Recent Acquisition Highlights: Summer Fall 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.

Artists Featured:

Martine Gutierrez
Matthew Kirk
Terry Evans
Walton Ford
La Monte Westmoreland
David Macdonald

About the Artists:

Martine Gutierrez was born in Berkeley, California and is currently based in Brooklyn, New York. While primarily known as a photographer, the artist is also recognized for her work in music, performance, and video. Throughout Gutierrez’s creative output, she has challenged cultural standards regarding beauty and exposes biases embedded in our ideas around gender, nationality, and race. Growing up, Gutierrez was a keen observer of advertising and fashion and became fluent in the cultural codes embedded in these worlds. As a transgender Latinx woman with indigenous roots (her father is Guatemalan with Mayan lineage), she understood that, in her words: “No one was going to put me on the cover of a Paris fashion magazine, so I thought, I’m gonna make my own.” This resolve helped propel her 124-page magazine titled Indigenous Woman where Gutierrez assumed multiple roles in its production from model/muse, photographer, designer, editor, to writer. By overseeing all aspects of its production including advertisements, fashion spreads, and editorial content, she maintains ultimate control. “To control our own image, we need to be our own photographers, distributors, CEOs … all of it!” The Museum has recently been promised two photographs by Gutierrez, both of which are from the Indigenous Woman project.  Masking, Red Spath Mask, p. 49 is part of a series of masks interspersed between high-fashion spreads of her fictional magazine. In this image, Gutierrez, whose face has been covered in white rice paste, strategically arranges exotic flora and fruit on her face simultaneously obscuring yet emphasizing her facial features. The act of “masking” is also a nod to beauty rituals. “True beauty” she notes, “is not something we conform to but [rather] a practice of health and self-care that celebrates our complete uniqueness and individuality.”

Matthew Kirk is an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation and was raised in Wisconsin after being born in Arizona. He is currently based in Queens, New York. Kirk is largely a self-taught artist, but as he explained in an interview, he learned a tremendous amount about artmaking “from the other side of the curtain” while working as an art handler for well over a decade. In addition to gaining insight from artists’ studios as well as from packing, transporting, and installing art works, he came into contact with a vast range of materials including those not typically associated with fine art. In his own mixed media paintings and assemblages, he often creates personal narratives that combine Navajo motifs with physical remnants and references from urban settings. The Museum has recently acquired three of the artist’s works. Among them is his abstract painting Line Leader from 2023. This work shows the artist’s inventive adaptation of materials including repurposed sheetrock which serves as this painting’s support upon which he has placed a range of abstract patterns and symbolic fragments arranged in rhythmic pattern. Kirk explains that his paintings “are extensions of my brain, physical existence, and my everyday life. Through my use of readily available materials, vague and familiar marks, and unique presentation, I have a desire to connect with people as a distinct individual. I want them to come away with an idea of who I am and how I relate to the work and the world. Just as family, work, current events, and city life are reflected in the work, my Indian heritage plays an important, but nuanced role.”

Photographer Terry Evans has maintained a strong relationship with the Museum since her 2007 exhibition From Prairie to Field: Photographs. A few years later, Evans completed an ambitious project, in collaboration with award-winning journalist and filmmaker Elizabeth Farnsworth, titled Fractured. North Dakota’s Oil Boom. Evans bequeathed the forty-four photographs from this project to the Museum. Upon the passing of the Museum’s founding director, Laurel Reuter, Evans donated Ring-necked Pheasants, 1930, 1927, 1921 in honor of Reuter. The photograph was one of the images from the 2007 exhibition and shows three pheasant specimens from the collection of the Field Museum in Chicago. Using a 4×5 camera and studio lights, she focused on historical specimens from the prairie. In this photograph, each of the birds is tagged and labeled by hand, a detail that reflects Evans’ desire to pay “homage” to both “plants and creatures collected and to the collectors themselves.” As she explains, “In most of these images, the hand of the collector is very much present, from the flowing script on an herbarium sheet to the delicate wrapping of a bird’s nest. The loss of these living things—the fact that they had to be killed to be collected—is tempered by a quiet tenderness; the evident care that went into their collection, preparation, and cataloging.”

