Download - Autumn Art Auction 2007
The North Dakota Museum of Artis grateful to the following entities
who have given generously to guarantee that
the arts may flourish.
Marking the Land: Jim Dow in North Dakotafeatured on
PRAIRIE PUBLIC
HEAR IT NOW with Merrill Piepkorn
Monday, October 22, 2007
Pledge $20 a month or more to Prairie Public
and you will receive
Marking the Land, soft cover
Pledge $1,000 or more and receive a hard cover copy
Commissioned by the North Dakota Museum of Art,
Jim Dow began photographing folk art within the North Dakota landscape in 1981.
By 2000, he was shooting anything he pleased and wandering across
the borders into Minnesota and South Dakota.
Marking the Land was produced by the North Dakota Museum of Art
in collaboration with the Center for American Places:
220 pages, 186 color photographs, hard and soft cover,
distributed by the University of Chicago Press
or through the North Dakota Museum of Art.
Cover: Melanie Rocan, SWIMMING #2, , 54 x 66 inches, 2007
North Dakota Museum of Art
A U T U M N A r t A u c t i o nS at u r d ay, N o v e m b e r 1 0 , 2 0 0 7
Wine and hors d’oeuvres 6:30 pm
Auction begins at 8 pm
Autumn Art Auction is
Underwritten by
Auction PreviewOctober 14 until auction time in the Museum galleries
Monday - Friday, 9 to 5 pm, Saturday - Sunday, 1 to 5 pm
All works to be auctioned will be on display.
.
patronsChester Fritz Auditorium
Clear Channel Radio
East Grand Floral
Grand Forks Herald
High Plains Reader
Holiday Inn
KVLY TV
KXJB TV
Leighton Broadcasting
Merrill Lynch
Office of Academic Affairs, UND
SponsorsBremer Bank
Ellen McKinnon
Minnesota Public Radio
WDAZ TV
SupportersAltru Health System, Truyu
Ameriprise Financial Services, Inc.
Avant
Blue Moose Bar & Grill
Bronze Boot
Cancer Research, UND, Mary Ann and Don Sens
Community Bank
Curtis Tanabe DDS
Farmer's Insurance Group, George Wogaman
Greater Grand Forks Community Theatre
Gustafson Gluek, PLLC
HB Sound & Light
Museum Café
North Dakota Eye Clinic
North Dakota Ballet Company
North Dakota Quarterly
Auction Supporters continued next page
SupportersRed Pepper
Rhombus Guys
Sanders 1907
Special Arrangement, Daryce Van Hoff
Special Olympics
Suite 49
Summit Brewing Company
Valley Bone and Joint
Waterfront Kitchen & Bath, Northern Plumbing Supply
Whitey’s
`Contributors
Axis Clinic
Acme Electric Tool Crib of the North
Camrud, Maddock, Olson & Larson
Capital Resource Management
Columbia Liquors
D. Tran, DDS
Fine Print
Greater Grand Forks Symphony Orchestra
Gregory J. Norman Funeral Chapel
Happy Harry’s
Ink, Inc.
Letnes, Marshall, Swanson & Warcup Ltd.
McDonald Family Dentistry
Praxis Strategy Group
Rite Spot Liquor
River City Jewelers
Salon Seva
UND Writers Conference
Xcel Energy
Zimney Foster PC
AdvertisersAmazing Grains
Best Western Town House
Brady, Martz, and Associates
Browning Arts
Burger King
Chad Caya Painting
David C. Thompson, Law Office
Drees, Riskey, Vallager, Ltd.
Economy Plumbing
Edward Jones, Mark A. Larsen
Forks Chem-Dry
Gate City Bank
Greenberg Realty, Mary Adams
Greenberg Realty, Kelly Thompson
Home of Economy
Hovet Roofing, Inc.
Meland Architecture
Monarch Travel & Tours
Earl Pomeroy
Reichert Armstrong Law Office
Robert Vogel Law Office, P.C.
Shaft Reis & Shaft Ltd.
SuperOne Foods
SuperTarget
Valley Dairy
Vilandre
Wall's Medicine Center, Inc.
You Are Here Gallery
Buy local. Read the sponsor pages
to learn about those who
invest in the Museum.
Please return their investment. —John Foster, Retiring Chairman
Museum Board of Trustees
Burton Onofrio recently retired as Attending Neurosurgeon at the
Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, where he also served as
Professor of Neurosurgery in the Mayo Medical School. His first
job after retirement was as Senior Consultant for Pain Disorders,
Neurosurgical Service, Massachusetts General Hospital in
Boston. His training includes an M.D. degree from the Medical
College of Cornell University (1957); a surgical residency at the
New York Hospital Medical Center (1958); and a fellowship at
the Mayo Clinic in neurosurgery (1964), all of which resulted in
a life-time career at the Mayo Clinic.
As busy as his professional career has been, he has also lived a
wonderful life within the arts. It began when he married Judy, a
self-taught potter who has emerged as a sculptor of national
stature. Judy was deeply involved in the Rochester Art Center,
and Burton soon joined the Board of Directors. Most recently—
another retirement job—he co-chaired the Capital Campaign
Building Committee of the Rochester Art Center. The new
building opened in the spring of 2004 with the central gallery
named in honor of Judy and Burton Onofrio—gifted by a former
patient.
In another corner of his life, Onofrio runs art auctions. For
twenty-six years he was the auctioneer of the Rochester Art
Center annual auction, most often organizing it as well. Both the
Northern Clay Center in Minneapolis and the University of
Minnesota Art Department have called upon him to serve as
auctioneer. For twelve years he has been the announcer of the
Rochester Art Center Art Festival. Onofrio’s days, however, are
spent in Judyland, the garden he created with his wife. And
finally, this is a man who loves animals, in particular his
menagerie of cats who have full run of the garden.
Burton Onofrio, Auctioneer Heather and David Schall, Chairs
Heather and David Schall, Chairs
Brad and Michelle Stenberg
Chad and Elisa Hanson
Alan Mulhern
Devera Warcup
Stacy Warcup
Autumn Art Auction Committee
David and Heather Schall reside in Grand Forks
with their four children. Jordyn is a sixth grader at South Middle
School, Camryn is a third grader at Kelly Elementary, Isaac is four
and Ellie is two. David and Heather are both natives of Grand
Forks. David graduated from the University of North Dakota and
is currently an orthopedic surgeon at Valley Bone and Joint Clinic
in Grand Forks. Heather previously was a Diagnostic
Cardiac/Medical Sonographer.
Photograph by Christy Doyea Photography
Rules of Auction
q Each registered guest will receive a bidding card as part of
the price of a ticket. Upon receiving the bidding card, each
guest will be asked to sign a statement vowing to abide by
the Rules of the Auction listed in this catalog.
q Absentee bidders will either leave their bids on an Absentee
Bid Form with Museum personnel in person or by phone, or
bid by phone the night of the auction. Absentee bidders, by
filling out the form, agree to abide by the Rules of the
Auction.
q Each bidder will use his or her own bidding number during
the auction.
q All sales are final.
q In September 2002 the Office of the North Dakota State Tax
Commissioner determined that the gross receipts from the
sales made at the Auction are subject to sales tax at 6.75 %.
This does not apply to out-of-state buyers who have works
shipped to them.
q In the event of a dispute between bidders, the auctioneer
shall either determine the successful bidder or re-auction
the item in dispute.
q Purchasers may pay for items at any point following the
sale of a work but must pay for all art work before the
conclusion of the evening—unless other arrangements are
in place. Absentee bidders will be charged on the evening of
the auction or an invoice will be sent the next business day.
q Works of art in the auction have minimum bids placed on
them by the artist. This confidential “reserve” is a price
agreed upon between the artist and the North Dakota
Museum of Art below which a work of art will not be sold.
MISSION: To foster and nurture the aesthetic life and artistic
expression of the people living on the Northern Plains through
exhibitions, programs, and publications which engage the
region, the country, and the world.
VISION: To create the richest learning environment possible for
experiencing art and developing community that affirms the
highest level of respect for art, artists, and audiences.
VALUES: For the Museum to be successful, our most important
resource, our people, must have a clear sense of where we are
going, and the collaborative spirit in which we undertake that
journey. Our values are guiding principles for how we will go
about our work. They are guideposts to daily conduct that speak
to the integrity of our behavior.
1) Rural Lens: We interpret rural life through the arts, just as we
view the art of the world through a rural perspective.
2) Global Context: We place the lives of artists and audiences
within the context of contemporary art and critical thought from
around the world.
3) Humanities Focus: We function as a laboratory for all forms
of artistic, aesthetic and cultural inquiry.
4) Collaboration: We build and nourish relationships with
artists, visitors and each other.
5) Scholarship: Academic rigor and quality research underpin all
museum programs and publications.
6) Stewardship: We are stewards of the public trust for the
artistic environment of our region, and the human, financial and
physical resources of the Museum.
Photograph by Mike Mohaupt
Museum Mission Statement
Each year we open the fall season by publishing
the Autumn Art Auction catalog. Gradually the catalogs are
accumulating into a historical record of art in our time and place.
If it weren’t for our important sponsors whose ads fill the last half
of this book, the catalog would not be published. Please take
your business to these companies and individuals; thank them for
their significant contribution; and note how many are locally
owned and operated. Sometimes they say, “I don’t care if I get an
ad, I just want to give to you guys.” Supporting cultural life is not
in the interest of the “big boxes” but rather has become the
business of the butcher, the baker and the keeper of bees—and
of Ellen McKinnon who buys her own ad because it pleases her.
In 1992, Madelyn Camrud inaugurated the Museum’s first
Benefit Dinner and Silent Auction. She added the Autumn Art
Auction in 1998, assisted by a good committee and supported by
the Museum staff. The goal from the beginning was to develop the
buying audience for artists from our region. For decades, the only
artists who could stay in northern Minnesota and North Dakota
while continuing their professional careers had to find a different
way to make a living—usually teaching on the college level. The
mantra became, “If we don’t support them, who is going to.”
From the beginning, the Museum has never asked artists to
donate work. Instead, we allow them to establish their minimum
price, an amount the Museum guarantees. (For the winter
auction, works of art are less expensive and the minimum is
established at $100.) The auction procedures are:
DIVISION OF MONEY between the artist and the North
Dakota Museum of Art on a work sold in the Auction: The artist
is guaranteed to receive the amount of the reserve bid. If work
does not reach minimum bid, it will be brought in by the
Museum and returned to artist. Any amount over the reserve bid
and the Museum’s equal match is split 50/50 between the artist
and the Museum. Example: If a reserve bid is $200, and the work
sells for $395, the artist receives $200 and the Museum receives
$195. If the same work sells for $500, the artist and the Museum
each receive $250.
Gradually we have seen the prices for art increase as our buying
audience experiences the pleasure of knowing artists and living
with art. And also gradually, the Museum has begun to make
some money from the auction as well. It wasn’t long, however,
before every art entity in the region began holding their own
auctions—and positioning them to compete with the Museum’s
auction. Then non-art entities thought, “why not us?” It was as if
the Museum threw a pebble into the pond and art auctions
rippled out.
Art has also become an accepted part of younger people’s lives.
