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

North Dakota Museum of Art

A U T U M N A r t A u c t i o nF r i d a y , o c to b e r 1 0 , 2 0 0 3

Wine and hors d’oeuvres 6:30 pm

Auction begins at 8 pm

Autumn Art Auction is

Underwritten by

Marshall Field’s

Auction PreviewSeptember 28 until auction time in the Museum galleries

Monday - Friday, 9 to 5 pm, Saturday - Sunday, 11 to 5 pm

Preview PartyTuesday, October 7, 7 pm, Museum Director, Laurel Reuter, will

lead an informal discussion about the art work in the Auction

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Buy local. Read the sponsor pages

to learn about those who invest

in the Museum. Please return

their investment.

—Ann Brown, Chair, Museum Board of Trustees

From the Museum Director

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. Many Museum regulars will remember Judy’s

1993 show, one of most popular shows we ever mounted.

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. When the new building

opens in May 2004, the large gallery will be named in honor of

Judy and Burton Onofrio—gifted by a former patient.

In another corner of his life, Burton runs art auctions. For twenty-

six years he has been the auctioneer of the Rochester Art Center

annual auction and for most of those years he organized the

auction 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. Burton’s

days, however, are spent in Judyland, the garden he created with

his wife Judy. And finally, this is a man who loves animals:

witness the candid photo above.

Burton Onofrio, Auctioneer

The North Dakota Museum of Art Autumn Art Auction began five

years ago and was the first live auction with an accompanying

catalog in the region. Today there are several such auctions in the

Red River Valley alone. What sets this one apart is that through

our catalogs we are creating a history of contemporary art in our

region. Like the catalogs of the major auction houses, ours is

becoming a collectable research tool.

We are also using the auction to introduce new artists to the area,

such as Wyoming artist Kasey Keeler, or to reintroduce artists

originally from North Dakota and are now living elsewhere, such

as Erin Holscher and Jen Wright Champlin. We also include

artists who will be exhibiting in the Museum in the future. You

can expect upcoming exhibitions from Alec Soth, whose

photograph is on the cover, and Jennifer Onofrio, a sculptor from

Rochester, Minnesota, now living in South Carolina.

You will find pieces in the auction by artists who recently showed

in the Museum. Megan Craig, Nedra Newby, and Nancy Friese

were in the Re-Imagining New York exhibition in 2002, which

included all nine artists who lost their studios on the ninety-first

floor of Tower One of the World Trade Center. Nedra’s drawing

was one of the choice works in our exhibition. Kristín Jónsdóttir

of Iceland, Ross Rolshoven of Grand Forks, and David Madzo of

St. Paul all had shows last season.

Zoran Mojsilov made the three free-form granite benches that

were dedicated a year ago in the Museum Garden. Over the past

year he worked on three "domestic-size" garden chairs for

inclusion in this auction. Gradually, by drawing together artists

with roots in North Dakota, Minnesota, and Manitoba, we are

building a vital art community. We are also building a support

base that will nurture this artistic community for years to come.

— Laurel Reuter

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee/One clover, and

a bee/And revery . . . and, a stalwart museum of distinct vision.

Ann Brown and Lisa Lewis are pleased to serve as this year’s co-

chairs for the North Dakota Museum of Art’s Autumn Art Auction.

They invite you to join in their revery, and reality, to strengthen

and support the home of our prairie’s most cultural and

contemporary aesthetic.

Ann K. Brown is originally from Willow City, North

Dakota, the second eldest of ten children who grew up on a grain

farm, a farm still maintained by her family. After receiving a B.S.

in art and design from NDSU, she became the advertising

manager for John Norby of Norby’s Department store in Grand

Forks. Currently, Ann is a physician at Altru Hospital, her original

love of art and design now scientifically focused in her work as a

pathologist.

Ann is the newly-appointed chairperson of the Museum’s Board

of Trustees. She has previously served on the Museum’s Jazz

Festival committee and serves now on the committee of the

Museum’s Art Odyssey group. As well, she is the mother of two

children, ages twelve and sixteen, courtesy of the Mayor of

Grand Forks.

Lisa D. Lewis is a member of the Museum’s Board of Trustees.