According to the artist, Walton Ford has been drawing animals since he was five or six years old. His family home was stocked with all manner of natural history books including the famed illustrated volumes of birds by John James Audubon. While at the Rhode Island School of Art and Design, Ford trained as a filmmaker but was never fully able to master the technical complexities of the medium. What drew him to filmmaking was the narrative element. As he turned to other media such as watercolor and printmaking, he pursued his interest in animals and placed them in narrative frameworks often with a dark or unexpected violence in order to reflect on contemporary global issues reshaping the social and political order. In Visitation, passenger pigeons appear to binge on a field filled with fruit and nuts calling to mind a written description by Audubon: “Whilst feeding, their avidity is at times so great that in attempting to swallow a large acorn or nut, they are seen gasping for a long while as if in the agonies of suffocation.” The work can be interpreted as a critique of the extractive practices of European settlers to the Americas which ultimately contributed to the extinction of this bird species. The large-scale print demonstrates Ford’s formidable mastery of etching and aquatint as the highly detailed image is beautifully rendered. Moreover, Ford consciously included details to make it resemble a vintage print such as the illusion of foxing (brown spots) along the edge of the paper.

La Monte Westmoreland was born in Racine, Wisconsin but spent most of his life in Los Angeles. After serving in the Vietnam War, he attended California State University, Los Angeles on the GI Bill earning a BA, MA, and MFA. Originally trained as a painter, he later pivoted to printmaking and expanded to collage and assemblage. Target Series is part of a larger body of work that brings together mixed media including found objects. Here he has taken a framed circular table top or tray, a replica of a renaissance triptych (a three-panel altarpiece by Botticelli), and images gleaned from popular magazines and advertisements as well as postcards featuring canonical figures from western art history including Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and a work from the Getty Museum by the baroque painter Hendrick ter Brugghen. Westmoreland strategically juxtaposes imagery to provide contrast and commentary about his experiences as an African American in the United States. The Birth of Venus, for example, is paired with a group of Africans photographed nude with tribal markings on their body. Additionally, the classical figure from the Getty painting holds a bottle of Aunt Jemima syrup while the Quaker Oats man appears twice. Likewise, the Virgin and child figures are joined by a black and white portrait of a Black man whose face is partially obscured by an African Mask. Mass cultural images thereby comingle with images from fine art prompting questions about hierarchies in art and culture as well as an artist’s place within this hierarchy. In a 2022 interview, Westmoreland described that the series title “target” represented his way of inviting critics “to take their best shot” because the target was giving them “something to shoot at.” At the center of the circular frame, the essential shape of a target, is a photograph of a bearded male figure, possibly a self-portrait, with eyes closed. To the left of the figure is a scrap of paper with Japanese script and colophons, a biographical detail that often appears in his mix media works referring to his reverence for Japanese print culture that he picked up while studying with Japanese faculty in college. What may at first appear as a random selection of references is indeed semi-autobiographical. “I use order to give the viewer a way of organizing the information in my works, and at the same time, connecting this information to personal experiences and cultural perspectives.”

Ceramicist David R. MacDonald was born in Hackensack, New Jersey. For many years he taught at the Department of Art and Design at Syracuse University. As a student, he was inspired by notable African-American ceramic artists including Joseph Gilliard and especially Robert Stull. His early work was deeply informed by the Civil Rights Movement and his work incorporated social and political events from that era. Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, however, he began exploring his African heritage as a way to celebrate African cultural achievements. “I started looking at African pottery and African sculpture and African textiles, and how freely they decorated surfaces. I became interested less in decorating the surfaces of my pots with images of anger and frustration, and more interested in images of pride and my African heritage.” In addition to the technical excellence of his large-scale ceramic works, MacDonald is especially admired for his intricate surface patterns like we see in Nyama Form with Fibers. The word “Nyama” means “vital life energy” in Swahili and this large vessel represents a container for the soul which the artist has adorned with colorful fibers and raffia. Recently exhibited in New York, Nyama Form with Fibers was described as a totem dedicated to his family which in West African culture “represents royal lineages and symbolizes the passage into the world of the ancestors. MacDonald views works such as this one as memorials to the ancestry of enslaved African people.”