They participate, they buy, they live with art—and all of our lives
become richer.
Remember, when you buy through the Autumn Art Auction, the
price includes framing or presentation. Frames are often custom
made by the artists who pay attention to using archival materials.
This alone adds significant value to some of the work.
Not all of the artists live locally, but they all have some
relationship with either the Museum of Art or the region. As I
recently told artist Marjorie Merriman, Nancy Friese has worked
with me on tracing artists who have backgrounds in North Dakota.
Because we have so few artists, we sometimes borrow them from
the past. You are being borrowed! Marjorie’s
grandparents were early settlers who lived in the Dakota Territory
before North Dakota became a state. Her drawing of a
Norwegian stave church is in the Auction.
Laurel Reuter, DirectorNorth Dakota Museum of Art
From the Museum Director
Vivienne Morgan: I’m English—not a snow lover—but
the weather in northern Minnesota fills me with nostalgia for
England in winter. I’ve lived in the United States for all these years
and I’ve never taken American citizenship. Sooner or later I must
make a choice. I’ve been thinking about what it means to migrate
and immigrate. What it means to fly, to change, to slow down or
grow ill, perhaps grow better or stronger, but to inevitably grow
old, and to finally stop in one place. This meditation on
acceptance has led me to look locally for places that remind me
of England, of Europe, to find solace or perhaps as a point of
compromise.
I made the The Absence Series using Holga negatives, which I
shot in downtown Bemidji, Minnesota, at the Greenwood
Cemetery not long after my father died. Because it pleased me, I
Lot #1
Vivienne MorganBemidji, Minnesota
Ennui, 2007
Digital print on Innova paper
18 x 18 inches
Range: $150 - 250
took a lot of photos with my Holga. The series I made was for a
local exhibition called Between Two Lands. It was about
absence: the absence of my father whose ashes were scattered on
a football pitch in Bristol, England, and my own nearly thirty-year
absence from my family and England.
I had been watching the Cemetery that fall as I drove by, since it’s
the only place in northern Minnesota with anything close to topi-
ary. You have to love the old European order expressed in
topiary, the annual clipping of trees and grasses making all things
in the garden good. One day a thick fog rolled in and the rest of
the town disappeared, and magically I was back on some
Devon estate.
When you are gone for long enough you are no longer absent,
you just cease to exist.
Lot #2
Vivienne MorganBemidji, Minnesota
Absence Found, 2005-07
Nine Holga negatives cross processed
Each 8 x 8.5 inches
Range: $500-600
Invented in Hong Kong in 1982, the Holga is an inexpensive,
medium format (120 film) toy camera that has come to be
appreciated for its low-fidelity aesthetic. The Holga's cheap
construction and simple meniscus (convex-concave) lens often
yields pictures that invoke an other-worldly presence, resulting
from soft-focus tones, misty colors, and streaming lights.
Ironically, the camera's quality problems became a virtue among
some photographers, with Holga photos winning awards and
competitions in art and news photography.
Vivienne Morgan was born in England in 1958. In 1979 she
moved to the United States and earned her MFA from Bowling
Green State University. She now lives in the countryside near
Lot #3
Guillermo GuardiaGrand Forks, North Dakota
and Lima, Peru
Neo David, 2007
High fire ceramic
31 x 9 x 8 inches
Range: $300 - 400
Guillermo Guardia (Memo) was born in Lima, Peru,
in 1975. He completed a BFA in Industrial Design at the
Universidad Católica del Peru in 1999. As part of his studies he
took a ceramics class and found he loved it. Soon he was
applying to graduate programs in ceramics in the United States.
In 2005 he completed his MFA in Ceramics from the University
of North Dakota and is currently enrolled at UND in a second
graduate degree program, seeking a Master of Science in
Industrial Technology.
Guardia comes from an ancient ceramic culture of pre-
Columbian Peru. From the time he was little he was steeped in
the images and materials of those early potters. From his family,
his teachers, television, and classroom visits to museums, he
learned to venerate the early traditions. In particular, he loved the
work of the Mochica culture, a pre-Incan civilization that
flourished on the northern coast of Peru from about 200 B.C. to
A.D. 600, known especially for its pottery vessels modeled into
naturalistic human and animal figures.
Guardia intuitively carries the past forward in his ceramics,
preferring narrative work based on the figure, unglazed and
burnished surfaces that allow the clay itself to dominate the
work. The work in the exhibition, Neo David, breathes with life,
both contemporary and ancient.
I had to go to Peru and immerse myselfin Pre-Columbian ceramics before I
understood Guillermo’s work. Given thatcontext, I believe he is creating an im-
portant contemporary art form deeply embedded in the past.
Laurel Reuter, DirectorNorth Dakota Museum of Art
Lot #4
Monte BreckheimerPekin, North Dakota
Trillium
Oil on old barn wood
16 x 16 inches, 2002
Range: $175 - 225
Monte Breckheimer turns seventy-five years old on
October 26, 2007. He waited until he was sixty and retired from
farming south of Tolna, North Dakota, before embarking upon his
artistic career—that is, when he was sixty he began to really
investigate art. He had always liked looking at paintings in books
and magazines but never imagined he could become a painter.
First, he tried his hand at rosemaling, “that decorative folk
painting of Norway, which began in the low-land areas of eastern
Norway about 1750 when such upper-class artistic styles as
Baroque, Regency and Rococo were introduced to Norway's
rural culture. At first Norway's painters followed the European
styles closely. Those who rosemaled for their livelihood would
not have been land owners but poor city dwellers. After being
trained within a ‘guild’ they would travel from county to county,
painting churches and the homes of the wealthy for either money
or room and board. Thus rosemaling was carried over the
mountains and toward Norway's western coast. Once farther
away from the influence of the guilds, these artists explored new
ideas and motifs. Soon strong regional styles developed.”
(According to the Illinois Rosemaling Association.)
Rural painters of all kinds began to imitate this folk art. Not
having been taught in an urban guild, the amateur became
spontaneous and expressive in his or her work on smaller objects
such as drinking vessels and boxes. Immigrants to the United
States arrived with their belongings stuffed into elaborately
painted trunks. Since they were even farther from the dictating
guilds, their work became even more original. Breckheimer
began to study with these first- and second-generation
immigrants, and, as always, he bought books and traveled to
exhibitions, including the Norwegian-American Museum in
Decorah, Iowa.
Breckheimer was also a woodworker and after a few years he
began to turn the plates and build the boxes to underpin his
painting. Not given to restrictions, it wasn’t long before he began
to just paint the world around him and the one that existed in his
imagination. He painted on gourds, on paper, on wood, on
canvas. Soon he was entering the Pekin Art Show and winning
prizes: Best of Show, two Seconds, one Third, two Honorable
Mentions. In 2005 the Jud Days Art show gave him the Artists’
Choice award. Then the North Dakota Museum of Art included
him in their touring Artists Self-Portrait exhibition. With great fun,
he painted himself with a goofy, toothless grin, his teeth in a
wineglass in his hand.
Trillium, the painting in this auction, combines woodworking
and painting. Breckheimer first made his intricate support out of
barn wood and then painted both the “picture” and the
surrounding “frame.” While being interviewed for this auction,
he said, “I didn’t want to let the painting interfere with the
woodworking, but it sure has. I love painting more than
woodworking. I just love painting.”
Lot #5
Zhimin GuanMoorhead, Minnesota
Violinist II
Oil and wax on metal
12 x 12 inches, 2007
Range: $900 - 1,200
Sponsored by Prairie Public
Zhimin Guan speaks of his painting process: I am
amazed to see how painting materials and gesture marks
transform each other into a spiritually and physically integrated
autonomy. I strive to establish a vital breath and universal
harmony through forms, colors, space and dynamic gestures. In
my art career, I have always incorporated the traditional with the
experimental, the figurative and the abstract. I wish to continually
change through aesthetic modification over time and discover the
right form and metaphor among endless possibilities.
The artist was born in China in 1962. He started to paint when
he was nine years old, influenced by his father, Chintian Guan, a
traditional Chinese calligrapher and ink painter. Zhimin received
rigorous training in calligraphy and ink painting before he was
fifteen years old. At the same time, he developed a strong interest
in the Chinese philosophy of Taoism and in ancient Chinese
poetry. During his BFA studies at Fuyang Teachers College in
China, he concentrated on oil painting and again received
rigorous training in drawing and painting in the Western classical
style. From 1985 to 1994, he taught painting, drawing, and
design at Dalian Institute of Industrial Design in Dalian, China.
Besides teaching, Guan devoted himself to his art practice.
When he lived in the northeastern Chinese city of Dalian, Guan
was only five minutes from the Yellow Sea. Then in the spring of
1995, Guan came to the United States, driven by the desire to
examine the complexities of Western contemporary arts. After
three years, he earned his MFA in Painting and Drawing at Fort
Hays State University, Kansas. Guan has successfully blended
his academic training in visual art with the aesthetics of Eastern
philosophy. As an artist, he is deeply committed to unifying the
West with the East in his own distinctive manner—a new
synthesis of technique underpinned by a holistic philosophy.
Today Zhimin Guan is an Associate Professor of Art at Minnesota
State University Moorhead.
Guan’s art has been exhibited throughout China and the United
States in such institutions as the China National Art Gallery in
Beijing; China Academy of Fine Arts Museum, Hangzhou;
Singapore Asian Arts Gallery; the Salmagundi Club, New York;
CCC/USA, Philadelphia; The Minneapolis Institute of Fine Arts;
Dunton Gallery in Chicago; Fraser Gallery, Washington, DC;
Museum of Southwest Texas, Corpus Christi; North Dakota
Museum of Art, and, most recently, a solo exhibition at the
Plains Art Museum, Fargo.
Lot #6
Daniel SharbonoMinot, North Dakota
Dress
Acrylic and found materials, 2007
11 x 21 x 3 inches
Range: $250 - 300
Daniel Sharbono is a Minot artist, designer, and
freelance graphic designer whose recent projects include design
work for Main Street Books, 10 North Main, Otis and James
Photography, Dakota Kids Dentistry, Minot State University, and
62 Doors Gallery and Studios.
Found objects and materials discovered at flea markets, yard
sales, old barns and garages, and the occasional curbside
shopping trip, are rescued and recycled for use in artwork that
gives these objects the opportunity to be appreciated.
Most of Daniel’s work is about observing the things around you
and learning to appreciate them for their inherent aesthetic
qualities—signs of a personality, loyalty, and a past filled with
experiences we can all relate to.
Dress was created for a juried show with a figurative theme at 62
Doors Gallery in Minot where it received an honorable mention.
Lot #7
Doug PfligerMinot, North Dakota
Whirly-Gig-Dog-#97
Wood, metal, and paint, 2007
18 x 3.5 x 13 inches
Range: $125 - 150
Doug Pfliger has donated the proceedsfrom the sale of this sculpture
to the Museum of Art
Doug Pfliger states, Humor and color tend to dominate
my art. My work is narrative, as many of the series have a
continuous story or repeating characters. I want viewers to
respond immediately to a piece for the surface humor, and then
look for the deeper psychological content of the work. I have
been working for the past few years with the themes of chairs,
houses, toys and trailers in 2D and 3D formats.