She chaired the first Autumn Art Auction in 1999 as well as

chairing one of the Museum’s first membership drives. She is

chairing the Museum’s Art Odyssey group, a growing group of

members whose wonder and desire for art is cultivated and

celebrated through lively lectures, discussions, and travels.

Lisa teaches in the English Department and Honors Program at

the University of North Dakota, as well as serving as a clinical

faculty member of the School of Medicine and Health Sciences

where she occasionally lectures on illness in literature. She

utilizes the Museum extensively as a cultural text in her classes,

where for many of her students, a visit to the museum is their first.

Lisa has one grandson and four children to whom she formerly

paid one whole dollar for each painting she commissioned.

Rules of Auction

Autumn Art Auction Committee

Ann Brown, Co-chair

Lisa D. Lewis, Co-chair

Madelyn Camrud, SuAnne Frasier, Rita Hadland,

Jon Jackson, Jeremy Klein, Alice Lee, Marsy Schroeder,

Barry Stinson, Wayne Zimmerman

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 bid 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. 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.

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 that work but must pay for all art work before the

conclusion of the evening. Absentee bidders will be charged

on the evening of the auction or an invoice will be sent on

the next business day after the event.

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 North Dakota Museum

of Art below which a work of art will not be sold.

Ann Brown and Lisa Lewis, Co-Chairs

Charles Beck is best know for his woodcuts. Less

known, but equally important, are his oil-on-paper paintings,

one of which appears in this auction. In all his work, Beck is

affected by where he lives. The landscapes around Fergus

Falls, Minnesota, always his home, continually reappear in

his woodcuts and paintings. Beck says, "You have to make art

from what you're interested in. I'd rather make a woodcut of

a plowed field with some conviction than a crucifixion with

none." Color and textures are what he takes from the

landscape, but the horizon is his biggest influence. He

continues, "The separation between the sky and what I call

vertical space and horizontal space . . . seems to be a part of

every landscape. I seem to feel the need to show the sky in

the background." He believes landscapes are extremely

exciting because of how they constantly change weekly, even

daily.

Beck enrolled at Concordia College, Moorhead, Minnesota,

in 1941. His professor, Cy Running, influenced Beck in those

early years when Beck was making watercolors, but

ultimately, Beck let go of influence and developed a style,

undeniably his own, which has served him well for a half-

century. In 1950, Beck returned to Fergus Falls with his wife

Joyce, having completed military service and graduate school

at the University of Iowa. Beck's work is represented by the

Rourke Art Museum, Moorhead, Minnesota, and his work is

also in its permanent collection. A painting from the same

series as the one in the auction recently entered the North

Dakota Museum of Art’s permanent collection.

Lot #1

Charles BeckFergus Falls, Minnesota

Untitled

Oil on paper

5 5/8 x 13 inches, 2002

Range: $400-500

Charles Beck is the finest example of a Regional Artist in

the best sense of the term. His subject is the landscape of

Ottertail County where he lives. His work is owned by

friends, neighbors and those who live in—or remember—

the larger Red River Valley. His gift to other artists is the

example of his life, his integrity, the self-confidence he

brings to his work, his willingness to support his family

by other means in order to keep his work accessible to

young artists, friends and neighbors. His aesthetic sense

is refined and informed by the larger world, and, at age

eighty, he continues to spend long hours making art.

—Laurel Reuter

Lot #2

Steve NowatzkiMinneapolis, Minnesota

Adaptability

Hand-colored etching

18 x 24 inches, 1995-2003

Range: $225-250

Steve Nowatzki was born in 1958 in Germany, the son of

an American soldier stationed there. He was introduced to

printmaking in Heidelberg, but returned to the States to study at

the Minnesota State University Moorhead, where he received his

B.F.A. in printmaking and drawing in 1986.

The work in the auction, Adaptability, evolved over many years.

According to the artist, I did the original etching (zinc) as a two-

plate print back in 1986 or 1985, but I resurrected the key plate

to milk the image and I’m currently printing another edition on

this paper (Indian Hand Made Paper-Bagasse) as needed. I started

this second edition back in 1995 or so. The artist proof in the

auction, which I hand colored, was completed in July 2003.

