were given by the Edith Freeman Estate in 1993 with the cooperation of her brother and estate executor, Floyd Maxwell.