Autumn Art Auction North Dakota Museum of Art
Mar 10, 2016
A u t u m n A r t A u c t i o n
N o r t h D a k o t a M u s e u m o f A r t
KXJB TV
KVLY TV
Merrill Lynch
Prairie Public
The North Dakota Museum of Artis grateful to the following entities
who have given generously to guarantee that
the arts may flourish.
North Dakota Museum of Art
A U T U M N A r t A u c t i o nS a t u r d a y , O C T O B E R 1 4 , 2 0 0 6
Wine and hors d’oeuvres 6:30 pm
Auction begins at 8 pm
Autumn Art Auction is
Underwritten by
KXJB TV
KVLY TV
Merrill Lynch
Prairie Public
Auction PreviewSeptember 24 until auction time in the Museum galleries
Monday - Friday, 9 to 5 pm, Saturday - Sunday, 11 to 5 pm
Preview PartyTuesday, September 26, 7 pm, Museum Director Laurel Reuter
will lead an informal discussion about the work in the Auction.
patronsCapone’s
Chester Fritz Auditorium
Clear Channel Communications
East Grand Floral
Grand Forks Herald
High Plains Reader
Holiday Inn
Leighton Broadcasting
Office of Academic Affairs, UND
SponsorsCC Plus Interiors, Incorporated
Minnesota Public Radio
Waterfront Gallery, Northern Plumbing
SupportersAltru Health System
Avant
Blue Moose Bar & Grill
Bremer Bank
Bronze Boot
Community Bank of the Red River Valley
Kevin Register & Paula Anderson
Farmers Insurance Group, George Wogaman
Gate City Bank
Gustafson Gluek, PLLC
HB Sound and Light
Lakeview Inn & Suites
Lumber Mart
Ellen McKinnon
Museum Café
North Dakota Ballet Company
North Dakota Quarterly
Reeves Studio
Roadking Inn Columbia Mall
SupportersCancer Research, UND, Don and Mary Sens
Special Olympics
Suite 49
Summit Brewing Company
Dr. Curtis Tanabe, D.D.S.
Valley Bone and Joint
ContributorsAcme Electric
Alerus Financial
Axis Clinic, PC
Brown Corporations
Camrud, Maddock, Olson & Larson, Ltd.
Capital Resource Management
CEO Praxis, Inc.
Columbia Liquors
Fine Print of Grand Forks, Inc.
Frokjer - Petersen, Oral & Facial Surgeons
Gregory J. Norman Funeral Chapel
Happy Harry’s Bottle Shops
Letnes, Marshall, Swanson, & Warcup, Ltd.
James S. McDonald, D.D.S.
North Dakota Eye Clinic
Rite Spot Liquor Store
River City Jewelers, Inc.
Salon Seva
Super One
The Lighting Gallery
UBS Financial Services
Xcel Energy
Zimney Foster P.C.
AdvertisersBrady, Martz & Associates
Browning Arts
Burger King Restaurants of Grand Forks
Chad Caya Painting
Classic Jewelers
David C. Thompson Law Office
Dr. Paul Stadem, D.D.S.
Drees, Riskey & Vallager, Ltd.
Edward Jones, Mark Larsen
Forks Chem-Dry
Greater Grand Forks Symphony Orchestra
Greenberg Realty, Mary Adams
Greenberg Realty, Kelly Thompson
Hovet Roofing Inc.
Meland Architecture
Monarch Travel & Tours
Moosbrugger, Carter & McDonagh, PLLP
Northern Valley Obstetrics & Gynecology
Plaza Jewelers
Earl Pomeroy
Reichert Armstrong Law Office
Robert Vogel Law Office P.C.
Shaft, Reis & Shaft, Ltd.
Super Target
Tanglez, Holly Undlin
Valley Dairy Stores
Vilandre’s
Wall’s Medicine Center, Inc.
Buy local. Read the sponsor pages
to learn about those who
invest in the Museum.
Please return their investment. —John Foster, Chairman, Museum Board of Trustees
The Autumn Art Auction exhibition
is funded in part by
a general operating grant from the
Minnesota State Arts Board.
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
Onofrio, 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 Chris and Penny Wolf, Chairs
Chris and Penny Wolf, Chairs
Alan Mulhern
Heather and David Schall
Jill and Mark Sczepanski
Bonnie Sobolik
Holly Undlin
Ken Vein
Devera Warcup
Autumn Art Auction Committee
Penny and Chris Wolf reside in Grand Forks with their
two children. Keaton is in second grade at Kelly Elementary, and
Georgia is 1 year old. Penny is originally from Cavalier, ND. She
has been a cosmetologist for 16 years. The last 3 years, she has
been a salon coordinator. She is currently the salon coordinator
for Salon Seva, which recently opened in September. Chris grew
up in Grand Forks. He is a certified public accountant. He is
currently the Chief Financial Officer for Brown Corporations. He
is on the board of the Community Foundation of Grand Forks,
EGF, and region.
Photograph by Christy Doyea Photography
Rules of Auction
� 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.
� 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.
� Each bidder will use his or her own bidding number during
the auction.
� All sales are final.
� 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. State sales
tax is 5% of the total sale and the Grand Forks city tax is
1.75% of the first $2,500 of the sale. Out-of-state buyers
who have the work shipped to them will not be subject to
North Dakota sales tax.
� In the event of a dispute between bidders, the auctioneer
shall either determine the successful bidder or re-auction
the item in dispute.
� Purchasers may pay for items at any point following the
sale of that 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.
� 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.
As inhabitants of the Northern Great Plains, we struggle to ensure
that the arts are nourished, and that they flourish, because we
know that a vital cultural life is deeply essential to isolated
people. We have concluded that to study the arts is to educate
our minds, for through the arts we learn to make difficult
decisions based upon abstract and ambiguous information. This
is the ultimate goal of education. Furthermore, we have come to
value the arts because they make our hearts wise—the highest of
human goals. Therefore, in the most difficult of times, and in an
environment that might be perceived as alien to the visual arts,
we propose to build a world-class museum for the people of the
Northern Plains.
The North Dakota Museum of Art, by legislative act, serves as the
official art museum of the State of North Dakota. The Museum's
purpose is to foster and nurture the aesthetic life and artistic
expression of the people living on the Northern Plains. The
Museum will provide experiences that please, enlighten and
educate the child, the student and the broad, general public.
Specifically, the Museum will research, collect, conserve and
exhibit works of art. It will also develop programs in such related
arts as performance, media arts and music.
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 important entities; thank them for their
significant contribution; and note how many of them are locally
owned and operated. Supporting cultural life is not just in the
interest of the “big boxes” but rather it has become the business
of the butcher, the baker and the keeper of bees.
This season we are introducing more artists from Winnipeg, our
closest large city and the center of a thriving art community. I
don’t remember a time when as many young, ambitious,
insouciant, and talented artists have sprung onto the scene at one
time. The late Caroline Dukes used to be my Winnipeg guide.
This year Aganetha Dyck invited artists to bring work by her
studio for me to see. Within several hours I met a dozen new
artists, many of whom I now introduce to you. You will remember
Aganetha’s work with bees that was exhibited in the Museum last
summer. You may also remember the cover of last year’s auction
catalog, a collaboration between Aganetha and her son Richard.
This year Richard has an earlier scan in the auction. To make it
he literally placed the lamb on the scanner bed and “took its
picture.”