A Hazen, North Dakota, native, Pfliger currently teaches art at
Minot State University where he received his Bachelor of Science
degree in art education in 1984. He taught art in the public
school system for thirteen years before pursuing graduate work.
He received his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1997 from the
University of North Dakota. After spending several years
teaching at Northern State University in Aberdeen, South Dakota,
he returned to Minot State University in 2001.
Lot #8
Bill HarbortMinot, North Dakota
Dakota in Love
Mixed-media collage
32 x 38 x 4 inches, 2007
Range: $400 - 600
Bill Harbort was born and raised just north of New York
City. After receiving his BFA and MA degrees from Syracuse
University, he pursued a career in commercial design. Over the
years he worked in New York as a package designer for Revlon,
as the art director for a children’s educational software company,
and as a freelance automobile illustrator. During the 1960s and
1970s, Harbort self-published thirty-one limited edition art prints
of American muscle cars. (For the unfamiliar, muscle cars, also
called Pony Cars, have giant V-8 engines with super chargers and
special exhaust. These gas-guzzlers were really fast! Muscle cars
reached their epitome in the 1960s with the advent of such cars
as the GTO, certain Mustangs, Camaros, and some Chrysler
models like the Challenger. Unfortunately the energy crisis killed
the genre.)
While working on the East Coast, Harbort was a member of the
New York Society of Illustrators. He became widely recognized
for his automotive airbrush work, which appeared in over
twenty-five different automotive publications. Tiring of
commercial work, he moved to North Dakota in 1996 to teach
graphic design and illustration at Minot State University.
Gradually Harbort, the commercial artist, began to explore fine
art. He states, paint-by-numbers, coupons and clip art are just a
few ingredients often found in our popular culture landfill. Being
a college professor has given me time to explore my painting,
which is still driven by pop culture words/images and messages.
Each collage is sealed with a yummy coating of poured-on
clear-cast plastic. My paintings may be tragic, comical or simply
aesthetically pleasing.
The artist lives in Minot with his wife Sandy, sons Nicholas and
Tyler, and three ex-racing greyhounds (Ethyl, Diesel and Petro).
Lot #9
Kim BromleyFargo, North Dakota
Billboard Beauty: Erin 329
Collage and oil on canvas
2004
Range: $3,000 - 3,500
Sponsored by High Plains Reader
Kim Bromley created Erin as part of his
Billboard Series. In real life, billboards are
changed on a regular basis by slapping a
printed sheet—or sheets—of paper on top to
cover up the last message. After the billboard
accumulates approximately eight layers, they
are all stripped off, not unlike removing layers
of old wallpaper. Then the accumulation begins anew. Bromley
goes to the billboard company and selects scraps of layered
paper, which he collages onto his canvas with rabbit-skin glue,
over which he commences to paint and draw. The billboard
scraps suggest the layering of time.
According to the artist, The concept of billboards has always
fascinated me. First and foremost, they create an immediate and
powerful visual impact. They follow principles of design. They
mark their territory and influence how we think. Yet, they merely
illustrate a specific idea. My challenge in working with
billboards is to create something visually powerful going beyond
illustration.
This work is about being a billboard and comments on their
effect on our society.
Bromley has an MFA in Painting and Drawing, Southern Illinois
University at Carbondale (1986), and an MA in Painting and
Drawing, University of Northern Iowa (1983). He has completed
painting residencies in Cedar Falls (2004); Chicago (1998);
Badlands, South Dakota (1997); Cuba (1994); Jamaica (1993);
Ecuador (1992); and in Mexico (1987 and 1990). His work is
represented by Yvonne Rapp Gallery, Louisville, Kentucky. The
artist possesses functional knowledge of the Spanish language
and hypnotherapy certification.
Lot #11
Jerrel HolmValley City, North Dakota
Badlands Spine Vessel
Porcelain, 2007
31 x 8.75 inches
Range: $350 - 400
Lot #10
Mark AnthonyMoorhead, Minnesota
Fog, 2006
Archival digital photograph
31 x 8.75 inches
Range: $350 - 400
Mark Anthony, an artist-photographer, explores the
land around him seeking nuances of poetry and using
photography to create aesthetic links between the land and the
people who live there. Anthony composes images or scenes that
combine incongruities or anomalies that reflect tellingly on the
environs. He may photograph a romantic view of an early
morning foggy river bank and include in the picture frame the
mechanical ironworks of a deserted riverbank dam. Perhaps
above all, he is concerned and interested in portraying the
formal beauty of the land, the realities of the land, and human
collective relationships to the land.
Anthony spent his childhood in Watford City, North Dakota, and
his high school years in Fargo. He earned a BA in Architecture
from North Dakota State University and a BA in Biology from
Moorhead State University with degree-equivalent class work in
Art and Humanities. His great interest was in architectural
restoration but he ended up at Moorhead State as publications
photographer. After six years he left to open his own commercial
photography studio, now in its fourteenth year. Anthony
continues his work as a commercial photographer, an artist, and
a teacher at both Moorhead State and NDSU.
Jerrel Holm became interested in sculpture while attendingMinot State University, where he earned a BS degree in Art Education. He earned an MA in Art Education from Saint CloudState University and an MFA from the University of North Dakota. After teaching high school for twelve years in WatfordCity, North Dakota, Holm spent ten years working as a studio potter. In 2004 he moved east to Valley City State University to re-turn to teaching, while continuing to make art.
According to Holm, the harsh, rough, and desolate land surrounding my
former studio in western North Dakota often seems at odds with the
delicate, smooth, and pure porcelain being formed on my potter’s wheel. This
western environmental influence is apparent in the forms I make today rang-
ing from barrel shapes to squat, bulbous, mushroom-like pieces. The simple
taut forms with clean hard lines expand and contract from a base and con-
clude with a small opening on some, while others remain completely closed.
The forms become more complex and unusual as the smooth surface is inter-
rupted by the rhythmic repetition of points, resulting in a sense of
tension. This tension is repeated in the torn rims of porcelain bowls and sculp-
tural forms to create a natural organic image. Other works begin as
vessels but at the end of the forming process are bestowed with masculine
and feminine characteristics to become sculptural. Some pieces are left naked
of glaze to express harsh, frozen winters. An ash-type glaze coats the surface
of others, reminiscent of hot arid summers. My sculpture survives the winter
season out-of-doors. Porcelain is the most exacting of clays,
demanding a special kind of respect and patience. I find the slow
meticulous way I work in tune with my nature.
Mark Anthony has requested that his portion of the proceeds from the sale
of this work of art be used to purchase a Museum membership.
Lot #12
Jessie PalczewskiSpearfish, South Dakota
Blue, 2006
Collagraph print, gouache, Japanese paper and thread
68 x 60 inches
Range: $1,800 - 3,200
Sponsored by Office of Academic Affairs, UND
Jessie Palczewski, an enrolled member of the
Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe of South Dakota, was born in Eagle
Butte, South Dakota, and raised in Reeder, North Dakota. She
received her BS in Fine Arts from Black Hills State University
(2003) and her MFA from the University of North Dakota (2006).
According to the artist, While holding on to the tradition of fine art,
I wanted to explore the sentimental qualities that exist in the craft
of quilting. Consequently, I decided to investigate this idea further
by using an unlikely material, paper. I wanted to
communicate a level of fragility that relates to my feelings by
drawing upon the transparent-look of the paper. The paper makes
the quilts completely non-utilitarian, but functional as a
communicator of emotion. Furthermore, the medium that I have
chosen allows me to work in the areas of painting and
printmaking, which are the foundations of my artistic identity.
My quilts express personal experiences from both my American
Indian and European backgrounds. They tell stories that words
alone cannot accurately depict. Quilts are narrations that
transform over time carrying a legacy of the past and adapting to
the present, which gives them a timeless quality. As an artist in
search of personal growth, quilts have been my outlet for life
occurrences that are otherwise hard to communicate.
Marley Kaul maintains his studio in Bemidji, Minnesota.
His paintings continue to explore his surroundings including the
lush farmlands of southern Minnesota; the pinelands and prairies
of northern Minnesota and the Dakotas; images from his travels;
and, most importantly, daily life in his studio, home, and
gardens. Kaul blends personal symbols with social and political
issues, transforming simple images into complex metaphorical
statements. This work is at once autobiographical and a social
commentary on daily life.
This small still life, executed in egg tempera, is of the window sill
in Kaul’s studio. The plants are the everyday plants of a
Minnesota home, the mood one of quiet restfulness. Paintings
such as these are creating an important legacy. A hundred years
from now, they will be highly prized as historic renditions of an
earlier time and place. Kaul is a painter with a scholarly bent
who has become widely respected and loved within the region
he calls home.
Lot #13
Marley KaulBemidji, Minnesota
Being and Becoming, 2007
Egg tempera and acrylic wash on wood panel
17.5 x 21.5 x 3 inches
Range: $1,500 - 1,700
Sponsored by Clear Channel
Lot #14
Nancy FrieseCranston, Rhode Island and
Buxton, North Dakota
Coulee, 2004
Oil on linen
14 x 18 inches
Range $1,800 – 2,200
Sponsored by Holiday Inn
Nancy Friese painted this small oil in preparation for the
large sixteen-foot painting, Grove, Coulee and Open Sky (2004)
installed in the entryway of the Ina Mae Rude Entrepreneur
Center, Grand Forks, North Dakota. She painted it out-of-doors
south of Grand Forks on a coulee during the month of August.
Nancy Friese is a painter and printmaker who has shown
extensively nationally and internationally in over thirty solo and
100 group exhibitions. These include the Brandts Klaedefabrik
(Odense, Denmark), the Barbican Center (London), Metropolitan
Museum of Art (Tokyo) and in the Untied States at the Bronx
River Art Center, College of Wooster Art Museum, Chrysler
Museum, Everson Museum, Herbert Johnson Museum of Art,
International Center of Print New York, The New York Public
Library, Rhode Island School of Art and Design Museum of Art,
Snug Harbor Cultural Center.
She has received three National Endowment for the Arts
Fellowships, including the US/Friendship Commission six-month
grant to Japan. Nancy received the College Art Association and
Reader’s Digest Giverny Grant, a Blanche E. Colman Award and
a George Sugarman Foundation Award for painting.
Nancy has participated in over fifteen competitive art residency
programs for both painting and prinkmaking including the
MacDowell Colony; Millay Colony; I-Park Enclave; Musee’ de
Pont Aven Residency Program in Brittany, France; Theodore
Lot #15
Duane PerkinsWinnipeg, Manitoba
Untitled
Porcelain
14.5 x 13.5 inches, 2006
Range: $700 - 900
Duane Perkins has been working as a full-time studio
artist for thirty years. Born in 1947 in Chicago, he lived there
until he moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, to attend Bethel College
where he majored in art and philosophy. During his last year he
needed another credit so enrolled in his first ceramic class. A few
months later he graduated and moved to Winnipeg with his
future wife and immediately set up his ceramic studio.
