Brad Kahlkamer Blacktail

An artist who has been described as ”as punk as he is prairie,” Brad Kahlhamer’s watercolor and etchings meet to create a dystopian commentary that is as gripping as it is earnest.

Brad Kahlhamer draws on his tripartite identity in his art, navigating his Native American heritage, adoptive German-American family, and adult life in New York City’s Lower East Side, where he has lived since 1990. In reference to his Native American history, Kahlhamer works with Hopi katsina dolls, but he deviates from their prescribed histories and uses, reimagining the dolls through a neo-expressionist lens and embellishing them with detritus collected from his neighborhood. Kahlhamer similarly combines established artistic traditions with his own history in his painting practice. The artist references hallmarks of 20th-century abstract painting, notably German expressionism and American neo-expressionism, while incorporating a highly personal iconography and absorbing the artistic milieu of downtown Manhattan.

Kahlhamer’s work has been exhibited in the United States and internationally, including at the Minnesota Museum of American Art, St. Paul, Minnesota; the Plains Art Museum, Fargo, North Dakota; and at LOOM Indigenous Art Gallery, Gallup, New Mexico. Kahlhamer’s solo exhibition Bowery Nation opened at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Connecticut in 2012, and was presented at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Missouri in 2013. His work was included in PROSPECT.4: The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp, New Orleans, and has appeared in group exhibitions at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Museé du Quai Branly, Paris, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2022 two solo exhibitions opened in Arizona, Swap Meet at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and 11:59 to Tucson at the Tucson Museum of Art. He is represented by Garth Greenan Gallery where he debuted Fort Gotham USA.

Kahlhamer is the recipient of a Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant (2017), a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculpture Grant (2006), Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Rauschenberg Residency (2015), a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant (2020), and in 2022 was a Civitella Ranieri Foundation fellow. He was a Visiting Artist-in-Residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska (in partnership with the Joslyn Museum of Art, Omaha) and an artist-in-residence with The Claude Monet Foundation in Giverny, France (2009).