Recent Acquisition Highlights: Spring Summer 2026

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

David Goldes is Professor Emeritus at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Originally trained in the natural sciences, he earned undergraduate degrees in Chemistry and Biology, a Master’s degree in Molecular Genetics from Harvard University as well as a Master of Fine Arts in Photography. Throughout his art career his interest in materials and process has been paramount; often these elements shape the direction and final result of his artwork. “One of the great things about art-making,” he states, “is that there’s a component of it that has its own mind. It wants to go where it wants to go.” In Earth Memory he uses a spatula to apply molding paste to which he adds graphite and black gesso to create an evocative and heavily textured image of a powerful eruption. The dark and somewhat bleak surface appears to simultaneously absorb and reflect light—as if the scene is both apocalyptic yet also hopeful.

Brazilian artist Maria Nepomuceno was born in Rio de Janeiro. Originally trained as a painter and later in theater design, her multi-media sculptural works embody a dynamic theatrical quality. Her organic forms are made with traditional Brazilian craft techniques as well as her own methods of weaving and braiding incorporating varied materials from beads, straw, fiberglass, and entire ceramic vessels. The title Organela refers to a biological cell that has a distinct function, yet it is linked to other cells much like distinct organs are part of a body. Like a living organism, the work appears to writhe with energy as if it were alive. Nepomuceno once described in an interview her desire to “create a place where people can be suspended in time, in an environment where they can breathe and lose the notion of where they are, or what they’re doing or what the piece is for. I want to create an atmosphere that absorbs you, a place that’s about affect, ancestral connections and the future, about time, living and feeling alive, vital energy.”

The North Dakota Museum of Art and photographer Michael Berman have a shared history that dates back to 2009 when an exhibition titled The History of the Future, traveled to the Museum. Organized by the Lannan Foundation, the exhibition explored the dynamics of the US-Mexican border and featured photographs by both Berman and Mexican artist Julián Cardona; the catalogue was accompanied with an essay by Charles Bowden. Berman’s Open Door, El Nido, Chihuahua and X, Y, & Z, Camino del Diablo, Arizona, 2007 were two of the images from this exhibition. When the Lannan Foundation closed its doors in 2022, they gifted several works to the Museum, including these two photographs. The Lannan Foundation also provided generous support for the establishment of the Laurel Reuter Directors Fund.

Michael Berman was born in New York but moved west to study biology at Colorado College; he subsequently turned to photography and earned a Master of Fine Art at Arizona State University. Currently a resident of New Mexico, he is fascinated by the notion of place and how human interactions with it have shaped its history and are actively shaping its future. In particular, his black and white photographs explore “the political and social dialogue of the West” serving as a “catalyst to renew and heighten our perception of the land.” Moreover, he argues that art has an innate power to provide insight to things that we do not yet understand. “Its symbolic structure,” he argues, “allows us to approach complex ideas that would be lost under the weight of analytical language. Art can serve as a kind of incubator for nascent truths as they evolve a coherent meaning. Art can also elicit and galvanize the support of a larger community for complex ideas.”

Artist, musician, curator, and former gallery director Glen Hanson has worn many hats over the course of his career. After forty years in the art world, he turned to beading on brain-tanned deer hide and embarked on a nomadic life traveling in his camper across the country from rural South Dakota to artist-centered Marfa, Texas. In 2014 the artist had a solo exhibition at the North Dakota Museum of Art that featured his beaded minimalist forms. His works are typically small in scale yet filled with thousands of beads affixed to the surface using a Lakota technique of beadwork known as “Lazy Stitch.” The artist describes this process as laying down beads “in rows of seven” noting that it “is a very limited geometric form of language. There is only one diagonal that forms a solid line. Other than that, you have a 90-degree angle and that’s about it. Though it is a limited language, that is what interests me about this medium. It is basic, like the twelve-bar form in music which, though likewise limited, gave birth to blues, country and rock and roll. It is seemingly inexhaustible whether used by Muddy Waters, Hank Williams, Ornette Coleman or Philip Glass. The challenge is what you can do with so little.” The work Red/Dark Red Cross was recently gifted to the Museum from the Lannan Foundation.

The North Dakota Museum of Art is fortunate to have three works by Judith Shea in the permanent collection. The artist was included in NDMOA’s founding director Laurel Reuter’s important 1997 publication Whole Cloth, co-authored with Mildred Constantine. This study, which celebrated the contributions of the textile arts to contemporary art, described Shea as a sculptor who trained in fashion design adding that her “interest in the history of clothing has led her to a preoccupation with the structure of garments. Working in a variety of media—painted canvas, felt, cast iron, and bronze—she visualizes clothing as pure geometric shapes. Cones, darts, and cylinders, the basic vocabulary of women’s clothing construction, become the elements of her sculpture.” Tank is indeed a study of streamlined elegance. Made of a double layer of sheer cotton organdy fabric, the form captures the essential shape and scale of a swimsuit tank. The artist currently lives and works in New York City.