We are introducing the photography of Katherine Keck, a new
member of the Museum Foundation Board of Directors who
comes from Los Angeles. Other artists include Guillermo
Guardia, a ceramist from Peru who is working on his second
master’s degree from the University of North Dakota. Guillermo,
or Memo as we know him, worked at the Museum this past
summer. Ewa Tarsia, now of Winnipeg, emigrated from Poland.
Milena Marinov is a Bulgarian who lives in Fargo and paints
traditional icons in the style of the Eastern Orthodox Church. I
included her because her painting is very beautiful and also
because it is exciting to have her in our midst.
Zhimin Guan grew up in China as did Aliana Au. And thrown
into the mix are artists born and raised in our region. For
example, this is the first auction to include the work of Todd
Hebert. He grew up in North Dakota, finished his BFA in art at
UND, and went on for his MFA at the Rhode Island School of
Design where Nancy Friese was his teacher. In 2005 he was
named Emerging Artist of the Year by the Aldrich Contemporary
Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Friese, also an artist with
work in the Auction, serves on the Museum’s Board of Trustees.
Our art community has flourished by welcoming ideas and
people from around the globe. We also need our museum
supporters and art buyers, those who enjoy looking and those
determined to live with art.
You may arrange to place bids in advance or to bid by phone
during the auction. Unashamedly, I invite you to help us make
this event as successful financially as it is historically and
aesthetically. And remember, we never ask our artists to donate.
They receive their minimum bid before the Museum takes a
dime. Only after you have done your fine work as buyers do the
Museum and the artists split the profits 50/50. Once again, thank
you to Burton Onorfio, our auctioneer who has also become our
friend, to our chairs and their committees, to Lois Wilde and
Barbara Hatfield who assisted with the catalog, and to the
wonderful museum staff who make it look so effortless.
Laurel Reuter, DirectorNorth Dakota Museum of Art
From the Museum Director
Tim Schouten’s untitled work comes from the series “In the
Absence of Horses” recently shown at the Ken Segal Gallery in
Winnipeg. Consisting of 100 small encaustic paintings, the series
evolved from a single image of a horse rolling in dirt. According
to Mariianne Mays, the work is based on a poem of the same
name by the late American poet and animal rights philosopher
Vicki Hearne. . . . Schouten’s fascination with horses and his
interest in the “historic relationship between man and horse” are
informed by Hearne’s writings on the inner moral lives of
domestic animals.
The painter grapples happily with the untamed aspects of his
subject matter. As Schouten reminds us in his artist’s statement,
horses—except for their limited, specialized use in rodeos and
ranches—are now more frequently present in legend than in
reality. So a significant aspect of his work lies in honoring the
vitality of these animals that were once domesticated for human
use and then fell out of fashion.
In his encaustic technique, rather than using the wax and pigment
for inlay, Schouten applies a mixture of oils, beeswax, and
microcystalline in thick brush and hot iron work. He also works
back into the pieces with various heating implements and other
tools. The result is lush and ambient, contingent on the play of
light for depth and substance, or fragile translucence.
Schouten continues, The encaustic technique uniquely confers
the strength, vigour and intensity of the horse’s emblematic
movement. Revealing as they are in their energy and presence,
the figures are simultaneously ethereal—as though resisting
seizure, whether literal or imagined. Hooves circle the air,
muscles slacken and contract, spindly, elegant legs never betray
the mass they support. Yet their presence welcomes us to a
physical reality more insistent than memory or philosophy, rife
and rich and wild with the immediacy of life. (Border Crossing,
Vol. 24, No. 1, Issue 97, 2005)
Tim Schouten was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and lives with
his wife and horses on a farm between Winnipeg and Lake
Winnipeg to the north. He studied art in Toronto, first at Arts Sake,
Inc. and in 1990 at the Toronto School of Art.
Lot #1
Tim Schouten
Petersfield, Manitoba
Untitled (In the Absence of Horses)
Encaustic on plywood
12 x 11 inches
2006
Range: $500 - 700
Lot #2
Dave BrittonGrand Forks, North Dakota
McVille, North Dakota
35mm Fujichrome, June 29, 1998
Image 13.75 x 21 inches
Range: $200 – 300
Guillermo Guardia 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 for 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 museum, 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 in the figure, unglazed and
burnished surfaces that allow the clay itself to dominate the
work. The work in the exhibition, Johnnie, breathes with life,
both contemporary and ancient.
Lot #3
Guillermo Guardia
Grand Forks, North Dakota
and Lima, Peru
Johnnie, 2003
High fire ceramics
18.5 high x 7 wide x
11 inches deep
Range: $200 - 250
Dave Britton grew up around old grain elevators owned
and operated by his father Clarence Britton. These North Dakota
elevators were in Keith—six miles east of Devils Lake—Kempton,
Merrifield, and Northwest Mills Elevator in Grand Forks—a
partnership of Clarence, Earl Kurtz, and Eugene Ellingrud, which
was sold to North Dakota Mill and Elevator in 1953.
For two summers in 1958 and 1959, Britton traveled with his dad
as he sold Swenko barley shakers to elevators in eastern North
Dakota and western Minnesota. During his high school years, he
drove the Merrifield Grain Co. truck, picking up grain his dad had
bought from various elevators in the same area. He has fond
memories of several of these old elevators, their managers, and
their communities.
According to Britton, the elevators are a dying symbol of our
prairie heritage. They were an integral part of the economy, an
informal social gathering place for farmers, and reference points
on our flat prairie landscape. The old wooden, cribbed-
construction elevators became inefficient and are being
destroyed rapidly.
Britton, who started Britton Transport in 1980 in the basement of
his home in Grand Forks, has photographed over 1,000 elevator
locations on the plains, some of which no longer exist. This may
well prove to be one of the significant systematic records of an
important architectural archtype of early twentieth-century
Lot #4
Ewa TarsiaWinnipeg, Manitoba
Something Undeniable
1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Mixed media
Each 10 x 10 inches, 2006
Range: $800 – 1,100
Sponsored by Merrill Lynch
Ewa Tarsia is a Polish artist who became a Canadian citizen
in 1995. The success of her artistic career in Canada will be
celebrated in June 2007 when she will be 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 signature work included in this auction represents the
evolution of her printmaking into personal techniques that meld
the actual printmaking plate into the final work of art.
According to Kristen Pauch-Nolin, Ewa Tarsia suggests that it is
the fundamental elements of her process—the manipulation of
materials and building of textural surfaces—that motivate her
rather than the appearance of her finished pieces.
Tarsia’s position is not entirely unexpected. As a printmaker, she
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 affection. Covered with
marks, lines and subtle traces of colour, printing plates are often
as interesting as the images pulled from them.
The five-part suite in this auction reflects her current practice of
challenging standard printmaking practices by transforming
hundreds of her Plexiglas plates into three-dimensional
installations. 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.
“The memories of every decision, choice and thought are
inscribed on my printing plates, and I seek to share that
dimension with my audience,” says Tarsia. “I will elevate creative
activities to the rank of the finished work to open the energy of
my procedures. Through this revelation, I seek to push my work
beyond the product into a place where it can live.”
Tarsia describes herself not as a typical printmaker, but as an
artist who uses her love of the techniques and processes involved
in printmaking to share her interactions with the ever-changing
environment with her audiences. As an environmentalist, she
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 14 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
surfaces and then applying layers of colour. “It is a sickness,” she
half-jokes, “an uncontrollable compulsion medicated only by the
production of more art.”