In the summer of 2007, the Winnipeg Art Gallery celebrated
Perkins’ sixtieth birthday with a large exhibition about which
they wrote: The vessel form is a constant within Perkins’
production. Wheel-thrown and then reduction-fired, the works
are beautifully composed both formally and decoratively. The
firing technique leads to muted and subtle colour variations within
the glazes, skillfully worked into abstracted designs
recalling vegetation such as scattered leaves, twisting vines, and
unopened buds. In other instances. . . . the rich colours and
patterns of oriental fabrics are suggested. Over the last decade,
the dimensions of Perkin's work have increased as he creates
broad rimmed platters, flared bowls and vases of soaring heights.
In contrast to their considerable sizes, the vessels' decoration
mirrors the delicacy of the porcelain body, prompting one writer
to characterize his work as ‘noble vessel forms decorated with
lush surfaces.’
Lot #16
Duane PerkinsWinnipeg, Manitoba
Untitled
Porcelain
14.5 x 16.5 inches, 2007
Range: $1,400 – 1,800
Sponsored by Grand Forks Herald
Friese cont.
Roosevelt Medora Foundation Residency in North Dakota’s
Badlands; Ragdale Colony, Illinois; and the Center for
Contemporary Print, Connecticut. She was a painter in
residence for a four-month residency in Lower Manhattan
Cultural Council’s Studioscape Residency Program in the World
Trade Center during 9/11.
Friese has an MFA from Yale University School of Art and Yale
Summer School of Music and Art. She studied at the University
of California, Berkeley and the Art Academy of Cincinnati. She
has a B.S. from the University of North Dakota. Friese is a full
professor at the Rhode Island School of Design. She spends her
summers painting on the family farm near Buxton, North Dakota.
Lot #17 (far left)
Milena marinovFargo, North Dakota
Jesus and Mary
Egg tempera on wood panel
with glazes
18 x 11.5 inches
Range: $1,500 - 1,800
Lot #18
Milena marinovFargo, North Dakota
Jesus
Egg tempera on wood panel
with glazes
18 x 11.5 inches
Range: $1,500 - 1,800
Milena Marinov was born in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. She
graduated in 1982 from Dupnitza College of Education, Bulgaria,
with a degree in graphic art. Her life direction changed when she
took her first job as an art conservator with the Bulgarian
National Institute of Cultural Heritage and the Gallery of Old Art
and fell in love with orthodox religious art. Bulgarian icons can
boast of a thousand year's history. Bulgaria was the first of the
Slav peoples to adopt Christianity from Byzantium as her official
religion in 865. Since then the Bulgarian icon has developed as
a fundamental part of the art of the country from the ninth
century through the present day. Milena Marinov continues this
tradition while living in North Dakota. She maintains her studio
and lives in Fargo with her husband, who teaches at North Dakota
State University, and their two sons.
In religious art, an icon is an artistic representation or symbol of
anything considered holy and divine, such as paintings,
sculpture, or mosaics, sometimes quite small in size, generally
regarded by their users as a physical manifestation of the thing
represented. Icons are used particularly in Eastern Orthodox
churches and places of worship.
Orthodox Christians venerate the icons in order to show honor
and respect for the people and events depicted. They do not
worship icons, for the same council that defended their use, the
Second Council of Nicaea, forbade their worship.
Marinov utilizes the antique method of egg tempera painting,
which uses the yolk as a strong, transparent binder, and dry
pigments for color. In her work, she uses such hard woods as
walnut, cherry, or oak. She impregnates the wood with a diluted
glue adhesive containing zinc oxide and titanium oxide,
traditionally rendered from rabbit skin and fish bones. A
completed drawing is transferred from a sheet of paper to the
surface. Areas where 23-karat gold leaf will be applied are
treated with a Pompeii red glue to fix the gold leaf.
The artist adheres to the strict guidelines of the canon of icon
painting, which can carry very specific instructions. For example,
in painting Jesus Entering Jerusalem, Christ must be riding a white
mule. Depending upon the complexity of the composition, the
artist will spend from two to four weeks completing one icon.
The icons offered in this auction are meant to be a pair. They
reflect Marinov’s past year of intense work “writing” the icons for
the iconostasis of the All Saints Orthodox Christian Church in
Fargo. An iconostasis is a wall of icons and religious paintings,
separating the nave from the sanctuary in a church. Marinova
completed five of the six major icons, which will include
versions of the images in the auction, as well as two
Annunciation icons for the central King’s Gate that opens into the
sanctuary. She estimates that it will take her another two years to
complete six icons for the lower story of the iconastsis, which
depict stories from the Old Testament, twelve feast icons, and the
crowning Last Supper.
While the North Dakota Museum of Art is primarily a
contemporary art museum, we are pleased to support the work
of this superb artist working within an ancient tradition.
EWa Tarsia, RCA is a Polish artist who became a Canadian
citizen in 1995. The success of her artistic career in Canada was
celebrated in June 2007 when she was officially inducted into
the Royal Academy of Arts. Whereas she works in diverse media
including painting, sculpture, tapestry, landscape design, and
drawing, she is known internationally as a printmaker. She has
showed in international print biennials in Spain, France, Poland,
Austria, United States, England, Germany, and Korea.
The work included in this auction represents the evolution of
Tarsia’s printmaking into personal techniques that meld the
actual printmaking plastic plate into the final work of art, in this
case the painting Treasured Memories.
As a printmaker, Tarsia is part of a tradition of artists who
acknowledge that their plates—the pieces of metal, plastic, wood
and linoleum that they print from—are the true objects of their af-
fection. Covered with marks, lines and subtle traces of colour,
printing plates are often as interesting as the images pulled from
them. Each plate is visually complex, offering a fully active and
engaged surface that, once transformed into sculpture, reveals
both the artist’s obsessive process and the beauty that motivates
her to continue.
As an environmentalist, Tarsia sees the irony of using plastic and
paper to create images that celebrate the beauty of the natural
world. “It reflects our society,” she says of the work. “Plastic is
everywhere.”
Formally trained in painting and sculpture at the School of Fine
Arts in Poland, she began printmaking when she arrived in
Winnipeg in 1991. For the past fourteen years, Tarsia has been
working full time as a printmaker and painter. Her specific area
of interest, monoprinting, involves the creation of a one-of-a-
kind image on a smooth surface such as Plexiglas that is
eventually transferred onto paper.
There is rawness and unbridled energy that comes, regardless of
medium, from her complete preoccupation with process. On her
printing plates the energy is manifested in intensely manipulated
surfaces. She describes building them up, scratching into their sur-
faces and then applying layers of colour. “It is a sickness,” she half-
jokes, “an uncontrollable compulsion medicated only by the
production of more art.” (Kristen Pauch-Nolin)
Ewa Tarsia will have a solo exhibition at the North Dakota
Museum of Art in 2008.
Lot #19
Ewa Tarsia, RCAWinnipeg, Manitoba
Treasured Memories, 2006
Mixed media including acrylic and
plastic on canvas
48 x 48 inches
Range: $3,500 – 4,500
Sponsored by Leighton Broadcasting
Lot # 20
Adam KempGrand Forks, North Dakota
Lincoln Park, 2007
Acrylic, oil hardwood floor
with customized wood frame
32 x 99.5 inches
Range: $1,000 - 1,200
Lot #21
Cheryl OlsonDrake, North Dakota
Untitled
Watercolor on paper
4.25 x 7 inches, 2006
Range: $150 - 200
Adam Kemp, Grand Fork’s unofficial Artist in Residence,
was born in 1962 and grew up forty miles northeast of London
in the Essex countryside. From age fourteen through nineteen,
Adam sketched with watercolors because I could take them
anywhere. At about sixteen, I noticed there were a lot of things
that could be painted on—and I did. He graduated from
Newcastle upon Tyne with a BFA in 1986 but not before studying
for a year at a wood restoration school in Florence, Italy, and
working with a Newcastle blacksmith for six months.
While in college he realized he was a failed watercolor painter.
I put too much paint on so I would have to give my pictures a
bath in the tub. Finally the Department of Painting asked him to
leave just as the Department of Sculpture accepted him. The
Sculpture Department was grounded in the tradition of the
British Modern School—Sir Anthony Caro, Henry Moore, and
most importantly, Barbara Hepworth, whom his parents had
taken him to visit when he was a child. Her studio in Cornwall
“looked like my bedroom so I figured there was hope.”
Kemp earned an MFA degree from the University of North
Dakota where he learned to cast bronze in the new foundry. In
addition to paintings and sculpture, Kemp’s work includes a
commissioned wall mosaic at the Hotel Donaldson in Fargo
(summer 2003). Kemp continues to teach popular sessions in
the Museum’s Summer Art Camp and to run the You Are Here
gallery in downtown Grand Forks, of which he is half-owner.
Cheryl Olson: I was a farmer's daughter, born and raised in
North Dakota. I've lived in the state most of my life. I married a
farmer and became a farmer's wife. Living so close to the land, I
developed a deep appreciation for the wild and wide-open
landscape of the prairie. I've tried to duplicate that natural
balance and design in my paintings, using small detail with
obscure impressions, hopefully leaving some of the landscape to
the interpretation of the viewer. I like to play with the vivid and ob-
scure colors that our late night and early morning sun paints in the
North Dakota sky. It is a feeling I have every day I look
outside, and I hope you can experience it through my paintings.
Adam Kemp is donating halfof the proceeds of this sale
to the Museum of Art
Lot #23
Linda WhitneyValley City, North Dakota
Dakota Plains Portrait, 2005
Encaustic, seed beads and horse hair
Each 6.5 x 8.5 inches plus hair
Range: $300 - $400 for pair
Lot #22
Linda WhitneyValley City, North Dakota
Bluegill, 2006
Encaustic and oilbar on canvas
15 x 21.25 inches
Range: $125 - 150
Linda Whitney has a long history of service to the arts
in North Dakota reflected in her current position as President of
the Board of Valley City’s Community School of the Arts. In 1999,
she was honored for this lifetime of service with the Governor’s
Award for the Arts. Whitney took her MFA in Printmaking from
the University of North Dakota in 1993 and has gone on to work
in the field as a teacher, a juror/curator, and an artist. She
currently is Chair and Professor of Art at Valley City State
University. She exhibits extensively throughout the region, and
through the International Print Exchange #5 she will show work
in 2008 at SUNY, Buffalo; Pratt Fine Arts Gallery, Seattle; and
Denmark’s Roennebaeksholm Arts and Culture Centre.
According to Whitney, Everything about the encaustic process
feeds my personality. The smell of the warm beeswax brings to
mind lazy, sun-filled summer days and the smell of the honey
being extracted from the hive. The liquid pigments, which cool
and solidify quickly, encourage me to work with thick, textural
layers of color directly on the surface. The thickness of the wax
surface allows me to draw back into the image with my etching
needle, satisfying my need for linear detail. Rubbing oilbar into
the inscribed lines gives me a reason to get my hands dirty.
Bluegill comes from those childhood afternoons spent on a lake
covered with lily pads fishing for panfish. It comes not from the
thrill of catching a living creature on a hook but from the
knowledge that one can provide food for supper even though one
is only eight.
