Brad Kahlhamer

[1] His artistic career took form, first as a road musician throughout the midwest for ten years and later in 1982 graduating with a BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Fond du Lac and Oshkosh and moving to New York City.

[5] Most notably through Abstract Expressionism, graphic styles from Gary Panter, Art Spiegelman, Henry Darger, and continual study of Plains Indians' ledger drawings and a personal Native American heritage.

In object as well as in practice, they present cross-cultural communication between aboriginal peoples and American newcomer on a number of levels, beginning with the very tools they used to make the drawings.” [9] The “third place” to which Kahlhamer refers is explored through expressive painting and drawing that is a constant production of understanding personal histories.

Scattered across the surface is a swirl of forms: animals, figures in canoes, wobbly Happy Faces, skyscraper-like stacks of music amplifiers, scrawled phrases, portraits and self-portraits, all floating through abstract landscapes of green hills and blue skies.

[12] Depicting diversely coded references from popular culture Kahlhamer’s Billy Jack Jr. (2006), illustrates expressively painted figures, animals, and iconography of specific Indian tribes.

[14] Richard Klein wrote, “Kahlhamer has spoken of Bowery Nation as an “alternative tribe” and the fact that the majority of the work's individual elements were born on New York's Lower East Side (the part of city with the most extensive history of immigration) makes a certain kind of sense” [15] At first glance the installation is over 100-figures, small sculptures on top of a table, deriving from an earlier encounter with a vast collection of Hopi Kachina figures at the Heard Museum.

[15] Taking a new direction, Kahlhamer began a production of wire, bells, and dreamcatcher forms repeating and expanding – “Using the ubiquitous symbol of the dream catcher, perhaps the most recognizable and appropriated object of American Indian culture, it hangs as an intricate, sprawling, sieve-like chain link net.

[16] Most recently described as "dream catchers caught in an archaic fisherman’s net, studded with small bells" while on display at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.