Ewa Tarsia will have a solo exhibition at the North Dakota
Lot #5
Milena marinovFargo, North Dakota
The Last Supper
Egg tempera on oak panel
with glazes
17 x 18.5 inches
Range: $1,600 - 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. Milena has
work in collections throughout the world, including 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 manifestations 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 cannon of icon
painting, which can carry very specific instructions. For example,
in painting “Jesus Enters Jerusalem,” Christ must be riding a white
Lot #6
Zhimin GuanMoorhead, Minnesota
Violinist
Acrylic on paper
39 x 25 inches, 2006
Range: $800 - 1,200
Sponsored by
the High Plains Reader
Zhimin Guan 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; Plains Art Museum, Fargo; and the
North Dakota Museum of Art.
Meera Margaret Singh is a Winnipeg photographer
who explores the dynamic that exists between people and their
environment. While looking at the blurred space between fiction
and reality, she tries to blend the narrative flow of cinema and
the stilled moment of a fixed image.
You Left (and then you never left again) is from Meera’s most
recent series of C-prints wherein she creates an atmosphere that
elicits a sense of loss or vulnerability in relationships, be that
between individuals and/or the spaces they occupy.
Working with a large format camera, Meera develops her
narratives using elements of a material culture (the clothing one
wears, the art on one’s walls, the trees in one’s garden) as clues
to interpreting her characters. Notions of tableau, portraiture,
and staged photography are evoked. Acknowledging that we live
in a society that is consumed by reality television and obsessed
with social trespass, Meera creates a mise-en-scene that allows
viewers access into others’ spheres.
Meera Margaret Singh is a native Winnipeger who holds
Bachelors degrees in Anthropology and Fine Arts from the
Lot #7
Meera Margaret SinghMontreal, Quebec
You Left (and then you never left me)
C-print, 2004
30 x 40 inches
Range: $800 - 1,200
University of Manitoba. She was recently involved in a Manitoba
Association of Women Artists mentorship with ceramicist Grace
Nickel. Meera currently resides in Montreal and is attending
Concordia University’s Master of Fine Arts photography program.
She was included in the Winnipeg Art Gallery’s Supernovas
exhibition in 2006, which showcased the work of twenty-nine
K.D. Thornton works with technologies: mechanical,
electronic, biological and any others she might find interesting.
Generally, her work addresses social issues, conditions or
problems (consumerism, pharmaceuticalism, sexism, mortality,
denial, and taxonomies), often targeting these structures through
humour and subversion.
She has a BFA (honors) from the University of Manitoba and an
MFA (Art + Technology) from the School of the Art Institute of
Chicago. Her sculptural and installation works have been
exhibited in Europe, Canada and the United States, as well as
interactive works online, since 1994.
In response to the observation that in nature, cats generally do
not indulge in beef, lamb, tuna, etc., particularly grilled, roasted,
or with rice, the artist created a new line of cat food. The 23
flavors of Fresh Prey catfood are derived from creatures cats
might actually consume, whether in the wild or domestic life.
Lot #8
K.D. Thornton Winnipeg, Manitoba
Fresh Prey
23 cat food cans, provisions intact, with
digital labels, 2004
Range: $1,300 - 1,500
frisky field mouse
tasty gecko
cardinal sin
chipmunk treat
simply sparrow
international mole
plump red robin
cordon blue jay
nevermore raven
roadkill crow
tender tree frog
oriole interrupted
cockroach snack
humble wren
chinchilla dinner
little brown bat
wish upon a starling
escaped lab rat
forbidden budgie
beloved hamster
gerbilicious
glittering goldfish
Lot #9
Bill HarbortMinot, North Dakota
Coming Soon!!
Mixed-media collage
38 x 26 x 3 inches, 2006
Range: $500 - 800
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 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. 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, 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.
Melanie Rocan is a member of the Winnipeg artists
collective Two Six. According to Robert Enright (writing about
the Winnipeg artists’ collective Two Six in The Globe and Mail
11/12/03), Melanie Rocan is the only female member of the
group—and the youngest—and she casts a delicate shadow
across the testosterone-sprayed landscape inhabited by her
fellow two-sixers. Her work is mixed in its media: an assortment
of stretched-fabric pieces, luscious oil and acrylic paintings and
darling water colour occupy different parts of the gallery. What
they have in common is a cheeky whimsicality where a dress is
saved from prettiness by solid clothespins that hold it in place,
or where the barest whisper of a wine glass is abused by the
contents of a gorgeous ashtray smeared on the same filmy table
top. And her tiny watercolors—which she considers paintings—
are confections.
Born in 1980, this bilingual Franco-Manitoban graduated from
the University of Manitoba with a Bachelor of Fine Arts Honors
Degree with a thesis in painting. She has recently been
nominated as a semi-finalist in the 8th annual RBC Canadian
Painting Competition. Her work is included in a group
exhibition traveling to the following galleries: the Museum of
Contemporary Art (Toronto), Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery
(Kitchener, ON), Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal
Lot #10
Melanie RocanWinnipeg, Manitoba
I’m so cold
Watercolor on Stonehenge paper
9.25 x 7.5 inches, 2006
Range: $400 - 600
(Montreal), Art Gallery of Calgary (Calgary), Contemporary Art
Gallery (Vancouver). In 2006 she was part of a group exhibition
at the Winnipeg Art Gallery titled Supernova, and a Too-Sicks
exhibition at gallery 1.1.1., at the University of Manitoba. In
2005, she was part of an exchange program with the Glasgow
School of Art in Scotland, and in 2004-2005 she completed her
first year in the Master in Fine Arts program at Concordia
University. In 2004, Melanie had an exhibition titled Familiar
Places at the Paul Petro Art Contemporary Art Gallery, in Toronto.
In 2003 she was part of the Young Winnipeg Artists group
exhibition at Plug-In Institute of Contemporary Art and has
shown work in the Too-Sicks collective show À La Planche, at
the Annex Gallery in Winnipeg. In 2001-2002 she was the artist-
in-residence for the Franco-Manitoban Cultural Center, in Saint-
Boniface, and in the beginning of her thesis year she had a solo
show entitled Little Dream at the Center which completed her
residency. In 2007 she will be part of a Too-Sicks group show at
the Harvey Levine Gallery, in Los Angeles.
Lot #11
Jessie PalczewskiSpearfish, South Dakota
Past to Present, 2006
Digital photographs, Japanese paper, thread
63 x 68 and hangs 10 inches off the wall,
Range: $2,500 - 3,000
Sponsored by Chester Fritz Auditorium
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 in 2003 from Black Hills State University and her
MFA from the University of North Dakota in 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 for personal growth, quilts have been my outlet for life
occurrences that are otherwise hard to communicate.
Lot #13
Duane PerkinsWinnipeg, Manitoba
Untitled
Porcelain
14.5 x 16.5 inches, 2006
Range: $1,400 – 1,800 pair
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, and images from his
travels. 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.
"China Song: Generations Uncounted" is one of several new
paintings that relate to the prairie. The ring-necked pheasant was
brought to the West Coast at the close of the 18th century. It
made its way to the Dakotas where it thrives like many other
immigrants. The prairie embodies birth and rebirth, a place to
meditate on our relationships to the earth, a symbol of faith, time
and acceptance of hardship.
Marley’s wife Sandy serves on the North Dakota Museum of Art
Board of Trustees. One day in the deep of winter Sandy came to
a late afternoon meeting, and Marley drove over from Bemidji
with her. While waiting, he looked at the exhibitions, browsed in
the campus bookstore, and then drove northwest of Grand Forks
to sketch. When Museum Director Laurel Reuter saw this
painting, she deemed it the best capturing of light streaming
through sleet and frost she had ever seen. “Magnificent!”
