Exhibition Changes Quarterly
Recent Acquisition Highlights features new acquisitions to provide visitors with a glimpse into the breadth and depth of the Museum’s collection. Exhibitions rotate quarterly.
About the Permanent Collection: The North Dakota Museum of Art’s collection began in the 1980s by collecting individual paintings, works on paper, photographs, and sculpture, often drawn from its own exhibitions organized in-house. After nearly fifty years, the collection has grown to over 3,000 works of art. Through donors, strong relationships with artists, and groundbreaking commissioned work the collection continues to grow and thrive.
Areas of Focus:
• Contemporary regional, national, and international art starting with the early 1970s with the founding of the Museum and onwards.
• The visual history of the region created by local, national, and international artists, including Native American and indigenous artists from North America.
• The Museum collects historical art if appropriate and it supports the exhibition mandate, including twentieth century and Native American.
Exhibitions curated by the Museum bring important work into the collection, sometimes purchased from the show, through the gallery or artist, and sometimes gifts from artists or collectors. The Museum also commissions artwork that become valuable additions to the collection. Numerous works have entered the collection from private donors helping expand its rich holdings, or with assistance from the Laurel Reuter Directors Fund or the Helgi Ederstrom Fund within the Museum Foundation. As the State Art Museum, it is our mission that this valuable collection be celebrated and shared with all. In addition to frequent collection exhibitions, and the Recent Acquisition Highlights gallery, the Museum has placed works of art in public institutions such as the Altru Hospital and the Grand Forks International Airport, while seeking new and existing organizations to collaborate with.
The Laurel Reuter Directors Fund honors the life and legacy of Founding Director Laurel Reuter, who after 50 years retired in 2022. Following her retirement this fund was established to help purchase new contemporary artworks for the collection, and is available to support other museum components such as artist publications, general operating, and commissions.
About the Artists
Artist and educator Alicia Henry’s multi-layered textile works often centered on the human form, highlighting both vulnerability and resilience. In a 2022 interview, Henry described herself as always being a figurative artist. When she was young, she recalls playing with paper dolls, but since they did not resemble her, she would freely “transform” them by adding and taking away elements, cutting and pasting forms. In the Untitled series, her mask-like faces are muted yet command a presence through their nuanced materiality by mixing fabrics, paper, thread, yarn, dyes and other materials. Fellow artist Maria Magdalena Compos-Pons, whose work is also in the NDMOA permanent collection, was a supporter of Henry’s work, stating that: “The delicacy of that—the kind of soft, quiet, methodical, silent aspect of it—not only does that reflect her personality so well, but also talks to the history of making things in silence, which was the way of survival of Black culture. Part of the hidden power of her work resides in that modesty of gesture that, by consistency and commitment, becomes heroic.”
Educated at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Yale University, Henry garnered numerous awards throughout her career, including the Guggenheim Foundation, Ford Foundation, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Her work draws from a wide array of sources, informed by her travels and life experiences. She spent two years in Ghana teaching art with the Peace Corps; returning to the US, she taught art on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. In 1997, she became professor at Fisk University in Nashville, one of the oldest HBCUs in the United States inspired by its rich history and its collection of art of the African diaspora. Henry remained on staff until her recent death in October of 2024 after a battle with cancer.
Renée Stout is a prolific multi-media artist based in Washington D.C. Raised in Pittsburgh, she received her BFA at Carnegie Mellon University. Her work draws inspiration from contemporary social and political events as well as African American and African diasporic histories that include folklore, music, Afrofuturism, and spiritual practices of Voodoo, Santeria, and other African belief systems. Originally trained as a photorealist painter she works in a wide array of media from illustration, collage, painting, sculpture and installation. Both Come Back Gil (Scott-Heron #3) and One Million Miles From The Ground reveal her dexterity with paint with her delicate renderings of ethereal cosmic landscapes. Significantly, both works are inspired by the music of influential African American figures. Gil Scott-Heron, who is referenced directly in Stout’s title, was a spoken-word poet and jazz musician who is often credited as a formative influence on hip hop and neo-soul. One Million Miles from The Ground, on the other hand, features an inscription on the back of the painting to jazz musician Dexter Wansel whose song inspired the painting’s title. Her inscription elaborates “Every time I hear the song it puts me in a State of Peace, Reverie and Longing. These Days It offers An Escape, Even If it’s just mentally and brief, from the now normalized crazy.” The small-scale painting captures an intimate view of the cosmos with textures and colors evoking a suspended view of space, simultaneously near and far away. Rather than any kind of literal transcription of Wansel’s song, Stout creates visual parallels to it’s sonic elements.
Multi-media textile artist Sharon Kerry-Harlan was born in Florida and moved to the Midwest to attend Marquette University in Wisconsin. She learned quilting techniques from her mother Lela McDowell. For many years while she worked as an Academic Coordinator at Marquette, she taught textiles part time at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee and took courses at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. Now retired, she is dedicated full-time to her artmaking. Her richly patterned and textured work often focuses on the human figure and draws from the “lens” of her own experience rooted in her ancestral heritage and “modern metropolitan life.” In a recent statement, she elaborates: “The density of contemporary city living provides inspiration for my work. My art, like a bustling city, merges vocal, electronic, mental, and spiritual chaos into a confluence of concentric hustles, jabbers of conversations. The mass of human faces in the crowded urban environment intrigues me—what they reveal to the world and what they disguise from the world. In my artwork, I use the human face and figure to make statements about the quick turnarounds that confront us both in life’s mundane and unexpected circumstances.” The Museum is fortunate to own three of Harlan’s works, including the nine Black-Eyed Peas which was inspired by a doll-like figure she encountered at the National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C. Each of these figures is distinctive; the rich patterning and texture are created with the layering of materials including dyed fabric quilted, stitched and embellished with found objects such as safety pins, beads, and snaps. Often dissatisfied with commercially available patterned fabrics, Harlan experimented with different dying techniques including rust-dyeing fabric, a technique that transfers the imprint of rusted metal onto fabric. The result are highly expressive figures that combine abstract and geometric elements inspired by West African masks, sculpture, fashion and other sources.