Dakota Plains Portrait: Working with my hands can be a very
spiritual act especially when the mantra of a repeated, some
might say tedious, act is involved. Creating with materials
historically used by another culture—the seed beads and
horsehair—vicariously connects me to those artists of another
time. Using the impression of my own face places me, in an
abstract way, in an ancient place on the plains. The portrait mask
is a document of what I want to be when I grow up, working
creatively in a connected way.
Lot #25
Jessica ChristyValley City, North Dakota
that’s how the gypsy went to heaven
Encaustic and mixed media
30 x 22 x 3 inches, 2006
Range: $400 - 500
Lot # 24
Melanie RocanLa Broquerie, Manitoba
Swimming #2
Oil on canvas
54 x 66 inches
Range: $2,000 - 2,500
Sponsored by KVLY TV
Melanie Rocan: Born in 1980, this bilingual Franco-
Manitoban graduated with a BFA from the University of
Manitoba and is currently completing her Master of Fine Arts at
Concordia University, Montreal. She has recently been
nominated as a semifinalist in the 8th annual RBC [Financial
Group] painting competition. Her work is included in a group
exhibition traveling to galleries across Canada including the
Musee d’art contemporain de Montreal, The Museum of
Contemporary Art in Toronto and the Contemporary Art Gallery
of Vancouver. In 2005, she was part of an exchange program
with the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland. In 2007 she will be
part of a Too-Sicks group show at the Harvey Levine Gallery, in
Los Angeles.
My recent work speaks of the fragility of human beings and the
reality of the subconscious state. I want to capture a distressed
beauty in the work which suggests the inner emotional
condition, highs and lows, a psychological unease. There is a
dichotomy between the difficulty to comprehend the reality of the
internal world and a reaction to the outside world’s fragility and
the present state of the earth. I use the environment to
address issues concerning identity and by isolating the figure I
want to emphasize the ever growing disconnect between us and
our environment.
I rely on an intuitive process to create these works which gives
me the freedom to search and make discoveries. I find the
struggles of creating work by intuition and memory takes me on
a constant search to re-invent and build the work, within the
internal domains of my conscience. This process also allows
room for balance from my hand and the medium itself to
communicate. I use a variety of languages and diverse
techniques combined on one surface, a pastiche in the imagery as
well as in the way I paint. By using these techniques I want
to capture and evoke inconsistencies of emotions, making the
work linger in between a darkness and a playfulness, to be able
to affect and give sensations.
Jessica Christy was born in Valley City, North Dakota,
and recently graduated from Valley City State University. The
daughter of well-known artist/art professor Linda Whitney, she
has lived in and around art her entire life. Consequently she
began making and showing art at a young age. In the fall of 2007
she began work on her MFA in mixed media at the University of
North Dakota.
Asked about her work, she replied: When creating my art, I delve
deep into my subjects, to a place where I can look out from their
perspective. I grew up having my mischievous behavior blamed
on being “bohunk.” I became curious to its origin and started
digging into the culture of the Roma. I am fascinated with
American culture and its perspective on the world, so studying
the world of the Gypsies allowed me to step back and approach
tradition and society in a whole new light. That’s how the gypsy
went to heaven… discusses some of the most prominent beliefs
of the Roma. The power of the color red and strong belief of
order and cleanliness are addressed. I created this piece in an
attempt to highlight and separate the preconceived ideas of the
way these people live.
Ned Krouse, a native of Ft. Wayne, Indiana, was an
elementary school teacher for many years before his interest in
pottery and his desire to make handmade objects led him back
to school and a degree in fine art. He completed his MFA at the
Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia in 1982 before moving to
Wilmington, North Carolina, where his wife, Susan, was
pursuing a career in museum work. Her Doctorate in Cultural
Anthropology later allowed them to travel across much of
America.
Ned's curiosity about other cultures encountered during his
travels has allowed him to formulate and incorporate his own
ideas about glazes, color, size, and form into his work. Ned's
ceramics have been widely exhibited in the Northeast, the
Midwest and North Carolina.
As a studio potter, Krouse specializes in colorful raku pottery. His
pieces are removed from a kiln while red hot and smoked in a
reduction chamber (usually a metal garbage can filled with straw
and sawdust). Krouse has been a part of the teaching staff at the
Potters' Guild since his move to the Lansing area in 2000. Back
in 1989-90 Krouse taught for a year at Minot State University,
filling in for a faculty member on leave.
Lot #26
Ned KrouseHaslet, Michigan
Prairie Sunset, 2007
Slip decorated and raku fired stoneware
14 inch diameter, 3.25 inches deep
Range: $150 - 175
Lot #27
Brent BraniffMinot, North Dakota
Crisis
Oil on canvas
24 x 8 inches, 2007
Range: $350-400
Lot #28
KIM FINKGrand Forks, North Dakota
The Blood Beneath My Feet
Hybrid print (woodcut, flocking,
stickers, and serigraph)
38 x 36 inches, 2006
Range: $600 - 800
Brent Braniff exhibited a color pencil drawing in last
year’s auction. However, over the past year and a half my art has
taken a drastic change. I have gone from drawing to painting and
from tightly planned illustrations to doing work that evolves from
idea to idea. The process becomes part of the finished art.
Each of these paintings has moments of discovery without the
predetermination I was accustomed to with the illustrations. I
found that the less I force myself to follow a pre-planned
execution the more successful the piece. More recently I began
to introduce some of the narrative that I had in my drawings by
painting my photography into the work. My themes of spirituality
and sensuality become some of the foundation for the color
fields and symbols that are major elements in the image.
At first, I was convinced that if I turned to this more painterly
direction I would lose the directness that I enjoyed with the
drawings. In fact, I found the opposite to be true. With each
chance I took, reworking the intended outcome, the layers of color
became the richness of the story.
Perhaps this is the direction I should’ve taken all along. Although,
I haven’t abandoned drawing all together I’m sure that the past
year will have an effect on the look of any future works.
Brannif, who grew up in Devils Lake, North Dakota, was
studying art with Walter Piehl at Minot State University while
exploring electronic music on the side.Today Braniff continues to
live in Minot where he works as a television technician.
Kim Fink’s current work involves hybrid printing techniques,
illustrating what he says is an exploration of comparative culture
in what is termed “cultural” or “group memory”—implicit as well
as explicit—all of which forms us as individuals, as a group, and
ultimately as a nation. Conceptually, I develop a visual diary or
personal “travelogue” specifically reflecting our times in the early
twenty-first century. Images are drawn largely from contemporary
mass media and contrasted by hand-executed application in
opposition to mechanical or “cool” reproduction processes. It is
an attempt to create a fusion of cultural realities that explore
subjective versus objective visions and attempt to develop a
synthesis between image and meaning.
As art critic Michael Duncan wrote of Fink’s work: Kim Fink
assembles picture games, refining their strategies in structured
Ian August is a painter, lately of portraits from life, and a
member of the Winnipeg collective Two Six (or Two-Sicks or 26
or Twenty-Six or Too-Six). This group of seven artists in their early
to mid-twenties began as teenage graffiti writers steeped in
skateboard culture. Most are recent graduates from the
University of Manitoba's School of Art in Winnipeg, including
August who matriculated with honors in 2004.
According to Winnipeg's artist/critic Cliff Eyland, Two-Six paints
quietly in their shared studio and bicycles wildly in the streets,
decorating the city with original works of art that they call
“prefabs.” Many prefabs are painted with commercial colors
called “mistints,” that is, house paint that has been rejected by a
buyer after already having been mixed. Mistinted paint on
rejected pieces of wood found in the dumpsters makes prefabs a
fabulous return of the repressed.
Prefabs are small, original paintings that are “nail bombed” to
city fences and walls during the ritual bicycle expedition 26 calls
a “party bike.” In galleries, they install, along with large stretched
paintings, collections of small wall works they call “Shame Walls,”
a punning reference of Halls of Fame.
Each artist in the group also makes his or her personal work.
Such are the five small paintings in this auction by Ian August.
Painted on the outside of covers torn from hardcover books, they
defy logical interpretation although his working titles give clues:
wood grain, sore toe, stir sticks, Sumo Love, rope knot. His
charming and not-so charming characters go madly about their
unknown business, resembling, if anything, leftover characters
from Dr. Seuss. Another clue: Ian spent the last year in Banff but
returned to Winnipeg to live “because he missed the winters.”
Lot #29
Untitled
2006
9.5 x 6.3 inches
Lot #30
Untitled
2005
10.2 x 7.25 inches
Lot #31
Untitled
2004
9.4 x 6.3 inches
Lot #32
Untitled
2003
8 x 5.5 inches
Lot #33
Untitled
2006
9.6 x 6.4 inches
Ian AugustWinnipeg, Manitoba
Five paintings on
book covers
Range: $80 - 100 each
combinations. These goals are meticulously painted mysteries
and intricately layered prints. It’s an image world, baby. . . you
gotta know the symbols to survive. . . . (from the exhibition 4-
Way Stop, Donna Beam Gallery, University of Las Vegas, 1999).
The Blood Beneath My Feet is the central panel of a five-panel
allegorical work-in-progress that explores human life, addressing
such themes as the transience of life, death and wisdom, amongst
others. Primarily woodcut, this hybrid, or mixed-media print
includes silkscreen, flocking and stickers.
Kim Fink teaches printmaking at the University of North Dakota.
Lot #34
Jon SolingerMoorhead, Minnesota
Elm Elegy, 2006
Digital and film
42 x 19 inches
Range: $600 - 700
Jon Solinger: This work is part of a photography project
intended to lyrically document the life and death of trees in my
Moorhead neighborhood’s landscape. It especially relates to elm
trees and Dutch elm disease; how the process of change on my
street points out the impermanence of all things.
In this work I’m experimenting with visual ideas from the world
of books; folding the print to create gutters reminiscent of an open
volume, and presenting the print on a wooden easel
inspired by a library dictionary stand.
I like drawing a parallel between book forms that remind me of
many stories read, individual trees’ life stories as told by growth
rings in their stumps, and the larger tale of the demise of the
elms in my neighborhood. They all unfold in a progression that
moves from beginning through to an end.
These landscapes speak to the give and take between humans
and the natural world, how we respond and adapt, and signs of
time's passage.
Jon Solinger of Moorhead has been photographing the trees of
the Red River Valley and the Minnesota lake country for years.
In 2000 the North Dakota Museum of Art secured a grant from
Nodak Electric Foundation to allow Solinger to photograph
extensively. The Museum mounted an exhibition of eighty of his
photographs which opened in Grand Forks in the summer of
2005 and subsequently toured for two years throughout North
Dakota through the Museum’s Rural Arts Initiative. The Museum
is publishing a book of these photographs. His most recent
exhibition was a two-man show with Mark Anthony at the Plains
Art Museum in Fargo, winter 2006-07. Solinger enriches his
newest color photographs with layers of information. His themes
incorporate ideas of land usage along with the history of the life
of trees in the Red River Valley. Solinger teaches photography
part-time at the University of Minnesota, Moorhead, and runs
Solinger’s Resort on Lake Lida, four miles east of Pelican Rapids,
Minnesota.
Note: Work will be housed in a Plexiglass box.
imposed on simple shapes and forms. These images resonate with
many childhood and local memories. At the same time I wish to
dazzle the viewer’s eyes with color.