Lot #12
Marley KaulBemidji, Minnesota
China Song: Generations Uncounted
Egg tempera / acrylic wash on birch panel
20 x 60 inches, 2006
Range: $2,900 - 3,900
Sponsored by Clear Channel
Lot #14
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.
He has looked carefully over the years, citing John Glick and
Don Reitz as influences along with Ralph Bacerra and Luckman
Glasgow. Perkins sees his work as visual rather than idea-based.
His goal is to make a beautiful object, preferably in one firing.
For example, to decorate the surface of the magnificent
porcelain urns in this auction, the artist begins with slips that
are then glazed. He then paints on the decoration using slips,
glazes, and oxides that he has formulated. A final coat of glaze
prepares the object for firing.
Adam Kemp, born in 1962, 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, Kemp’s work includes a commissioned
wall mosaic at the Hotel Donaldson in Fargo (summer 2003);
murals at the International Center at the University of North
Dakota (2002); School of Fish created by Kemp and thirty-one
six-through twelve-year-old children enrolled in the 2002
Museum of Art Summer Arts Camp; a set for a play, Flood of
Memories by Francis Ford, based on the North Dakota Museum
of Art Oral History Project following the 1997 flood; and Café
Kosmos, a meeting place for high school students which Kemp
took on as a personal mission after the flood. He and the high
school students turned the two-floor building into a work of art.
Kemp continues to teach popular week-long sessions in the
Lot #15
Adam KempGrand Forks, North Dakota
Dog in Snowfall
Oil on wood panel
41 x 46 inches, 2005
Range: $500 - 700
Sponsored by KVLY TV
Lot # 16
Adam KempGrand Forks, North Dakota
Snowfall
Oil on oval wood panel
31 x 66 inches, 2005
Range: $500 - 700
Sponsored by KVLY TV
Barbara Hatfield: How to write about drawing? It’s
visual. It’s kinesthetic. It’s immediate and, when one is fortunate,
fully engaging. The everyday filters fall away. Liveliness and
immediacy blossom. There is no separation between drawer and
drawing. One is simply drawing. The ‘…ing’ is important, that
motion. When tired, we often seek stillness, but the motion in
drawing is in concert with stillness and can be remarkably
refreshing. I hope the work produces a similar experience for
the viewer: a moment of recognition, a willingness to give a bit
of time and allow oneself to be in the drawing.
Raised on a farm near Thompson, North Dakota, Hatfield has
also lived in Minnesota, New Mexico, Colorado and New York.
She is active in numerous facets of art with experience in
teaching, curating, and administration. Hatfield earned a
Bachelor’s degree from Minnesota State University in Moorhead
and a Master of Fine Arts in Painting from Parsons School of
Design, New York. Her work is in collections in Japan, France,
Switzerland and the United States.
Lot #17
Barbara HatfieldThompson, North Dakota
In the circle with Hokusai
Ink on paper
30 x 22inches, 2006
Range: $1,600 – 1,800
Lot # 18
Vance GellertMinneapolis, Minnesota
Cloud, Lake of the Isles, 1998/2005
Image: 30 x 30 inches on 34 x 34 sheet
Range: $1,000 - 1,800
Sponsored by Holiday Inn
Vance Gellert is both a photographer and a curator.
Whereas the Lake of the Isles photograph in this auction
represents his black and white work, both his color photography
and his curatorial work were recently showcased in the North
Dakota Museum of Art.
For nearly three years Gellert traveled through Minnesota and
North Dakota in search of self-taught artists who are compelled
to practice their craft. His photographs of the artists and the
landscapes in which they live, accompanied by a piece of each
artists’ work, came together in the exhibition Real: Artists and
Landscape which closed on September 19, 2006.
Vance Gellert earned a BA in physiology and a PhD in
pharmacology, both at the University of Minnesota, before
realizing that he really wanted to be a photographer. He
returned to school at Virginia Commonwealth University in
Richmond and finished an MFA in photography in 1984. In 1989
he became co-founder and director of the Minnesota Center for
Photography, a position he held until 2003. He resigned to
become a full-time photographer.
He is currently working on a project in Bolivia. According to
Gellert, a licensed pharmacologist, his goal is to foster
understanding of the contributions of shamanic ritual and belief
systems to medicinal plant efficacy that may hopefully lead to
novel new research protocols. The actual product would be a
photographic book containing conceptually created portraits of
Lot #19
Dan JonesFargo, North Dakota
Murder of Crows
Oil on canvas
48 x 48 inches, 2006
Range: $2,600 - 3,600
Sponsored by
Office of Academic Affairs, UND
Dan Jones, who lives and works in Fargo, is among North
Dakota's few artists able to make a living from their art. He has
long practiced plein aire painting, gathering with a group of
fellow artists and going to the countryside to sketch and paint.
The landscape of the Red River basin provides him with endless
subjects. According to Museum Director Laurel Reuter, “this
wonderful painting is a departure for Dan. He has moved closer
into the landscape, focusing upon living creatures instead of
taking the long view of the region’s idyllic landscape with its
rolling hills and running streams. The crows in the painting take
on individual personalities. They are of this world but also not of
this world, suggesting an almost Asian approach to landscape.”
The artist’s paintings are included in many museum, corporate
and private collections including the National Endowment for the
Arts, the Plains Art Museum in Fargo, and the Rourke Art
Madelyn Camrud has donated all proceeds from the sale of this painting to the Museum of Art
Madelyn Camrud says, Most of my landscape paintings
are about climate and weather, the drama of which I learned to
know while growing up in rural North Dakota. I think the most
successful pieces offer the viewer more sky than ground as if to
draw the eye upward from the horizon line. This reminds me of
the way we, while living on the farm, looked at the sky to try and
figure out what the day's weather would be. In this piece I
believe 'the weather' is already taking place. I'm not exactly
sure what it is, though there seems to be a strong presence of
wind.
In her current landscape series, Madelyn begins with a
photograph of the land, focusing on the horizon line which
holds the most interest for her—a flat land with few trees and a
great view of the sky. From the horizon line and its trees, she
builds up and down with paper collage, scraping the edges with
ceramic paste, while attempting to make the borders of the
photograph disappear on the board. The first paint layers are
acrylic; an umber glaze makes the final coat. Intermingled are
images of words, for Madelyn Camrud is also a practicing poet.
Lot # 20
Madelyn CamrudGrand Forks, North Dakota
Early Summer, 2005
Acrylic, graphite, oil paint and
varnish on paper
29 x 24 inches
Range: $600 - 800
Sponsored by Prairie Public
A North Dakota native, Camrud was born in Grand Forks, and
received degrees in visual arts and creative writing from the
University of North Dakota. She first practiced visual art, then
studied it, and finally worked, surrounded by it, at the North
Dakota Museum of Art. She, in fact, founded this live auction in
order to celebrate the artists in our region while helping the
museum survive financially. Camrud also inaugurated the
Museum Benefit Dinner and Silent Auction, the Membership
Program, and the Docent Program. Meanwhile, she was
introduced to poetry, and spent two decades working on poems.
This House is Filled with Cracks was published by New Rivers
Press, Minneapolis, in 1994. She has a second chapbook of
poems forthcoming from Dacotah Territory Press, Moorhead
Gretchen Bederman’s art is dominated by horses and
women. According to the artist, these images symbolize and
visually animate the elements of earth and its relationship to fire,
air, and water. She combines memories of actual places with a
mixture of reality, myth, and dream. She uses the figure in both
human and animal form to tell the story. Bederman grew up in
Houston, Texas, and settled in North Dakota after a 1980 visit.
