Mana Lesman’s passion for art goes back almost as far as she can remember.
“My parents just educated me in cultural things all my life since the time I was a little kid,” she says.
Watch Mana Lesman talk her passion below:
It’s a passion that still hasn’t faded since she first took art classes as a kid in the Billings Recreation and Park program, where she now teaches.
“Art itself is a message—an endless message,” she says
Mana is a prolific painter. One of her first murals—of fossil hunters and dinosaurs—that she painted the year she graduated from Billings Senior High School in 1960 can still be found on the third floor of the school.
This past summer, at the age of 83, she painted an 8-by-32 foot mural of a blacksmith shop on a garage. She finished in just 86 days.
While many of her paintings are of pretty scenery, others go much deeper than meets the eye.
“And so, I decided that my paintings are going to be messages that I think people need to think about—not necessarily that I agree or don’t agree with but what people need to think about,” she says.
Since moving back home to Billings almost 40 years ago, she’s also helped lead a senior women’s dance group called the Golden Dancers.
“They are quite a number. They are incredible. And they have a bunch of shows lined up,” she says.
“Choreography is as much fun as performing so I don’t perform but I love to put together dance and teach it to my group or whoever I’m working with.”
It’s all art—and art is life for Mana Lesman.
“They are messages just like every other piece of art is. Music, theater, and poetry, it’s all messages from people who feel they have something to say. And I suppose in that way I do to,” she says.
