Brad Kahlhamer

Best known as a painter of western landscapes, Brad Kahlhamer's work fuses the exuberance of expressionistic painting with the visionary traditions of Native American art. At the Neiman Center he produced Skull Project, a series of six etchings depicting portraits of humans and animals that suggest aspects of Native American history and traditions but reflect the present time. In one image, a bikini-clad female wearing a tophat wields a big gun while in others images of a bison, owl and wild boar - indigenous species from the western plains - fill the sheet.  

Central to Kahlhamer's work is his compelling biography. Born in 1956 in Tucson, Arizona to Native American parents and adopted by a middle-class German-American family, Kahlhamer grew up without knowledge of his tribal affiliation. His work explores his own displaced Native American identity as well as the position of Native Americans in mainstream American culture. He earned a BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh in 1982 and has received grants from the Marie Walsh Sharpe and Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundations. He has had solo exhibitions at the Massachusetts College of Art, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and the Madison Art Center. He lives and works in New York.

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