She completed her undergraduate work at Minnesota State
University Moorhead and received an MFA in painting from the
University of North Dakota in 1996. While in Grand Forks, she
served as a docent for the North Dakota Museum of Art and
worked as an Artist-in-Residence at Lake Agassiz Elementary
School.
Since 1992, Bederman has been in twenty-nine group shows and
twenty-two solo exhibitions in North Dakota and Minnesota.
Over the course of the last year she had a solo exhibition at
Fargo’s North Dakota State University, a two-person show at the
Spirit Room in Fargo, and a joint exhibition with Walter Piehl in
Miles City, Montana. She was a visiting artist at NDSU and taught
at the North Dakota Museum of Art Children’s Summer Camp. In
September 2006 Bederman moved to Glendive, Montana, where
she will head up the art department at Dawson Community
College.
Lot #21
Gretchen BedermanBismarck, North Dakota
Horse
Oil on canvas
48 x 72 inches, 2002
Range: $1,500 – 1,800
Sponsored byGrand Forks Herald
Lot #22
Brent BrannifMinot, North Dakota
Tiger Beat
Color pencil and photo transfer
30 x 40 inches, 2006
Range: $500 - 700
Lot #23
Cyrus SwannPine River, Minnesota
Inverted Invested
Salt and soda-fired stoneware
26 x 9 x 3 inches, 2006
Brent Brannif makes colored pencil drawings and pop
music. Tiger Beat, the work in the auction, draws from both.
Tiger Beat magazine debuted in September of 1965 as a bubble
gum rag consulted by 12-year-old girls interested in seeing
pictures of their music heroes, finding out what was cool to
wear, what to think, how to handle the hip scene.
Brannif, who grew up in Devils Lake, North Dakota, credits his
first art teacher, Central High School’s Bob Moore, with teaching
him “that an artist should always be truthful to himself in his art.”
In this work he looks back at himself in childhood, cocooned in
the sleeping bag he “absolutely loved.”
He began music about the same time he discovered art, that is,
he picked up a guitar and began to play. Soon Brent was in
college at Minot Sate University; Walter Piehl was teaching
drawing and painting; and he was exploring electronic music on
the side.
Today Brannif continues to live in Minot where he works as
technician at the local television station. For seven years he
tuned away from colored pencils, replacing them with oil and
canvas. Gradually he migrated back and continues today making
his strongest work in that medium. He also continues as a
rhythm guitarist but acknowledges that it difficult to find other
musicians interested in creating their own music. Most want to
play cover in bars as a way of making a living.
Art is the glue that holdsmusic together.
Cyrus Swann is a multi-media artist who focuses on three-
dimensional ceramics, moving from pottery, to sculpture, to
installation. According to the artist, my work explores the depths
of form and surface available in the medium but also addresses
issues of mass production, consumer waste, and the
comparative value of objects. I am also interested in pushing my
technical ability. I have a commitment to tradition and craft
although I don't feel bound by rigid definitions or parameters.
Swann, now 27, received a BFA from Bemidji State University in
2002 after which he moved back to Pine River, Minnesota, to
establish his studio. He had a solo exhibition at the North
Dakota Museum of Art in the summer of 2006, at which time his
functional work was featured in the Museum Shop.
Inverted Invested is part of an ongoing series exploring the idea
of the bowl as shape, and as a starting point for sculptural forms.
In this piece the forms are both opened in and closed out,
inviting and shut in at the same time. This work, while
suggesting human behavior, can also be viewed as abstract form
and surface. According to the artist, I want the ceramic material
to speak and am interested in drawing attention to pottery’s
ability to communicate beyond function.
Lot #24
katie McCleeryTravis City, Michigan
Untitled
Raku with gold leaf
18.5 x 15 x 5 inches, 2005
Range: $300 - 500
Katie McCleery retired from the University of North
Dakota at the end of the 2004-05 academic year, having taught
ceramics since 1973. She spent fourteen of those years carving
architectural murals in brick, working closely with the Hebron
Brick company, North Dakota's oldest and only functioning
brickyard. Two years ago she retired from carving brick because
of the wear and tear on my body. It's very heavy work and
although I enjoyed it and was proud to have had the opportunity
to do a good number of carvings, it became clear that, if I wanted
to continue to work as an artist, I would have to make some
changes. I've always done other works as well as the carved
murals. I've done a fair amount of work in raku since it is fast and
fun and have explored slip casting as well as continued working
in stoneware. Recently I took on an architectural restoration job
and got some experience with flexible mold systems and a new
casting material. I like learning new things and having choices
about how I work and what kind of work I do. McCleery’s next
project is to build her own house in Michigan.
Lot #25
Jon SolingerMoorhead, Minnesota
Shelterbelts, Suite of eight prints
Digital and film
Each 11 x 8.5 sheet , 2000 - 2004
Range: $700 - 1,000
Sponsored by KXJB TV
Jon Slinger of Moorhead began photographing tree claims
and shelterbelts around the turn of the century, commissioned by
the North Dakota Museum of Art and funded by Nodak Electric
Foundation. He headed out with his black and white, square-
format camera to capture fully mature shelterbelts, originally
planted after the Dust Bowl era. Even as he recorded their history,
rows of old trees were becoming obsolete. Planted for an earlier
time, they stood in the way of the massive machinery of
contemporary agriculture. More and more were dug up and
burned. If replaced at all, it would be with single rows of trees.
By 2005 Solinger broadened his story with digital cameras and
Photoshop. Using core samples of the soil, satellite images,
investigations into the evolution of machinery for tilling and
planting, global positioning systems to identify soil
characteristics, commodity charts, and other such tools of
twenty-first century farming, 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.
During the summer of 2005, the North Dakota Museum of Art
unveiled Solinger's work, some eighty photographs winnowed
out of dozens more. Variations of that exhibition are touring
through the Museum's Rural School Initiative and the book
documenting Solinger’s work will be published in 2007. This
suite of eight photographs, printed as miniatures, celebrate Jon
Jon Solinger has taken hundreds
of images of trees in the Red
River Valley of the North. These
are among the most important
works of art about this time and
place to be produced during our
era. And they are so beautiful.
Laurel Reuter, DirectorNorth Dakota Museum of Art
“Maybe he marveled while watching the heavens as a toddler in
Hedalen, Norway. Maybe his parents directed his attention to the
stars as they sailed back and forth across the Atlantic. We know
for sure that it was in western Dakota Territory that Ben Huset’s
interest in the planets turned to fascination and finally to
devotion.”*
This self-taught man went on to become the Weatherman of the
Great Plains. From 1937 into the 1960s his annual Ben Huset’s
Forecast served as the farmer’s bible.
Nancy Friese, Huset’s granddaughter, inherited a similar passion
for the natural world. Her prints and paintings spring from astute
observation within the landscape. And they are fed by her intense
understanding of the forces of weather. Movement, brilliant
color, slashing lines and inner tensions spill onto canvas and
paper and then reappear in woodcuts, drypoints, and aquatints.
Weather never exists as a static entity. In her work, change is
imminent; the landscape is volatile, hiding great storms and
massive cloud buildup, winds, and movement even in moments
of calm. The earth, the plant world, and the sky, each have an
equal presence, just as the whole of her picture plane is potently
alive. She works from both the factual and the intuitive and
therein lies her art.