I use a blend of new studio practices with the original

printmaking techniques to minimize the resources used in my art.

I use stone lithographs, zinc etchings, monoprints and

drawings—many times in concert with one another to achieve

the end result of my concepts.

My prints are all hand printed, by me, on archival paper. I believe

in working with the least amount of environmental impact

possible. My zinc plates are ground down and reused after

completing the edition run; the lithographs are drawn and

printed on reusable stones. I even recycle old cotton clothes into

my hand made paper.

In my work I attempt to strip away the veneer of commercialized

packaging that disguises the stresses put upon the planetary

environment. The easiest way to accomplish this task would be to

bluntly illustrate the damage done. Unfortunately, this easier

route is not necessarily the most artistically gratifying. In my

images, I’ve attempted to cerebrally challenge the viewer and

also educate them with different view points on how they make

their lifestyle choices.

Lot #3

Will MacleanTayport, Fife, Scotland

Study of old wooden fishing boats

for Day of the Dead celebration

Lithograph, artist proof

Image 15 x 23 inches, 1996

Range: $400-500

The art of Will Maclean is a visual song of sorrow.

This man of the Scottish Highlands, born of seagoing fishermen

and now an artist of international rank, has created an unending

song cycle that chronicles the pain of his own people. Rooted in

language and visual metaphor, Maclean’s art seems akin to a tone

poem that has been a lifetime in the making. Initially one is

struck by the sheer beauty of Maclean’s constructions, prints and

paintings, by their formal elegance and calm. Often that is

enough in art. To really hear the song, however, to grasp its

cadences, one must learn his country’s history beginning with the

Bronze Age and continuing into the present with the construction

of nuclear bases in the West Highlands. One needs to know what

it has meant to be Scottish in the last centuries, and then, maybe,

what it means to be human anywhere in a society of the

dispossessed. Those are the opening lines of the book Will

Maclean: Cardinal Points, written by Laurel Reuter and published

by the North Dakota Museum of Art in 2001 to chronicle his

1998 solo exhibition at the North Dakota Museum of Art. The

exhibition later toured in Canada.

Will Maclean is one of the leading artists of his generation in

Scotland. He was born in Inverness, the son of the harbor master,

and spent his childhood between Inverness and the Isle of Skye.

Raised in a family of fishermen, Maclean went to sea at an

early age, spending years on fishing boats and in the Merchant

Marine. His art is rooted in his knowledge of the Highlands,

the Highland people, and their history both on land and sea.

In 1968 he returned to sea as a herring fisherman, happily

working a six-man boat with members of his own family.

Ultimately, he was forced to give up a life on the sea because

he failed his eye exam for the Merchant Marine; subsequently

he became an artist. In all of Maclean's work, the sea is the

ultimate agent of human destiny. The lithograph in the auction

memorializes the lovely, old fishing boats, crafted from wood,

that have been made obsolete by commercial fleets that now

rule the seas.

Maclean’s work is in a multitude of collections, among them

the British Museum, London; the Scottish National Gallery of

Modern Art, Edinburgh; the Yale Center for British Art, New

Haven, Connecticut; and the North Dakota Museum of Art.

Lot #4

Barbara Thill Anderson Moorhead, Minnesota

Study #1, Beatitudes Series

Oil on canvas

20 x 20 inches, 2003

Range: $600-$800

Barbara Thill Anderson recounts, Three years ago I

began a series of paintings titled The Beatitudes Series. The

paintings are based on the contents of a box of photographs

dating from my late father’s service in World War II. He was

stationed in Italy and northern Africa with an army intelligence

unit assigned the task of recording Allied plane crashes. These

black and white photographs (over two hundred of them) show

all manner of crashed aircraft, from a fully intact but upside down

Spitfire to a totally unrecognizable heap of machinery. These

photographs have no documentation associated with them. They

serve as the basis for most of the works in the series. There is great

beauty and compositional challenge in the arbitrary disarray of

the elements caused by sudden impact. Some paintings are more

abstract than others. The work in the auction is the first study I

made for the series.

Furthermore, painting has always been, for me, grounded in

formal concerns such as composition and color relationships. In

the last few years the surface of the artwork and its evolution to

new stages has emerged as a primary aspect of how I work.