Robert Crowe lives on the family farm near Comstock,
Minnesota. This past summer he showed at the Plains Art
Museum in Fargo in the exhibition Personal Journeys on
Common Ground: Robert Crawford Crowe, Dan Jones, Carl
Oltvedt. He is represented by the Boerths Gallery in Fargo.
“Plein Aire” painters work on location to quickly capture the
fleeting light effects that occur in nature. Typically the initial
painting is completed on location in two to three hours before the
quality of the light changes. The artist may return to the same
location at the same time of day to complete the work, or may
make adjustments in the studio.
Painting in this manner, rather than from photographs, gives the
artwork a quality of being truthful to nature and conveys an
atmosphere and feeling of a place that is not achievable by any
other means. When viewing a Plein Air painting, you can almost
imagine yourself in the scene. —Carmel Plein Aire Gallery
Lot #35
Robert Crawford CroweMoorhead, Minnesota
Untitled
Pastel on paper
18 x 22 inches, 2007
Range: $800 - 1,200
Sponsored by KXJB TV
Robert Crowe: Having been born into the family who
owned the Bergstrom and Crowe Furniture store in Fargo for ninety
years, I spent most of my early life in retail and interior
design. During this time I was painting artistically and doing faux
finishes in my spare time. Finally, I became frustrated with retail
and decided to return from Dallas to Fargo to finish a long
overdue art degree at the University of Minnesota, Moorhead.
While finishing my BFA, I began teaching at Creative Arts Studio
in Fargo. There I became friends with Robert Kurkowski, the
Studio’s director, and through Bob I fell in love with teaching
kids. After getting my BA, I decided to pursue a BS in education.
While completing this second degree, also at Moorhead, I met and
became friends with painting instructor Carl Oltvedt and
Dan Jones, another local painter.
Carl and Dan introduced me to Plein Aire painting. This way of
painting has a long history in that most of the great Impressionists
and Expressionists painted this way. The three of us became close
friends and began to paint together often. Through Carl and Dan I
learned to appreciate our Lakes Country and our beautiful Red
River Valley. These subjects have been my major focus for the last
ten years as I continued to paint realistic, local landscapes.
For the last three years I have been concentrating on abstraction of
these local images by pushing color as far as I can. The result is
what you see in the work in the exhibition: brilliant color
In 2002, he began work on his MFA in sculpture at the University
of North Dakota (2004). He currently works as Coordinator of
Marketing and Graphic Design at Presentation College,
Aberdeen. He also serves as an adjunct art instructor at Northern
State University and Presentation College.
In 2007 Blair completed an outdoor sculpture commission for
Northern State University. The sculpture, My Body is a Cage,
was installed in June in the main green space on campus.
Blair has a long relationship with the North Dakota Museum of
Art as a artist who creates sculpture with children through the
Museum’s Rural Arts Initiative. As part of the Museum’s Emptying
Out of the Plains project, Blair cast tree sap into the images of
the human heart as a memorial to trees that once thrived in
North Dakota during the glacial Lake Agassiz era. His tombstone
installation also cited trees that have the potential to become
extinct. When asked to create an additional sculpture in the
Museum Garden, Blair asked himself, “How would a museum
display a tree specimen?” His answer: Treat it like a dinosaur.
His tree dinosaur occupied the southwest corner of the Museum
Garden for months.
Greg Blair: This piece is from my series that integrates
natural materials with works on paper. I have been thinking
about the influence of Christianity on our cultural perceptions
and attitudes towards nature. Within Christian imagery, evil is
often represented as an animal or something else from the
natural world: the snake in the Garden of Eden, the plagues of
frogs and locusts, and the devil as half goat. This piece is the
opposite in that good is represented by something organic or
natural. I decided to use the Holy Trinity, God, Jesus, and the Holy
Spirit, because together they sybolize the epitome of goodness.
The three leaves, which are positioned level to each other, are
almost exactly the same, but each is still unique. One of the leaves
has the top portion broken off and placed slightly above the leaf
body. This is meant to be the crown that God wears in the
kingdom of heaven. I chose this opposite representation of
Christian imagery in order to satirically comment on the
underlying ideology concerning nature in Christianity.
Greg Blair was born in Edmonton, Alberta, but spent his early
years in Red Deer (south of Edmonton in the treed foothills of the
Rocky Mountains). He received his BFA degree from the
University of Lethbridge in Alberta with an emphasis in sculpture.
Lot #36
Greg BlairAberdeen, South Dakota
The Holy Trinity
Leaves, paper and charcoal
19 x 24 inches, 2007
Range: $350 - 500
Greg Blair has donated theproceeds from the sale of this work of art to the
Museum of Art
Lot # 37
Georgie PapageorgePretoria, South Africa
Study, Waiting for the Mountain to Come Out Series
Oil and graphite on Fabriano paper
27.75 x 39.25 inches
1997
Range: $800 - $1,200
Georgie Papageorge draws like an angel. Her line is
sure, swift, and elegant. Inevitably the drawings appear in her
exhibitions as “working drawings.” Rather, I believe them to be
summations, made by the artist at the end of a large body of
work, incorporating all that has gone before. Once finished, the
large-scale monumental drawings, laced with calligraphy and
expanded with washes of paint, become singular works of art,
more comprehensive and more mysterious than the
photographic murals, the sculpture, the installations, and the
videos from which they gather their substance.
Georgie Papageorge, born in 1941 as Jennifer Jane van der
Merwe in Simonstown, Cape Province, South Africa, changed
her name to George when she was ten—and a few years later, to
Georgie. This heralded the beginning of what can only be
described as an extraordinary life, marked by tragedy and an
incredible ability to rise above it all. She graduated with a BA
from the University of South Africa, Pretoria, at the age of 40 and
embarked on an international art career.
Her art has never been without intense personal, spiritual, and
social investment, with the notion of transcending “barriers”
central to her work—political in her earlier art and
transcendental in later works.
Throughout the 1980s South Africa and its violent political
situation provided the conceptual basis of her art. The political
work, which came from this time, included Collaboration,
Suspension and other monumental works that were exhibited in
the United States, including the North Dakota Museum of Art,
which owns a substantial body of the earlier work and in 2005
published a full catalogue covering ten year’s work.
In 1994, Papageorge began working in the Kalahari Desert,
Botswana, to produce the Gondwanaland Series, a land-art series
based in the Sowa Salt Pan. In pursuit of the Great Rift Valley, she
traveled north to Mount Kilimanjaro, which she has climbed
three times, making this great African mountain the subject of her
next major project.
This drawing comes from that large series, “Kilimanjaro Through
the Rifting Barrier.” She made the drawing, Waiting for the
Mountain to Come Out, in a mealie (corn) field while waiting for
the barrier of clouds to move away to reveal the tip of
Kilimanjaro. She centers herself in line with the mountain
through the use of the circle. In 2008-09 the North Daktoa
Musuem of Art will mount a major exhibition of Papageorge’s
work, including the Kilimanjaro series.
Lot #38
Todd HebertLos Angeles, California
Snowman with Grass #3
Acrylic and watercolor on paper
2007
10.50 x 29.75 inches
Range: $1,800 - 2,200
Sponsored by East Grand Floral
Todd Hebert’s paintings are fuzzy definition incarnate—
lush images of melting snowmen, sweating water bottles and
bubblegum backyard Americana seen, delicately, coolly, through
the prism of the morning dew caught on an invisible spider web.
The young Los Angeles-based artist's paintings are deftly blurry,
eerily suggestive, an enigma made out of the familiar and the
obvious. There is a special, childlike and almost primeval, sense
of wonder at the physical world which the works increasingly con-
vey. Still their highly crafted, minutely designed facture
unabashedly plays with the idea of digital manipulation with a
very knowing, not quite entirely out of focus, playful “broken cam-
era” aesthetic—resulting in the mysterious soft edges and off kil-
ter, from the hip perspective that have become one of Hebert's
signature framing games, a magical mixture of thematic heft with
light-as-air touch. Patient distillation, requiring the same of the
viewer.
Following his Emerging Artist Award exhibition at the Aldrich
Contemporary Art Museum (Ritchfield, Connecticut) last year,
Hebert showed five new paintings at Mark Moore in Los Angeles,
a show in which he further investigated the physical and
metaphorical properties of that which might be his favorite
element—water. As his gallerist points out, his paintings are like
elaborately staged film stills, reminiscent of some of Los Angeles
legend John Baldessari's conceptual-based paintings that play with
the nature of meaning and notions of art theory, and of
fiction, abstraction, what constitutes substance.
Like so many of Hebert’s paintings, Snowman with Grass #3 is
full and empty at the same time, and as evanescent, beautiful and
ephemeral as they are real.
Hebert was born in Valley City, North Dakota, in 1972. He
received a BFA from the University of North Dakota in 1996, and
in 1998 he earned an MFA from the Rhode Island School of
Design. He has been a fellow at both the Fine Arts Work Center
in Provincetown, and at the Core Program, Glassell School of Art
in Houston. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles and is
represented by Mark Moore Gallery in Santa Monica.
The artist recently completed a print edition for the Aldrich
Contemporary Art Museum and is also currently in a three-
person show, “Works on Paper: Todd Hebert, Dennis
Hollingsworth, Jason Meadows,” at the Cirrus Gallery in Los
Angeles. Hebert will have a solo show at Jack Shainman Gallery,
New York, in 2008.
— Quoted passage by London critic Lupe Nunez-Fernandez
Todd Hebert is from North Dakota. He sees the world the way North Dakotans do a good part of the time: the world made white
and blurry, or gorgeously colored, by shifting snowin a country where the Prevailing Westerlies seldom
stop blowing.
Barton Lidice Benes’ suite of twelve construction
lithographs was produced between October 2004 and June 2005
at the Sequoia Press, in conjunction with the University of North
Dakota Art Department. Kim Fink, Chair of UND’s Printmaking
Department, founded the Sequoia Press.
There are twelve suites, numbered 1/12 to 12/12 and there is no
bon a tirer suite or proofs. Each print is signed, numbered and
dated by the artist. All images are on archival material as follows:
Each “dream” image has been scanned and printed on archival
80 lb. “ultra-white” printing paper, using an Epson 3700 Photo
Scanner and MacIntosh G5 computer as matrix. Each “dream” is
printed with an Epson Stylus Photo 2200 printer, using T0300
series archival ink, and flocked with #612 “golden flow” Vintage
Glass Glitter, and glued onto Arches 400 lb. watercolor paper,
using archival glue.
Each dream “bubble” is flocked with #612 glass glitter on Arches
300 lb. watercolor paper, using archival glue. Each “stamped”
image is printed from aluminum plate lithography matrix.
Lot #39
Barton Lidice BenesNew York, New York
Wet Dreams, 2004-05
Twelve constructed lithographs with
title pages and box (right)
Each approximately 8.5 x 10.5 inches
Edition 12/12
Range: $2,500 - 3,000
Walter Piehl was born into a family that raised rodeo
stock so he rode horses as a matter of course. When he arrived
at graduate school at the University of Minnesota in 1969, Bill
Goldstein, now the Director of Universal Limited Art Editions but
then a fellow student, commented that from the beginning
Walter drew with great confidence and skill. We were beginning
students and he arrived full-blown. He put his hand to paper and
the lines flowed. And he drew horses.
