Brad Kahlhamer, page spread from sketchbook Nomadic Studio Courtesy image
The exhibition “Exploding Native Inevitable,” on display October 27, through March 4, 2024, at the Bates College Museum of Art, features thirteen Indigenous artists and one collaborative from around the nation on the vanguard of their practices in ceramics, painting, video, fiber arts, and more. Occurring simultaneously, a new solo exhibition “Brad Kahlhamer: Nomadic Studio, Maine Camp” displays the acclaimed artist’s traveling sketchbook studio.
Co-curated by Indigenous artist Brad Kahlhamer and Bates Museum’s Director and Chief Curator Dan Mills, “Exploding Native Inevitable” is an exhibition of work by artists ranging from emerging practitioners to elders. “They are amazing voices, make compelling art, and have important things to say,” said Kahlhamer. “The artists build on traditions, push creative boundaries, and represent some extraordinary work being created by Indigenous artists across the land.”
The exhibition title riffs on Andy Warhol’s 1966-67 “Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” a series of multimedia events – including performance, concerts, and film screenings – that accompanied and extended his exhibition. Likewise, the expansive and adventuresome project that is “Exploding Native Inevitable” will include a wide-ranging and ongoing series of events and programs. During the exhibition’s run, the project will explode beyond the museum, across campus, and into the community with collaborations that bring in performers, filmmakers, and writers from the surrounding region and throughout the nation. It will travel to several other museums, with community engagement and multidisciplinary programming related to Indigenous cultures in their regions.
Kahlhamer’s art lives at the crossroads of real and imaginary worlds. Born to Native parents and adopted by a German-American family, he spent his early adulthood as a musician living on the road before settling in New York City in the early 1980s. Since 2016, he has divided his time between New York; Mesa, Arizona; and extensive travel where he is working, exhibiting, performing, or yondering, as he describes it. Kahlhamer has been the subject of over 31 solo exhibitions and his work resides in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
The Nomadic Studio sketchbooks are a pictorial travelogue of sorts, and also a journey through the artist’s imagination and oeuvre. “These are full of notations, human and geographic observations, and the never-ending development of visual and textual ideas that connect myths, marks, figures, fantastic creatures, Indigenous iconography, skulls, underground comix, cultural mashups, travel observations, and his take on the American landscape,” states curator Dan Mills. “Strongly related to his larger works, each spread stands alone–a work complete unto itself–as well as a yondering chapter in Kahlhamer’s inner and outer worlds.”
Send questions/comments to the editors.