Revealing layers of earlier compositions and content allow me to

fashion a more complex imagery as the painting itself becomes

more abstracted.

I admire the work of Pieter Brueghel and Max Beckman for their

complex compositions; and the work of Willem de Kooning,

Richard Diebenkorn, and Elizabeth Murray for the elegance of

their lines and surfaces.

Barbara Thill Anderson received a B.F.A. degree from the

Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and an M.A. in painting

from Minnesota State University Moorhead. Anderson also spent

a year in Haarlem, the Netherlands, studying at Stichting Atelier

63, a fine art studio school. She has been teaching in the art

department at Concordia College in Moorhead since 1990 and

has acted as gallery director since 1991.

Anderson has received various Career Opportunity Grants from

the Minnesota State Arts Board, and in 1999 was awarded a

McKnight Individual Artist Fellowship from the Lake Region Arts

Council.

Lot #6

Laura Heit YoungbirdBreckenridge, Minnesota

Assimulation Dress II

Intaglio

15 x 11 inches, 2003

Range: $250–300

Laura Heit Youngbird’s art grows out of her Native

American background as an Annishanabe of the Grand Portage

Band. Her mother and grandmother grew up in boarding schools

Today the artist works at the Circle of Nations School in

Wahpeton, ND, a therapeutic American Indian residential

boarding school as a cultural counselor and art instructor.

Many of the artist’s images are based on old photographs of her

grandmother who scratched her own face out of nearly every

photograph. The faceless pictures haunted her, but also prompted

her to dig deeper for an understanding of her grandmother and

her heritage. Through her art, Youngbird communicates things

that cannot be put into words—observations, responses to

injustices, outrage at crimes committed in the past that continue

to play out a brutal legacy.

Youngbird graduated from Minnesota State University Moorhead

in 1997 with an M.A. in drawing and printmaking. Her work has

been exhibited at the Memorial Union Gallery, North Dakota

State University; the Spirit Room, Fargo, ND; the GK Gallery,

Cooperstown, ND; the Ojibwe Art Expo at the Plains Art Museum

in Fargo; and the Rourke Gallery in Moorhead. She is an Artist-

in-Residence for the North Dakota Council on the Arts. In the

summer of 2003 Youngbird was awarded a Jerome Fellowship to

Erin Holscher was raised in North Dakota and received

her B.F.A. cum laude from Minnesota State University Moorhead

in 2000 after having studied at the University of Massachusetts-

Boston and the Massachusetts College of Art. She recently

graduated from Rochester Institute of Technology with an M.F.A.

in non-toxic printmaking.

Her current work is an exploration of her physical, emotional,

and spiritual search for home. She says, I am fascinated with

location and dislocation, and our spiritual connectedness to

place. Through drawing and printmaking, I explore the temporal

nature of our human existence and the transient spaces we

inhabit throughout.

Motherland is a non-toxic, non-etch print that reflects the artist's

connection to the Midwest. Technically the work reflects her

discoveries while studying at the Rochester Institute of

Technology. An intaglio-type is a contemporary, no-etch

printmaking technique that utilizes ImagOn Ultra photo-polymer

film, developed by Keith Howard and DuPont. The construction-

intaglio-type is a technique that involves adaptively layering

pieces of the ImagOn ultra film to construct an image. The

addition of the pastel wash drawing is her own innovation.

According to the artist, after seeing my friend and studio-mate

Amy Williams draw and paint on drafting Mylar, I decided to try

drawing with pastel and exposing the drawings to the ImagOn

Ultra film. The process allowed me to integrate my drawing with

printmaking and to work more intuitively through the layering of

images.

Lot #5 (left)

Erin HolscherRochester, New York

Motherland

Intaglio-type, liquid aquatint

37 3/4 x 23 3/4 inches, 2003

Range: $225–275

Lot # 7

Ross RolshovenGrand Forks, North Dakota

Fish Camp

19 1/2 x 27 3/4 inches, 2003

Range: $400-600

North Dakota artist, Ross Rolshoven, widely

known for his hand-tinted photographs and assemblages, had a

major exhibition at the North Dakota Museum of Art in the

summer of 2002.