But before that, at the beginning of his experience with the world
outside of Marion, North Dakota, Walter went to Concordia, a
small Lutheran college in Moorhead, Minnesota, enrolling in
1960. Cy Running was his teacher. Walter was the skittish colt. I
was so used to calendar art, to illustration, to cowboy art as it
appeared in the magazines, I had a hard time.
Piehl went on to draw and paint horses, year after year, never
wearying of his subject, never despairing in his quest to create
Lot #40
Walter PiehlMinot, North Dakota
red bob: sweetheart of the rodeo,
with thanks to Dave Doll
Acrylic on canvas
39.5 x 27.5 inches, 2007
Range: $3,500 – 4,500
Sponsored by Merrill Lynch
contemporary Western art. By drawing, overdrawing, and re-
drawing, Piehl could leave the traces of movement on the paper.
He worked and reworked the surface, always leaving enough
description for the viewer to follow the motion of a falling hat, a
rider flying backward, the gesture of a flinging hand, a boot
following the body into a somersault as the rider is tossed.
Ultimately Piehl is charmed by the bucking horse, for him the
real sweetheart of the rodeo, and the title of his on-going series,
of which there are hundreds of paintings and drawings.
Today Piehl is widely recognized as one of North Dakota’s senior
painters and as the artist who singularly pioneered the
contemporary cowboy art movement. In 2003 the Plains Art
Museum mounted a retrospective of his work. In 2004 he was
honored with the Governor’s Award for the Arts and in 2005 he
was appointed to the North Dakota Council on the Arts as a
member at large. And, Piehl continues to ride horses.
Lot #41
Marjorie Talle MerrimanTowson and Baltimore (studio) Maryland
Stavlirke Series #9
Ink and watercolor on paper
28 x 22.5 inches, 1983
Range: $350 - 450
Norway’s Stave Churches: Most churches built in Norway
before the Black Death swept across the country (and Europe as
well) in the years 1349-51, were stave churches, which take their
names from the distinctive building technique using vertical
staves. There must have been approximately 800 - 1000 stave
churches in Norway, although there are only about thirty original
stave churches remaining today.
The oldest type of stave churches were built in the 1000s, but the
timber of their walls were set directly into the ground and, as a
result, they quickly rotted away. In the 1100s it became
customary to set the walls on beams or sills above ground. Thus
all stave churches still standing rest on such sills.
There are several kinds of stave churches. The simplest have only
a nave, with a narrower chancel—in these churches the roof
rests on the walls. Some stave churches have a tall, sturdy upright
or mast in the middle which supports the ridge turret and
strengthens the walls. The biggest and most elaborate type has a
central section with a lofty ceiling, which is supported by
freestanding posts upon the floor. A lower aisle encircles the
central area. — Arild Hauge, Denmark
Stave churches may be Norway's foremost contribution to world
cultural heritage—this church is on UNESCO's World Heritage
List.
Marjorie Merriman is a consummate painter-
printmaker with deep ties to the Northern Plains region. Her
grandparents were married in the Dakota Territory. Her
grandfather, Ole Larson Huset, owned two farms in North
Dakota and his heirs, including Marjorie, share the ownership.
Her mother, Edith Margaret Huset, grew up on a farmstead near
Hatton and in a house on Reeves Drive in Grand Forks.
Marjorie’s father, Henry O. Talle, was born on a farm near Albert
Lea, Minnesota, and graduated from Luther College in Decorah,
Iowa, in 1917. In 1919 and 1920 he taught and was
superintendent of schools in Rugby and Rolette, North Dakota.
Shortly after, the family moved to Decorah, Iowa, where they
lived for the next two decades and where Marjorie was born. She
moved with her family to Washington in 1939 when her father
became a United States Representative in Congress. Marjorie
graduated from The College of William and Mary and received
her MFA in painting from the Mount Royal School of Art at the
Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore.
Both a painter and a printmaker, Merriman has created a
significant body of work about Norway’s stave churches, having
visited the stave church in Norway where her grandfather Huset
was baptized and confirmed.
Active in Maryland Printmakers Association, she continues to go
daily to her studio where she houses her own printing press. Her
recent concentration on printmaking has produced work that is
abstract although it references nature and symbolic forms.
According to printmaker Nancy Friese (a cousin), “Marjorie’s
work has a direct and graphic strength.”
Marjorie Merriman has lived in Cornwall, England, and the US
Virgin Islands, and she has traveled extensively including four trips
to Norway to paint churches. Merriman co-founded a non-
profit exhibition space in Maryland where she curated monthly
shows. As a curator she also has produced several large group
exhibitions, including a show of five family painters for
Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum in Iowa, and has
advised corporate collections.
Jim Bailey’s work in the auction, Sixtyfour, was given
Honorable Mention in ANA 35: A National Juried Exhibition at
the Holter Museum in Helena, Montana. Of the 600 entrants,
147 works in all media were chosen. Sixtyfour was reproduced
along with half-a-dozen other images in the exhibition brochure.
Sixtyfour is part of the artist’s Customized Series, which draws
upon two different but equally important aspects of his life:
wheel-thrown ceramic vessels and automotive culture. Bailey
seeks to merge these seemingly unrelated topics in his art.
The ceramic vessel evolved as a practical device for food storage.
Gradually they took on decorative as well as religious elements of
the local culture including being used as reliquaries for human re-
mains. Today ceramic vessels are quite devoid of function,
either practical or symbolic. Commercial products have replaced
them and contemporary social customs have devalued their
importance. Now the ceramic vessel functions solely as a
decorative object, the expression of personal taste and interests.
According the artist, my interest in cars dates back to my youth,
when the automobile represented my first definition of
masculinity and personal freedom. As an adult, this interest has
shifted to the cultural implications of the customized vehicle.
Many embellishments are pure ornamentation as the hot-rodder
aesthetic demands that functional parts of the automobile be
customized. This ensures a consistency of style throughout the
entire vehicle that manifests itself through a strict accordance to
form—form follows function.
Lot #42
Jim BaileyMinot, North Dakota
Sixtyfour
Stoneware, cone six oxidation with
metal, vinyl. and rubber
24 x 21.5 inches, 2004
Range: $1,600 – 2,000
At some point these separate passions merged, and my
ceramic vessels became infused with the hot-rod
aesthetic. The elaborate fit, finish and presentation in
my artwork replicate the custom car experience and
acts as a testament to a cultural lifestyle. My vessels,
like some “show cars,” are no longer primarily about
utility. These customized vessels become symbolic
objects diverting attention to surface, color, and
imagination. They reveal a host of social and cultural
attitudes and beliefs about function, style and individuality.
As an undergraduate art major, Jim Bailey enrolled in his first
ceramics course in 1992 at Minot State University. A year later
Bailey joined Davy Pottery in Burlington, North Dakota. During
his six years as a production potter, he divided his time between
production, distribution and marketing of the full pottery line.
In 2002, Bailey finished his BFA degree and was accepted into
the graduate program at the University of North Dakota. In 2005
he graduated with a MFA having also acquired three years of
university teaching experience.
From 2005 to 2007 Bailey completed a residency at the Custer
County Art and Heritage Center in Miles City, Montana. As
Resident Artist, Jim was responsible for the in-house adult
ceramic classes. He also contributed to the educational outreach
programs to area schools and communities, as well as organizing
and maintaining the Center’s ceramic studio.
Bailey is currently an instructor at Minot State University where
he teaches ceramics and other related studio courses. He
exhibits, locally, regionally and throughout the United States.
Weekends find him working as a track announcer at the local
drag strip during the racing season.
Lot #43
Gregory VettelFriday, August 13, 1806
Digital composite giclee print
26 x 34 inches
Range: $400 - 600
GREGORY VETTEL: I was born in Hillsboro, North Dakota,
and grew up in the flat Red River Valley, lived in western North
Dakota, the mountains of Montana and Los Angeles and visited
New York, Denver, Chicago, Mexico City, Buenos Aires and
Montevideo, Uruguay. I like the contrast of living in and
experiencing different geographical regions, but have always
come back to my childhood terrain where the sky and land go on
forever.
My landscape photography and love of history are combined in
my auction piece as I attempt to echo the feeling of surviving
through hunting in the North Dakota environment under our won-
derful summer skies. I made this work in response to William
Clark’s journal entry on Wednesday (Friday), August 13, 1806
which said:
The last night was very cold with a stiff breeze from the
northwest. All hands were on board and we set out at sunrise and
proceeded on very well with a stiff breeze astern the greater part
of the day. Passed the entrance of the Little Missouri River at 8
A. M. and arrived at the entrance of Myry (sic) River at sunset and
encamped on the northeast side having came by the assistance
of the wind, the current and our oars eighty-six miles. Below the
little basin I with Drewyer walked through the northeast point.
We saw an elk and several deer. Drewyer wounded the elk but
Gregory Vettel has donated the proceeds from the sale of this
work of art to the Museum of Art
could not get him. I joined the pirogues and party again in the
bend below and proceeded on. Some Indians were seen in a skin
canoe below. They were descending from an old camp of theirs
on the southeast side, those I suppose to be some of the
Minetaras who had been up on a hunting expedition, one canoe
was left at their camp. We had not proceeded far before I
discovered two Indians on a high hill. Nothing very remarkable
took place. The mosquitoes are not so troublesome this evening
as they have been. The air is cool. . . . [spelling has been
regularized]
Greg Vettel received his BA from Minot State University in art and
graphic design. He’s spent thirty-eight years studying and
repairing all types of mechanisms from motorcycles to telescopes
before becoming the Exhibition Coordinator and Registrar at the
North Dakota Museum of Art. This former automobile,
motorcycle, and truck technician transformed his love of
machines into sculpture and prints made of and inspired by
discarded Harley Davidson parts, which he has exhibited
extensively throughout the region. Professionally, he serves as
President of the North Dakota Art Gallery Association and is a
new board member of the Grand Forks County Historical Society.
He purchased the thirty-acre family farmstead in rural Thompson,
North Dakota, and filled it with his wild and eclectic collection of
motorcycles, cars, boats, machines and works of art.
Lot #44
Joan HallSt. Louis, Missouri
Bikar
Handmade paper, printing,
sisal fibers, pulp painting
30 x 40 inches, 1999
Range: $1,200 - 1,500
JOAN HALL is known for her large-scale, sculptural prints
that are thickly layered with handmade paper, pulp, and printing
ink. The process of addition and subtraction, cutting out shapes
and painting with paper, creates a deep and complex surface that
reveals new images as we look deeper into the work. It is as
though the viewer is diving through the surface of the ocean.