The artist credits the Weatherman with her enduring interest in
the landscape. For thirty years this has been her subject. Not the
Fauvists but the grandfather taught her to see the colors of
weather. Reflecting sundogs. Northern lights. Rainbows. Fiery
sunsets. Heat mirages. Swirling snow transformed by sunlight
into an impressionist’s palette. For only through light and
movement does color exist as a living entity. This is the
underriding truth of Friese’s art. Like the grandfather, the artist
immerses herself into the wildness of weather, into its untamable
energy, into its patterns, and into its beauty, an element never
absent in Friese’s art. Unfashionable? Perhaps. True to human
experience? Certainly.
One wonders if the temperament derived from the fierce weather
of Friese’s ancestors didn’t form her artistic bedrock. Had she
been the child of more benign climates would she have made an
altogether different kind of art? Recently Friese purchased her
grandmother’s family homestead in North Dakota, searching not
only for home but also a place to paint.
Laurel Reuter, Nancy Friese, Paintings and Prints,
Boston: Pepper Gallery, 2006.
*Hoffman, S. (2006). Ben Huset’s forecasts. Unpublished manuscript.
Lot #26
nancy FrieseCranston, Rhode Island
Four-color woodcut,
8.5 x 31.5 inches, 2005
Range: $600 - 900
enhance that surface. It seemed natural to include them; they
related to an earlier city series—urban stuff, the stuff of our
environment. The decay and waste products of “life” seemed to
relate well to what I was doing and thinking.
I don’t want to give my work individual titles, because it narrows
the focus. . . . When I have a coffee cup in my painting, it’s not
just a coffee cup. It’s a symbol. Once I heard a comment about
Giorgio Morandi and his “society of objects.” That’s the way I
think of the objects in my still life series—as symbols for people
in the society that I’m a part of.
Some of the objects can have multiple meanings. A chair can be
stability or rest, it can be stagnation or isolation, security or lack
of adventure. I might be thinking about it one way for one image
and use it to mean something totally different in another. I do
look at the objects as having some character suggestions. I use
the coffee cup because it’s such a common drinking vessel, and
you know, your average “cup of Joe” sort of thing. The contours
and forms say a lot too. I think a brandy snifter has a kind of
feminine quality. A coffee cup makes less money than a teacup.
These sorts of things guide my selection of objects for my work.
Mike marth was born in 1962 in St. Paul Minnesota. He
received an MFA in painting from Southern Illinois State
University in 1991. Marth currently lives in Moorhead, MN
where he maintains his studio. Over the years he has taught in
the design department of North Dakota State University. He also
worked as curator at the Donaldson Hotel in Fargo during the
first years of its reincarnation in the 21st century. In 2000 the
exhibition “Mike Marth, A Decade of Still Life” was shown
simultaneously in six sites in Fargo/Moorhead. At that time Sally
Jeppson, Curator at the Plains Art Museum in Fargo, interviewed
Marth for the High Plains Reader. The following quotes are taken
from that interview:
Over time I edit or refine my imagery to better suit my needs. I
have always worked in series. I never feel satisfied exploring an
idea with one or two works, they seem to generate more
questions than they answer. So I repeat things, like a coffee cup,
to more fully explore what it can do for me in my work.
My techniques used to be more traditional. As my palette evolved
and objects became more stylized, I started to enjoy the surfaces
of the paintings more. I would find and incorporate stuff to
Lot #27
Mike MarthMoorhead, Minnesota
Untitled
Oil and mixed media on canvas
24 x 24 inches, 1999
Range: $300 - 500
Gift from David and Julie Blehm.
Lot # 28
Katherine Keck
Los Angeles, California
Art of Net Throwing
(Taken on the Niger River,
Mali, French West Africa)
Digital print on watercolor paper
Limited edition #2 of 7
30 x 40 inches, February 2005
Range: $500 -700
Katherine Keck travels the world “in search of the essence
of the emotion of the moment.” She began her formal study of
photography at the Cortona School of Photography in Cortona,
Italy, under Alan Matthews. She later attended the Speos School
of Photography in Paris, France. Most recently she studied in
Rome through the Venice School of Photography.
Through her work, she seeks “to capture images that stand as
symbols of humanity with the goal of revealing what is often the
underlying emotion or hidden sentiment of the moment.” Her
mirror-like compositions utilize reflection to offer the viewer a
hidden glance into the spiritual side or essence of our existence—
the vibrating energy of nature that is often hidden to the viewer.
Her photographic travel has taken her to such places as Italy, the
cottages of England; a river trip along the Yukon River, 150 miles
south of the Arctic Circle to study life in the Athabascan villages,
to Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand; and to North Dakota to
photograph grain elevators. Keck recently traveled to French West
Africa and has completed a photographic essay chronicling this
trip called Timbuktu and Beyond.
Katherine Keck has donated theproceeds from the sale of this
photograph to the Museum of Art
Lot #29
Todd HebertLos Angeles, California
Bubble and Snowman #12
Acrylic on paper, 2006
13 x 42.5 inches
Range: $1,000 - 1,500
Occasionally a work of art is too ethereal to be
reproduced. Todd Hebert’s Bubble and Snowman
is such a work. But then, those who live among
bubbles and snowmen know that certain skies
and weather conditions can mask anything. Visit
the Museum to see this work of art.
Todd hebert was born in Valley City, ND 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.
Hebert won the prestigious 2005 Emerging Artist Award from The
Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT. Upon Hebert
receiving the award, Jessica Hough, Curatorial Director, wrote:
Viewers of his work may be surprised to learn that Todd Hebert
produces his paintings in a small, grungy, windowless one-car
garage. This environment seems to have little to do with Hebert’s
ethereal paintings which lead us to imagine him working in a
much more idyllic setting. . . . Particle-filled air is a good place
to start when considering Hebert’s work. His hazy, seemingly
out-of-focus compositions have us thinking we are looking
through an atmosphere of water or dust. This effect, achieved by
the artist through airbrushing, is hard to get used to at first. We
naturally want to bring the image into sharp focus so that we can
see all of what we think is there. But then we realize that the
beauty and appeal of the paintings is in part due to this gossamer
fog that cloaks the landscape.
Last year Hebert was interviewed by Lupe Nunez-Fernandez for
ArtReview Magazine, and said:
[In my early work} there were always things in transmutation, in
curious cycles of change: a raccoon into a basketball or a
snowman into a scarecrow. I started thinking that just having the
snowman or a basketball in a painting, exhibited within the
commercial fine art context was a gesture, a transformation: one
that was not illustrated, but embodied. That seemed to be a
bigger, better idea. "Narrative" eventually fluttered off my radar.
The snowman is just an absurd, ridiculous image of a "man"
(three round balls of snow…a man?) crudely, and whimsically
built from the immediate surroundings. This started as a
culture/nature thing, and for some people that is interesting. But,
I like that the snowman is a personage and an object at the same
time. I hope that the smile is a welcoming gesture: a parallel to
what I want the viewer to bring in seeing it. But the smile can
either be scary or warm. It is an image of ambiguity and
projection. I like that so many ideas and associations can be
plugged into the image. I think coolers are similar: they keep
things hot or cold.
Ambiguity is an important thing in picture making and can give
an image a power and resonance. People have to remember
what they saw. With this in mind, I've lowered the detail, upped
the precision. I think I have enough detail for duration while
Vivienne Morgan: I came from England twenty-seven
years ago, and now I often think about what it means to migrate
and immigrate, what it means to be rooted. I heard about trees
that walk across England: they slowly migrate by falling, sending
out roots, sending up new trees, falling. The time scale of their
movement is imperceptible to us, but their remains leave the
trace of their paths. Walking through a slate quarry on a spring
morning in England, I saw this pair of trees in an intimate
embrace, hanging onto the edge of a cliff. It occurred to me
that they might have walked there on purpose.