An obsessive collector of vintage toys and memorabilia, Native

American art, and artifacts, Rolshoven creates assemblages using

disparate objects to tell stories and evoke memories. Through the

accumulation of related and unrelated objects, Rolshoven builds

a world that encompasses his children, his love of the West, and

his deep immersion in contemporary popular culture. Rolshoven

is a visual storyteller and each piece has a theme that the viewer

can interpret. Rolshoven thinks of his assemblages as memory

conduit pieces, and the interaction between the viewer and the

artist creates an emotional bond.

Rolshoven, a lifelong resident of North Dakota, was born in

Mandan and spent countless summers looking for arrowheads,

playing on early military block houses, and exploring Mandan

Indian earth lodges at local state parks. His grandfather painted

landscapes of his native Germany as a way of remembering, after

he immigrated to North Dakota where he became a commercial

artist and continued to paint and to hand-tint his own

photographs. His son, Rolshoven’s father, became a civil

engineer and photographer as well. Like his ancestors, Rolshoven

both paints on canvas and hand-tints his own photographs,

mostly of Western subjects and landscapes.

Rolshoven, a graduate of the University of North Dakota,

manages a private detective and insurance claims office in Grand

Forks and travels extensively, using business trips to collect the

objects used in his artwork. He has participated in many local,

regional and national art shows. Two of his tinted photographs

are included in the permanent collection of the Van Vechetin-

Lineburry Museum in Taos, New Mexico. His artwork is also in

the collection of the North Dakota Museum of Art, and the East

Grand Forks Public Library, the Custer County Art Center,

Montana, and the Rourke Art Gallery, Minnesota. He has won

numerous awards for photography. Rolshoven has also worked in

elementary schools as an artist and is a trustee for the North

Dakota Cowboy Hall of Fame.

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 of these nearly abstract

seasonal landscapes.

Bederman has been in twenty-seven group shows and twenty

solo exhibitions in North Dakota and Minnesota since 1992. She

recently completed a five-month residency at the Jamestown Arts

Center and taught figure drawing at Bismarck State College.

Lot #8

Gretchen Bederman Mandan, North Dakota

Untitled

Acrylic on canvas

4 x 6 feet, 2003

Range $1,500–1,800

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 M.F.A.

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.

The painting in the auction is rare for Bederman in that its scale

is large and the horses are monumental. It signals her move into

new artistic territory.

Megan Craig was introduced to the audience of the

North Dakota Museum of Art in August 2002 when her small and

exquisite paintings were included in the exhibition Re-Imagining

New York as one of the nine artists who lost her studio on the

ninety-first floor of the World Trade Center. Craig, who was in the

lobby on her way up, would later describe her relationship with

one of the most daunting cityscapes on earth:

The view from the World Trade Center offered an ethical sightline

onto New York City, a sightline the city needed to have. Those

vertical, narrow windows widened one’s perception of the city

and one’s place in it, enforcing an exchange of the deafening

jumble of sound and light for an encompassing and nearly silent

experience of the city as a working whole. . . . One could not

descend unchanged onto the packed streets of lower

Manhattan—one emerged at least newly aware of the stretches of

clover-shaped housing projects outlining the boroughs, of the

tops of the buildings, and the extent to which their inner

workings perched on the rooftops in jumbles of piping and metal

boxes. Seeing so much of the city’s insides on the outside, one

was struck by the extent to which Manhattan exists inside out, its

heart on its sleeve.

The small painting of the Brooklyn Bridge that is in the auction is

an outgrowth of her earlier World Trade Center paintings—most

Lot #9

Megan Craig New Haven, Connecticut

9 pm Brooklyn Bridge

Oil on panel

9 x 9 inches, 2003

Range: $300–400

of which were lost in the Tower.

