Brad Kahlhamer

Brad Kahlhamer fuses exuberant Expressionist painting with the visionary tradition of Native American art, resulting in what the critic Michael Cohen describes as "a new narrative of how the West was won that allows the original inhabitants to live to tell the tale." Kahlhamer draws in part from visual sources in the country western and Native American rock-music scenes, and his landscapes swirl with an atavistic energy; they seem to have a sound that accompanies their visual rhythm. Their unruly cast of characters, dead and alive, from the artist's life and from his imagination, are visited by the great American bald eagle, who sweeps though the frame as the artist's surrogate. Kahlhamer's immersion into his personal American landscape finds him mixing representations of the real into what he calls a visionary "third place," counted out from the "first place" of his Native American heritage, and the "second place" of his more conventional American upbringing with his adoptive parents. This, his own personal third America, gleefully mingles the real and the imaginary. This volume is the first complete survey of Kahlhamer's work to date, covering more than 10 years of material.