EVENTS

Teaching at Anderson Ranch Arts Center
+Art at Altitude+
Painting Workshop
Dates: July 28 - August 1, 2025
Register here

ABOUT

Brad Kahlhamer (b. 1956) is an artist working in a range of media including sculpture, drawing, painting, performance, and music to explore what he refers to as the "third place"—a meeting point of two opposing personal histories. Reimagining a subjective vocabulary through a neo-expressionist lens, his work references hallmarks of twentieth-century abstract painting, such as German Expressionism, while incorporating highly personal iconography.

Drawing on his tripartite identity, Kahlhamer’s work navigates his Native American heritage, adoptive German-American family, and adult life in New York City’s Lower East Side. His initial work as an illustrator at Topps Comics, early exposure to Native American ledger drawings (which he considers to be America’s first graphic novels), and the artistic milieu of downtown Manhattan shape the language of his paintings and drawings. While referencing Native American history and culture, his work explores his own displaced identity and straddles notions of authenticity and representation within the discourse of Native American art.

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

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

Kahlhamer holds a B.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, Fond du Lac Campus. Kahlhamer has served on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts, as a Visiting Artist and Critic at the University of Minnesota, and as a Richard Diebenkorn Teaching Fellow at the San Francisco Art Institute.

RECENT Exhibitions

Bowery Nation: Birds Are Talking
Venus Over Manhattan, New York, NY
MAY 13, 2025

Terraphilia
An exhibition by TBA21 and Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza
Curated by Daniela Zyman with Marina Otero Verzier and Walid Raad
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain
JULY 1–SEPTEMBER 28, 2025

+ EXPLODING NATIVE INEVITABLE +
Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, Nebraska
Curated by Brad Kahlhamer and Dan Mills
FEBRUARY 7, 2025 - JULY 13, 2025

+ EXPLODING NATIVE INEVITABLE +
Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, Arizona
Curated by Brad Kahlhamer and Dan Mills
AUGUST 10, 2024 - JANUARY 5, 2025

+ EXPLODING NATIVE INEVITABLE +
Bates College Museum of Art, Lewiston, Maine
Curated by Brad Kahlhamer and Dan Mills
OCTOBER 27, 2023–MARCH 4, 2024

+BRAD KAHLHAMER: NOMADIC STUDIO MAIN CAMP+
Bates College Museum of Art, Lewiston, Maine
OCTOBER 27, 2023–MARCH 4, 2024