Criag was born in New York State and grew up in Brussels,

Belgium, and Goshen, Connecticut. She studied painting with

Andrew Forge, John Hull, Laura Newman and Richard Lytle at

Yale University, where she graduated with a B.A. in philosophy in

1997. Her work has been included in Cartouche, a group show

of emerging New York artists at CB313 Gallery; Illuminated

Interiors, at Rubilad in Williamsburg; and in Re-imagining New

York at the North Dakota Museum of Art. She has been awarded

painting residencies from The Vermont Studio Center, from LMCC

to paint from the ninety-first floor of the World Trade Center in

their Studioscape program, and to paint in DUMBO through the

LMCC’s New Views program. She has also been an artist-in-

residence at C-Scape Duneshack A in Provincetown. Craig is the

recipient of a Dean’s Fellowship at the New School for Social

Research where she is a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy. She has

taught courses in aesthetics and contemporary art at Parsons

School of Design and was the organizer of the philosophy

conference, “Thinking Through September 11th: New York

Philosophers Respond,” held at the New School in April 2002.

Other awards include a Pollock-Krasner grant, two Vermont

Studio Center Full Fellowship Awards, the Grace LeGendre

Fellowship for Advanced Graduate Study, and a New School

Teaching Fellowship.

multimedia collaboration courses at UND for two years and then

became director of Beall Park Arts Center in Bozeman, Montana.

Beginning in 1992, he spent seven years with the Plains Art

Museum in Fargo where he guided the transformation of an

historic International harvester branch house into an award-

winning arts facility. In 2000, he established Jelsing Studios in

Fargo, where he works in a variety of media to create both two-

and three-dimensional works of art, including large public

commissions. He also teaches art and design at universities in the

Fargo-Moorhead area. While maintaining strong ties to artists and

arts organizations of the Northern Plains, he has served on many

national committees and commissions, including the U.S. State

Department’s Friends of Art and Preservation of Embassies

Millennium Committee.

Lot #10

Terry Jelsing Fargo, North Dakota

Dwelling

Graphite on paper

17 1/2 x 23 1/2 inches, 2001

Range: $500-700

Terry Jelsing, a native Noth Dakotan, creates work that is

spiritually tied to the prairie landscape.

Born in Rugby, North Dakota, in 1954, Jelsing’s artistic abilities

presented at an early age. By the time he graduated from Rugby

High School he had several public commissions to his credit.

Before enrolling in the B.F.A. program at the University of North

Dakota, Grand Forks, he completed a three-year tour of duty with

the Army in Europe. He later returned to Europe to study at the

Institute of European Studies in Vienna, Austria, where he was

strongly influenced by the German expressionists. He completed

graduate work (M.A. and M.F.A.) in art history, sculpture and

painting at the University of New Mexico in 1986. According to

Jelsing, "during that time he was part of the first American post-

modernist movement, experimenting with time-art studies and

conceptual projects." His graduate exhibition, "Circus for

Matthew," received good media coverage and was published in

Artspace magazine.

Jelsing has worked professionally as an artist, teacher, curator

and arts administrator for twenty-five years. He taught

Ali LaRock is an artist living and working in Bismarck, North

Dakota, having grown up in nearby New Town. She received her

B.F.A. in painting from Minnesota State University Moorhead in

1998. Since leaving college, she has shown widely throughout

North Dakota, including solo exhibitions at the Taube Museum in

Minot, the Bismarck Art Gallery, the Cando Art Center, in the Art

View Program at the Plains Museum in Fargo, and the Roland

Dille Center for the Arts in Moorhead, Minnesota.

LaRock works in the areas of painting, printmaking,

papermaking, and mixed media. Besides creating art, LaRock

teaches art to children through various artist-in-residency

programs, including the North Dakota Council for the Arts, Theo

Art School in Bismarck, and Dakota West Arts Council. She has

also taught art in such diverse venues as the Salvation Army

Summer Day Camp and the Elks Camp Grassick for Children,

For LaRock, creating art is a continual learning process—about

myself, those around me, and the complexity of this world. She

builds duality into her work, combining humor with difficult

issues and depicts the complications of adult life with child-like

simplicity.

Later he moved to nearby Whidbey Island and set up his own

shop. In the 1970s hot tubs were all the rage on the West Coast

and for several years Swenson made them out of Western Red

Cedar. "Unfortunately, I didn’t get into making small, artful things

but always responded to commercial assignments." In 1995 he

returned to North Dakota. It wasn’t until 2001 that he set up a

shop—and then in East Grand Forks, Minnesota. Vowing not to

take on commercial work, he christened his shop a "studio" in

order to discourage people in the trades from trying to hire him.