The photograph is printed on aluminum because I like the way it
kicks back the light. The work glows the way light glows through
trees in the natural world.
I am a multi-media artist out of necessity: in the winter I work
indoors in the warmth of my studio, often at my computer. In the
summer I work outdoors whenever I can: I garden, build, and
Lot #30
Vivienne MorganBemidji, Minnesota
Final Embrace, 2006
Archival digital print on aluminum
50 x 40 inches
Range: $1,500 - 1,800
Sponsored by Leighton Broadcasting
photograph, often my own garden and local landscapes. Back in
winter at the computer, the photographs change and, like shifting
memories, become akin to meditations on life.
I'm English—not a snow lover—but the weather here 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.
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 Bemidji, Minnesota.
Lot #31
Richard dyckWinnipeg, Manitoba
Lamb
C-print of a flatbed scan
30 x 24 inches, 2005
Range: $500 - 800
Richard Dyck is a Winnipeg-based artist whose work
includes audio, installations, photographs, and computer-based
interactive digital games and applications. His has exhibited
across Canada, in France and Serbia, and in the United States.
In the summer of 2005 he showed his Hive Scans in the North
Dakota Museum of Art.
In the fall of 2006 he will mount a solo exhibition titled "The End
of Scanning by Richard Dyck with flower and leaf arrangements
by Susie Rempel", a three-part grid installation of 2000+ flatbed
scans for Platform: Centre for Photographic and Digital Arts, in
Winnipeg. The work in the auction, reproduced in his book
Species, was created by placing a lamb on a scanning bed.
According to Dyck, the print is soft, not pixilated, but soft. This
is because the original image is scanned at 72 dpi (dots per
inch), out of kindness to the animals because higher resolution
scans take much longer and the animals would start to frighten
after too much time.
We study the arts because they make
our hearts wise, the highest of human goals.
Museum Mission
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 #32
Walter PiehlMinot, North Dakota
spotted pup:
Sweetheart of the Rodeo
Acrylic on canvas
48 x 36 inches, 2005-06
Range: $3,500 – 3,900
Sponsored by Capone’s
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.
When I finished this painting the colors reminded me of the
cowboys’ favorite dessert. We call it “spotted pup.” Rice pudding
spotted with raisins—and cinnamon if one is lucky.
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 paintings and drawings.
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.
Aliana Au first exhibited this painting at the Winnipeg Art
Gallery in 1981. At that time she said, My family lived in the city
of Canton (Guangzhou) in China for a number of years. It was a
city of very few lights at night, and the summer seasons were very
hot. We spent a lot of nights lying on a canvas bed outside, with
our mother sitting on a chair fanning the mosquitoes away. The
sky was always blue with stars, a crescent or full moon; and I
remember very well my thoughts as a young child at that time.
Winters were cold there, our clothes were those from our father’s
childhood. He was always far away from home yet I felt a strange
kind of closeness to him, perhaps from the clothes we both wore.
In my grandfather’s house, I remembered observing the remnants
of his existence, possessions once loved which now were left in
such a way that the life force still appeared to exist in their form.
To me, a chair is a vehicle where one’s mental being expands and
travels in time and space while one’s physical being remains in
Lot #33
Aliana AuWinnipeg, Manitoba
Sheepskin Cat on a Red Chair
Oil on Linen
24 x 21.5 inches, 2004
Range: $1,600 – 2,000
reality. The chair series is an expression of fantasies and personal
experiences, a mosaic of different elements in my life that reach
out to me.
Au’s interest in art started early. She studied Chinese brush
painting with Professor Au Ho-Nien in Hong Kong and then
came to Canada to further her art study, graduating from the
School of Art at the University of Manitoba. A Canadian citizen,
Au resides in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Au’s work has been exhibited in numerous galleries including
the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Moose Jaw Art Museum, the Art
Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba in Brandon, and the John
Michael Kohler Art Center in Sheboygan, Michigan. Her works
are housed in various private collections in Sweden, Greece,
England, the United States, and Canada. In Canada Au’s work is
in collections of the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Province of
Manitoba, Canada Council Art Bank, Toronto Dominion Bank,
Lot #34
Barton Benes
New York, New York
Pencil Dance
Mixed media on paper
10.5 x 8.5 inches
Range: $400 - 600
Barton Benes’s works are highly idiosyncratic, sometimes
humorous, more than a little impish, and always a fresh lens
through which to view the world. Much has been made of this
artist’s fascination with celebrity—that, in today’s world, a scrap
from a movie star is valued with the same fervor once reserved
for a piece of the true cross. But Benes’ work strikes more than
one note, and comments on the complexity of what we, as a
society, preserve, revere, treasure, or discard. It’s a vexation
known to museum professionals charged with caring for ever-
growing collections; it’s a puzzle in most individual’s lives where
the revolving door of consumerism endlessly circulates “stuff.” At
least, while viewing Benes’ assemblages, one pauses for a
moment to muse over the rubbish of experience.
Linda Tesner, 18 July 2006
The North Dakota Museum of Art and Barton Benes have had a
long friendship that began when Barton designed the Museum
Shop. Then, because he made museums in his own work, the
Museum staff asked him to create the Museum’s Donor Wall. In
1989 Barton had his first exhibition in conjunction with the
grand opening of the newly-renovated Museum. Later he
showed Lethal Weapons, his work about AIDS. And following
the 1997 flood, the Museum commissioned Barton to make a
Flood Museum from fragments of memory-laden objects
contributed by people in the community who had gone through
the flood. When Barton dies, he is leaving the contents of his
apartment to the North Dakota Museum of Art. The apartment
contains many museums within it including African and Egyptian
sculpture, work by contemporary artists, stuffed animals, an
African voodoo altar, etc. etc. etc. It will become the Museum's
Craig Love
Winnipeg, Manitoba
Untitled from series
Along the Red Carpet
Watercolor and ink on paper
5 x 5 inches, 2005
Range: $150 - 200 each
Lot #35
Lot #36
Lot #37
Lot #38
Craig Love was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1975. He
graduated from the University of Manitoba in 1999 with a BFA
with Honors in Painting. In 2004 he received his MFA from
Parsons School of Design, New School University, New York. He
returned to Winnipeg to take up life as a painter. He is already
amassing an impressive exhibition record which includes a
three-person show with Cliff Eyland and Krisjanis Kaktins-
Gorsline at Winnipeg’s Cream Gallery in 2005; a group
exhibition, Life and Limb, at Feigen Contemporary Gallery in
New York in 2004; Things They Carried, Arnold and Sheila
Aronson Gallery, New School University, New York, 2004; and
Newton’s Prism: Layer Painting, Gallery One One One,
University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, 2003.
These small paintings on paper represent only one aspect of the
artist’s work. In addition he creates larger, more abstract paintings
on canvas and board. But over the course of eighteen months,
Craig Love worked intensely, ultimately creating several hundred
such miniatures.
Tim Schouten has a second encaustic in the Autumn Art
Auction, Lot #1. Wall and Turret, however, is part of a different
and 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
Lot #39
Tim SchoutenPetersfield, Manitoba
Wall and Turret (Treaty I)
Encaustic on canvas
32 x 42 inches,
Range: $2,000 - 2,500
Sponsored by East Grand Floral
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,
luminous 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
enactment, 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 summarizes,
political questions of property and Aboriginal
Fred Thomas: That combination of aesthetic tough love is
evident in the work of Fred Thomas, the oldest member of Two
Six and the collective's most experienced graffiti artist. He has
retired from the street but continues to make his arresting art.