Implicit natural phenomena, such as water, wind, currents, and
waves not only show the artist’s long fascination with the sea, but
also portray the permeability of human beings’ basic structure
from part to whole; we are of and by the sea. Hall has always
sailed and always brought the sea into her art. According to Hall:
w I like to work with a mixed media approach to printmaking.
w The Internet has opened up a good community for
networking and reading technical information, so it's been pretty
positive overall.
w I love sailboat racing, so many of my pieces are suggestive of
the sea. I like to multi-layer the sheets of paper I've made using
different textures, weights, and densities. The layering represents
the water and the mysteries that lie below.
w The ocean is like another world. Being out on the water, when
you can no longer see land, you definitely feel like you’re out of
your element. [In my prints] I wanted to recreate the sense of
journey and of the human need to explore and dream of new hori-
zons.
w Making paper, that’s the easy part.
w Linocut, collagraph, monoprint—I’ll use whatever works for a
particular piece. Printmaking and papermaking are so
unbelievably physical and labor intensive that if you don’t keep
pushing, you can get caught up in technique and not think enough
about making art.
Born and raised in Ohio, Hall earned a BA from Columbus
College of Art and Design and spent a summer at San Francisco’s
Institute of Experimental Printmaking, working with Garner Tullis
before receiving her MFA from the University of Nebraska. Today,
Joan Hall is Professor of Art at the Sam Fox School of Design and
Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis where she holds
the Kenneth E. Hudson Professorship.
Her work is included in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum
of Art; the Saint Louis Art Museum; the Fogg Art Museum at
Harvard University; the Leopold-Hoesch Museum in Duren,
Germany; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art; the Pulitzer
Foundation for the Arts; the Evansville Museum of Art; the
Municipal Museum, Suwa, Japan; and the Municipal Museum,
Nanjing, China. Her work has been published in over ten books
and her latest exhibition was at the Hillwood Museum, Long
Island University, New York.
Hall has deep roots in North Dakota, her mother’s home. As a
child she spent her summers in Carson, located in Grant County
southwest of Bismarck.
Tim Schouten‘s paintings from the initial Treaty Lands
Series present landscapes within the geographic boundaries of
Canada/First Nations Treaties. The first body of work was created
between 1996 and 2000. The Treaty Lands title has become an
umbrella title for an extended series of works which now
includes the Distances Between web project, the Roads North
and Markers Series of paintings as well as The Treaty Suites on-
going Series of paintings made on the sites of treaty signings
between Canada and its native people. The treaties gave rights of
land usage and economic support to the native inhabitants in
exchange for land ownership, both above and below the surface.
Still today, as in the United States, legal wrangling continues
between the Canadian government and its native citizens.
The lyrical landscapes of the treaty series are visually gorgeous, lu-
minous and shimmering, and all the while underpinned by
troubling questions of land ownership in North America. The
artist researches each treaty site, photographing the landscape,
digging through historical files in search of the records of treaty en-
actment, intent upon understanding the layers of conflict and
beauty associated with each specific place. For Schouten
landscape is visual place. Landscape is also the dumping ground
of human grief. As the critic Mariianne Mays eloquently
Lot #45
Tim SchoutenPetersfield, Manitoba
From the Treaty 4 Suite
8.5 x 11 inches
Oil, dry pigment, microcrystalline
wax, beeswax and damar resin
on acid free vellum
Range: $150 - 250
summarizes, political questions of property and Aboriginal
disenfranchisement beat at the heart of these paintings.
This most recent Treaty 4 Suite contains a couple dozen exquisite
little paintings made of encaustic on velum. Part of the on-going
Treaty Suites Project, they are based largely on photographs
taken by the artist at the two locations where Treaty 4 was signed
in 1874. The Cree and Saulteaux of the Qu’Appelle Valley and
surrounding regions signed the Treaty with Canada at a spot that
is now on a residential street in the town of Fort Qu’Appelle in
Saskatchewan. Additional Cree, Saulteaux and Stony of the
region made Treaty ten days later at Fort Ellice near what is now
St. Lazarre, Manitoba. Treaty 4 Territory covers approximately
50,000 square miles of southern Saskatchewan as well as small
portions of Manitoba and Alberta.
Note: Today the building in these works of art functions as the
local hockey arena.
Lot #46
Tim SchoutenPetersfield, Manitoba
From the Treaty 4 Suite
8.5 x 11 inches
Oil, dry pigment, microcrystalline
wax, beeswax and damar resin
on acid free vellum
Range: $150 - 250
Lot #47
Marlon Davidson AND Don KnudsonBemidji, Minnesota
Five Landscapes, 2006
84 x 28 x 2 inches
Mixed media (detail below)
Range: $1,500 - 2,000
Marlon Davidson and Don Knudsonhave devoted their lives to art, first individually and ultimately as
collaborators. The work in this auction results from over a dozen
years working in wood and collage to make collaborations of
varying sizes and shifting configurations. Their collaborative art
works are in private and public collections throughout the
United States and Europe.
Davidson and Knudson both attended Bemidji State College and
the Minneapolis School of Art (now the Minneapolis College of
Art and Design). Davidson combined his art with education, first
in public schools and later at Bemidji State University where he
taught in the Visual Arts Department. Knudson has worked since
the late fifties as a sculptor and furniture maker.
We are lifetime artists. We have worked for over four decades,
both in the Twin Cities and later in Bemidji where we have lived
for eighteen years. We think of our lives as an artistic statement.
The great art historian, Bernard Berenson, wrote repeatedly
about “life as a work of art,” Whereas one never arrives at that
state, we find it a worthwhile journey. Making art objects is an
everyday part of our lives. We think of our art as a way of
explaining ourselves to ourselves. Through it, we try to
understand our culture, and to live actively within it. We also
explore the past through our art—especially the history of art.
While we use a variety of materials, our main source of inspira-
tion is nature and historical art.
Both born in northern Minnesota, we also lived for twenty years
in the Twin Cities. We are aware that our work is informed by the
art and artists we knew while living in the Cities.
Lot # 49 (right)
Ingrid RestemeyerMinneapolis, Minnesota
Gentlefish scroll #7, 2007
Etching and cotton thread
on handmade paper
50. 5 x 20. 5 inches
Range: $1,800 - 2,200
These are Sponsored by
Chester Fritz Auditorium
Ingrid Restemeyer is a printmaker and fiber artist
originally from North Dakota but now living and working in
northeast Minneapolis. Influenced by generations of fine crafters,
Restemeyer’s work reflects traditional embroidery techniques
while incorporating other process-intensive mediums through
collage. Her latest body of work features recognizable imagery
in the form of intricate etchings on handmade papers,
successively collaged with fine printmaking papers and
punctuated by paragraph-like forms made from hand-stitched
threads. For years Restemeyer’s art has alluded to storytelling or
narration through the use of her intaglio images as pseudo-
illustrations which suggest a story when paired with code-like
paragraph shapes formed from her hand-embroidery.
Restemeyer has spent more than a decade growing and
developing her unique combination of printmaking and fiberart
techniques. She studied overseas in Auckland, New Zealand and
Lot # 48 (left)
Ingrid RestemeyerMinneapolis, Minnesota
Swim School, 2007
Etching and cotton thread
on handmade paper
50. 5 x 20. 5 inches
Range: $1,800 - 2,200
in 1996 earned her BFA in Printmaking, Fiberarts and Mixed
Media Visual Arts from the University of North Dakota. In the
past several years she has shown extensively and gained gallery
representation across the United States and overseas.
As well as being dedicated full-time to producing and exhibiting
her artwork, Restemeyer is heavily involved in the Minneapolis
arts community, serving on the Board of Directors of the Rosalux
Gallery and as a lead committee member for the development of
the Northeast Minneapolis Arts District.
Lot #51 (right)
Sheila SpenceWinnipeg, Manitoba
Tulipa #5, Botanicals
Pigment on Somerset paper
Montage of five digital photographs
44 x 12.5 inches, 2007
Range: $800 - 1,000
Sheila Spence has always used her camera to investigate
notions of portraiture, self-portraiture, community and identity.
Then in the winter of 2006-07 her subject radically changed. “I
made them when my Mom was dying.” With her failing mother
always on her mind, she began to think of flowers. She pondered
the continuum of life, meditating on birth and death and all the
stages in between. She longed for spring in the dead of winter.
She wanted badly to make portraits of flowers that were achingly
beautiful. But first she needed flowers.
Her mother’s death came slowly, over the course of the winter,
long enough time to force tulips into bloom. The carefully
guarded bulbs came into flower and she took photographs—
unsatisfactory photographs. Just as every stage of life has its
season, every part of the tulip needed to be seen head on: the
roots, the bulb, the stem, the blossom. It was impossible to
achieve if she photographed the complete flower from one
vantage point.
Gradually, each tulip’s portrait evolved into a montage of
photographs, just as each stage of life demands a shifting point-
of-view if it is to be understood. She didn’t hide the passages with
the tricks of Photoshop but chose instead to allow the viewer to
consider them. The photo shapes are different; the colors not the
same.
Once finished, she hung a suite of four tulips outside of her
mother’s room in the care facility where she spent the last days of
her life.
Shelia Spence will have a solo exhibition, Portraits, at the
Winnipeg Art Gallery in 2008. She currently works as Executive
Director of the Manitoba Printmakers’ Association, Martha Street
Studio. Spence is a senior Canadian artist based in Winnipeg with
a long exhibition record and works in the collections of the
National Gallery of Canada, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the
Manitoba Arts Council Visual Art Bank, the Government of
Manitoba, the University of Winnipeg, Air Canada, and the
Wellness Institute of the Seven Oaks Hospital in Winnipeg.
Lot #50 (left)
Sheila SpenceWinnipeg, Manitoba
Tulipa #2, Botanicals
Pigment on Somerset paper
Montage of four digital photographs
44 x 15.5 inches, 2007
Range: $800 - 1,000
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part of our ongoing promotion of art and artists in the upper midwest. Still Life, oil and mixed media by Mike Marth of Moorhead, Minnesota, is on the cover
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North Dakota Museum of ArtFoundation
Board of DirectorsNorth Dakota Museum of Art
Board of Trustees
Victoria Beard, Vice Chair
David Blehm
Julie Blehm
Ann Brown
Chad Caya
Jeremy Davis
Virginia Dunnigan
John Foster
Bruce Gjovig
David Hasbargen, Chair
Jean Holland
Kim Holmes
Sandy Kaul
Rick Mercil
Laurel Reuter
Alex Reichert, Treasurer
Pat Ryan
Wayne Zimmerman, Secretary
Corinne Alphson, Emerita
Barb Lander, Emerita
Darrell Larson, Emeritus
Robert Lewis, Emeritus
Ellen McKinnon, Emerita
Douglas McPhail, Emeritus
Sanny Ryan, Emerita
Gerald Skogley, Emeritus
Anthony Thein, Emeritus
Kevin Fickenscher, President
Nancy Friese
Bruce Gjovig
Daniel E. Gustafson, Vice Chair
Kitty Keck
Margery McCanna
Betty Monkman, Secretary
Laurel Reuter
North Dakota Museum of Art Staff
Justin Dalzell
Suzanne Fink
Elizabeth Glovatsky
Amy Hovde
Kathy Kendle
Brian Lofthus
Laurel Reuter
Gregory Vettel
Scott Waege
Matthew Wallace
Justin Welsh
Katie Welsh
Student Employees
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Ana Moraru
Andrew Yost
and over fifty volunteers