Hayv Kahraman was born in Bagdad to a Kurdish family and fled to Sweden during the Gulf War as a child. She later moved to California and is currently based in Los Angeles. She has exhibited her work in group and solo exhibitions both in the United States and abroad for over a decade. Most of her work has focused on delicate female figures with stylized eyes and hair painted with great precision upon refined surfaces such as linen or vellum, a nod to the Middle Eastern traditions of miniature painting, calligraphy, and tapestry works which are filtered and transformed by her experiences in the West as a refugee. In 3eoon, Berbeen, and Botnij, however, only the beguiling eyes remain and they are poised on plant stems, stalks, and leaves against a backdrop of abstracted swirls created with marbling, a technique the artist recently learned. Moreover, a heavily textured fibrous flax paper has replaced the smoother supports of her earlier works. In her recent solo exhibition Look Me in the Eyes we learn that these eye-centric works pose questions about the colonial gaze as well as institutional systems of surveillance and classification. In an interview, she shares that invasive scanning of fingerprints and of eyes is used to keep track of refugees in Europe. For this reason, many of the eyes she paints lack irises as a gesture of resistance.
Her turn to botanical forms is also informed by her refugee experience as well as a recent encounter of rare edition books by the famed botanist Karl Linneaus with elaborate marbled end papers. “I grew up learning about Linneaus in Sweden, where he is seen as a heroic national figure. […] What a lot of people don’t realize about Linneaus, however, is that the sexual system of plants that he created is hierarchically divided [by gender and race].“ Furthermore, she explains that “Linnaeus created an incredibly problematic system rampant with biological racism and sexism, which has informed modern society and culture.” In her three small yet heavily textured works, the eyes peer out from the foliage forms and meet the viewer’s gaze. Their placement is deliberate if fragile as the stems that bear them are fastened to the marbled patterned surface with illusionistic tape. The swirling forms of the marbling represents the one space of unregulated and free expression reinforced by its history as a global art form migrating between cultures adapting along the way. In her research Kahraman learned that marbling patterns were also used to prevent forgeries, explaining that it is “monoprint that cannot be forged. It asserts itself on whatever surface it’s on. It refuses erasure. That spoke to me so much that I started trying to figure out how to marble.”
Brooklyn-based artist JJ Peet received his MFA at Yale University and BFA at the University of Minnesota. Ceramic History Monster is a mixed-media work that was featured at David Peterson Gallery in Minneapolis in an exhibition titled Buoy. This figure served as a character among several cast members that included a Universe Inspector, Seer, Overseer, Shaman, Conjurer as well as an ominous sounding character called Direct Doom. These crew members are said to be traversing the cosmos on a ship to track, document, interpret, protect—or depending on the character—the mysteries of the Universe. Here the Ceramic History Monster is equipped with an extended ear, reaching far beyond the head as if radiating from an antenna. The artist explains that the monster is “listening to the future.” Above all, the figure alludes to “ceramics and the unwritten legend of how clay became a universal material around our planet. The Ceramic History Monster is a storyteller in object form. It thinks about the anthropology of our human culture. Its intention is to behold the risk taking and the mistake making, these things lead us to invention.”
Peet is, in fact, known for his experimental approach to ceramics, here he freely mixes different types of clay as well as bronze and has mounted it on a roughly hewn piece of ash that serves as a pedestal. A close examination of the monster’s head reveals the physical manipulations of the clay from the artist’s hand, a quality that exposes the process of form-giving rather than disguising them. In an interview, Peet shares how much he cherishes the malleability of the medium stating, “Ceramics, clay is a direct object making machine. It shows an imprint—a window into the maker of the Object. It’s a guttural touch response to the material; we need that in our fake screen society.” While the artist also produces functional objects such as cups, plates and trays, he also embraces the potentials of narrative and play. “There’s a functional part in what I do … But the other thing that I do, I love to throw function out of the window and use science-fiction or sort of your eyes in your brain to make a moment out of it.”
Alicia Henry, Untitled 036, 2018-2020. Acrylic dye, cotton, linen, thread, and paper.
Alicia Henry, Untitled 052, 2019-2020. Cotton, linen, acrylic, felt, thread, and paper.
Alicia Henry, Untitled 030, 2015. Acrylic dye, cotton, linen, thread, and paper.
Alicia Henry, Untitled 061, 2018-2020. Acrylic dye, cotton, linen, thread, and paper.
Renee Stout, Come Back Gil (Scott-Heron #3), 2021. Acrylic.
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Renee Stout, One Million Miles From The Ground, 2022. Acrylic.
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Sharon Kerry-Harlan, Black-Eyed Peas 46, 236, 200, 245, 243, 159, 145, 248, 247, 2024. Textile.
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Hayv Kahraman, 3eoon, 2024. Watercolor, gouache, flax fiber.
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Hayv Kahraman, Botnij, 2024. Watercolor, gouache, flax fiber.
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Hayv Kahraman, Berbeen, 2024. Watercolor, gouache, flax fiber.
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JJ Peet, Ceramic History Monster, 2023. Stoneware, porcelain, bronze, ash wood.
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