As a Walt Disney Imagineer for 25-years, Gilleon worked at the side of Disney art legend Herb Ryman and dozens of world class artists, architects, and set designers inventing the concepts that became EPCOT and Disneyland Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Shanghai theme parks.
On January 18, 2024, The Scottsdale Museum of The West opens its 70-painting exhibit, The Tom Gilleon Retrospective. Raised by his grandmother who was 100% Cherokee in a home with no electricity, the show begins in the 1940s with Tom at 5-years old drawing with a stick in the sand, to illustrating for NASA’s Apollo moon missions, to designing theme park concepts around the world for Walt Disney
Imagineering—to painting on his Montana ranch today. The exhibit will feature paintings on loan from Disney and other private collectors and debut Spirit Catcher, his 22-minute digital painting on three 66” x 38” digital monitors.
Gilleon’s works are held in the permanent collections of the Whitney Western Art Museum, the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, the C.M. Russell Museum,, the Scottsdale Museum of The West, the Booth Museum of Western Art, the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, NASA, the United States Air Force, The Walt Disney Company, Universal Studios, and Warner Bros. Studios.
Recognized as “Linking the great American artists of the 19th century with today’s Contemporary Western Art movement”, Gilleon was inducted as a founding member of the C.M. Russell Museum Skull Society of Artists in 2015.
Invited by the Lunar Art Museum (LUMA) to participate in the first art exhibit on the Moon, 12-digital images of Tom Gilleon oil paintings are being stored on a data server for transport on an unmanned SPACEX Artemis rocket and delivered on the surface of the Moon in Q4 2023. Experienced by museum visitors at its Moon Campus in virtual reality, LUMA is the anchor art museum in a cultural arts center that specializes in curating space art exhibitions. Celebrating Earth’s emerging spacefaring civilization, Gilleon is a founding member of LUMA’s “First Artists”. This is LUMA’s second space art mission after creating the first NFT in space on board the International Space Station in 2021
Gilleon oil paintings are currently exhibiting at Montana Trails Gallery in Bozeman, MT; Sorrel Sky Gallery in Durango, CO and Santa Fe, NM; Sanders Gallery in Tucson, AZ; and the Gilleon Fine Art Gallery in Great Falls, MT. Gilleon’s canvas prints are currently for sale at Legends of The West Gallery in Santa Fe, NM. The Tom Gilleon Collection of wall coverings, fabrics, tile mosaics, and decor designs are represented exclusively by select interior design firms.
His 72 x 60 inches oil painting, Mourning Star, sold for $350,000 at the C.M. Russell Museum Auction in 2021, setting a new record for a living artist at the auction. His 50 x 80 inches oil painting Dirge With Black Feet sold for $375,000 at The Autry Museum’s 25th Annual Masters of the American West in 2022.
Gilleon’s first hardback book is being designed by award-winning graphic artist and former Creative Director of Twitter’s Global Brand, Derrit DeRouen. Edited by Norman Kolpas, the author of more than forty nonfiction books—this 200-page hardback book will be filled with 100-full color paintings and essays chronicling Tom’s art career. A PBS documentary, The Art of Tom Gilleon, is being produced for national
broadcast in 2025.
Exclusively represented by KingArts, Tom Gilleon oil paintings and digital paintings are also exhibited for sale at https://www.tomgilleon.art and by private appointment at the Gilleon Fine Art Gallery in Great Falls, MT.
To view The Tom Gilleon Limited Edition Print Collection, visit https://collections.kingarts.co/collections/tom-gilleon-prints