His subjects are invariably disenfranchised street people
observed in the street, while his surfaces are found on the
street—crushed oil cans, pieces of wood and cardboard,
discarded street signs. Thomas's ability to seamlessly match
surface with image is remarkable, as is his technique. He uses a
can of spray paint with more finesse and skill than a lot of artists
use their hands.
Fred thomasWinnipeg, Manitoba
Untitled (both works), 2005
Mixed Media on Found Objects
Range: $200 - 350 each
Lot #42
John WiddelGrand Forks, North Dakota
Paddles, 2006
Various woods and sizes
Sold in groups of three
Range: $500 - 700
Lot # 40
14 x 8 inches
Lot # 41
12-inch diameter
Two Six, has hit the street running. I should say hit the street
pedaling. Two Six (as in the size of a bottle of whisky) is a core
association of seven artists, most of whom have been into graffiti,
and continue to participate in what they call "party-bike nail-
bombing." On these excursions, weather permitting, the
members of Two Six pack art pieces, beer, hammers and nails,
and go riding off to find congenial outdoor locations where they
can "install" their art. Those favored locations aren't galleries, but
telephone poles, signs, fences and corners of urban buildings.
Their interventions are most often subtle, and always an
improvement on what they find. (Robert Enright writing in The
Globe and Mail, 11/03)
Lot #43
William EakinWinnipeg, Manitoba
Ink jet print
8.5 x 11 inches, 2005
Range: $300 - 400
William Eakin is among Canada’s most significant
photographers. Through his photographs of photographs he has
explored contemporary society’s obsession with UFOs, aliens,
and extraterrestrials. Over the years he has collected and
photographed all manner of mass-produced and common
objects, transforming pop culture artifacts into poetic icons.
Trinkets and decorative commercial junk, old and new, amateur
art, folk art, and craft objects: He calls these sorts of things
"ordinary art." His subject is often the cast aside and the
mundane—except when he is photographing gardens. Driven by
his subject, the work becomes exquisite as in this modest
photograph of an orchid.
Educated at the Vancouver School of Art and the School of the
Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, Eakin has been a
practicing artist for thirty years. His photographs have been
exhibited across Canada and in the United States, The
Netherlands, France, Japan and Taiwan. A recipient of numerous
awards from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Manitoba
Arts Council, including the Duke and Duchess of York Prize in
Photography, Eakin has taught in the Department of Visual Arts at
the University of Victoria and at the School of Art at the
University of Manitoba. His photographs are in many public
collections such as the Canadian Museum of Contemporary
Photography, Canada Council Art Bank, Winnipeg Art Gallery
and Edmonton Art Gallery, among many others.
John Widdel, a Grand Forks native, hand crafts canoe
paddles - sculpture to be used. The winner of the bid will choose
a group of three. Widdel designs and builds each paddle. In
order to achieve the greatest contrast, he personally selects the
reddest mahogany, the darkest walnut, the blondest aspen and
the wildest cherry. The blades are as different as fingerprints but
still retain the unmistakable style of the hands that made them.
The blade tips are made of fiberglass resin, mechanically bonded
to the blade.The handles are constructed from laminated,
straight-grained wood, giving them needed strength while
allowing them to flex.
Widdel attended the University of North Dakota for two years
before becoming sidetracked by his own small construction
company. All he wants to do is build things: to have a grand shop
exhibiting every metal tool and every wood tool that exists.
Lot #44
Albert BelleveauPuposky, Minnesota
Woman of Mettle
Welded steel
28 x 29.25 inches, 2005
Range: $1,500 - 1,8000
Albert Belleveau: To escape from a life of partying and
drinking, a young Albert Belleveau moved from the Twin Cities
of Minneapolis/St. Paul to live on his grandparent’s farm in the
country north of Bemidji, Minnesota. There he found two things
that laid the foundation for his artistic vision: a buzz box AC
welder and a pile of iron scrap.
He inherited his grandfather’s ability to value junk and save it,
not that he knows exactly what he’ll do with it at the time he
finds it. First, the stuff must go into his creative thinking
cauldron. There, guns are transformed into gun racks and tools
into a tool shed. Al’s playful dolphins (endorphins) are also
excited by the rock and steel rod he brings together with fire and
brute force into objects that address physics’ primordial
quantum dilemma: Is it particle or is it wave? His work reflects
Heisenberg’s answer: not certain, depends on how you look at
it. It’s something to look at and ponder while sitting in the
outhouse.
Al’s current series gently celebrates the sensual female form.
Although not formally trained, Al has had numerous shows. His
work sells well and he is often called upon to do residencies and
workshops. He particularly likes working with kindergarten kids.
He fires their creative juices by teaching them to weld with that
same old AC buzz box.
Note: The full figure of Woman of Mettle is shown above along
with a close-up of the torso.
Explore . . . Endure . . . Evolve . . .
North Dakota Quarterly, Merrifield Hall Room 110, 276 Centennial Drive Stop 7209, Grand Forks ND 58202-7209, (701) 777-3322 e-mail: [email protected] www.und.nodak.edu/org/ndq
North Dakota Quarterly isproud to support the
North Dakota Museum ofArt’s Autumn Art Auction,
continuing our ongoing promotion of art and artists inthe upper midwest. We regularly feature artwork
from the region and beyond on our covers. For exam-ple, an oil pastel by Jim Parks, University of Minnesota
Moorhead, is on the cover of our most recent issue,Hemingway: Places and People,
available for $12 each in the museum shop.
Bring this ad to Room 15 in Merrifield Hall to receive a free regular issueor a $10.00 discount on a subscription.
Jim Parks, The Peanut Steps of Freeport
North Dakota Museum of ArtFoundation
Board of DirectorsNorth Dakota Museum of Art
Board of Trustees
David Blehm
Julie Blehm
Ann Brown
John Foster, Chair
Cheryl Gaddie, Vice Chair
David Hasbargen, Vice President
Jean Holland
Sandy Kaul
Gretchen Kottke, Treasurer
Darrell Larson
Judi Paukert
Alex Reichert
Laurel Reuter, President
Pat Ryan
Gerald Skogley
Wayne Zimmerman
Corinne Alphson, Emerita
Virginia Dunnigan, Emerita
Bruce Gjovig, Emeritus
Barb Lander, Emerita
Robert Lewis, Emeritus
Ellen McKinnon, Emerita
Douglas McPhail, Emeritus
Sanny Ryan, Emerita
Anthony Thein, Emeritus
Kevin Fickenscher, Chair
Nancy Friese
Daniel E. Gustafson, Vice Chair
Kitty Keck
Darrell Larson
Margery McCanna
Betty Monkman, Secretary
Laurel Reuter
Gerald Skogley
North Dakota Museum of Art Staff
Justin Dalzell
Suzanne Fink
Pene Hargreaves
Barbara Hatfield
Amy Hovde
Connie Hulst
Kathy Kendle
Brian Lofthus
Laurel Reuter
Gregory Vettel
Matthew Wallace
Stacy Warcup
Justin Welsh
Student Employees:
Jeannette Baker, Caroline L. Brosseau, Amanda Rice
Sereysophaktra Som, Jennifer A. Verlinde
Katie L. Welsh, Andrew Yost
and over fifty volunteers
North Dakota Museum of Art, 261 Centennial Drive, Stop 7305, Grand Forks, North Dakota 58202-7305 USA