Today Swenson makes finely crafted, one-off pieces such as

Cobra, the box in the auction. He seeks out exotic hardwoods,

relishing their variations in color and pattern. Western Red Cedar,

for example, runs the color gamut from black to white. Swenson

Lot #11

Ali LaRockBismarck, North Dakota

Read Into

Oil on canvas

12 x 12 inches, 2002

Range: $275-325

Gene Swenson was born in Valley City, North Dakota, but

spent his childhood on the Fort Totten Reservation, living in the

village of Warwick. A man of enormous curiosity and a voracious

reader, he has learned to pay careful attention. He deeply loves

the prairies of central North Dakota, the hills, lakes, rivers and

grasslands, finding them "so unnoticed as to be unknown."

Swenson maintains that "one has to walk the hills in order to see

the great beauty of the North Dakota place." This attention to

obscure detail has flowered in his woodworking.

By the time Gene was fourteen, he was following his father

around, learning the construction trade—his father owned his

own construction company and taught all his sons his trade. As a

young man he moved to the Seattle area where he continued to

work as a carpenter. According to Swenson, a carpenter is "a man

who can do anything. He has all-around skills and knows how

things in general work and how they come together."

Nancy Friese was born in Fargo, North Dakota. She

completed her undergraduate studies in art at Cincinnati, spent a

year at the University of California, Berkeley, and graduated with

an M.F.A. from Yale. She has participated in national and

international residency programs including residencies in Japan,

France, and New York City. She was a Studioscape Artist-in-

Residence at the World Trade Center's World Views Residency

programs in 2001. One year after the Towers went down, Friese

curated the exhibition Re-Imagining New York, which opened at

the North Dakota Museum in August 2002. In 1997 and 1999

she was an artist-in-resident with the Museum of Pont-Aven in

Brittany, France. She has had four one-person shows at the

Pepper Gallery in Boston. Cate McQuaid of the Boston Globe

writes, Friese's work is so fluid, so dancerly, it looks like

spontaneous play. In truth, the artist returns to the site she is

painting a half-dozen times before she finishes each painting,

adding new layers of watercolor, anchoring all the dreamy,

delirious color with lanky, dark lines.

Skyward I and II were done from the Red River Valley landscape.

Friese has been painting in recent summers from her North

Dakota farmstead, her grandparents’ homestead which she

acquired in 2001. This year she will be exhibiting her paintings

in The Painting Center in New York City and the International

Center for Art in Rennes, France. Since the mid-1980s her

paintings and prints have been exhibited in more than twenty

solo shows and 100 national and international group shows.

During the school year she teaches at the Rhode Island School of

Design, where she has just completed a long stint as Director of

Graduate Studies and before that Chair of Printmaking.

Lot # 12 (left)

Gene SwensonEast Grand Forks, Minnesota

Cobra

Apple wood

7 1/2 x 5 x 5 1/2 inches, 2003

Range: $250–400

Lot #13

Nancy FrieseCranston, Rhode Island

Dyptich, Skyward I and Skyward II

Watercolor

Each image 15 x 22 1/2 inches, 2003

Range: $3,800–4,000

has a predilection redilection for local hardwoods including fruit

woods such as chokecherry and crabapple as well as walnut and

Russian olive. The work in the auction came from a local apple

tree in East Grand Forks. A neighbor came by and said the tree

had been caught in the storm and he could have it.

Fussy about finishes, Swenson has experimented with many over

the years. Today he prefers the finish rediscovered by America’s

great woodworker, Sam Maloof. Used on Cobra, it contains

mineral spirits, polyurethane, and boiled linseed oil, followed by

a waxing of hard beeswax and boiled linseed oil.

Paula Sethre has spent a lifetime immersed in both paint

and words. Her goal has gradually evolved: she wanted to pursue

a particularly American form of abstraction. Having traveled and

worked in France, she discovered that there was something

American in her vision and she had to return to the United States

to realize it. But first, she had to leave the figure behind, to leave

all reference to subject. According to Museum Director, Laurel

Reuter, the painting in the auction represents her finest

achievement of that goal.

Born and raised in Minneapolis, Paula Sethre received a B.A.

degree in sociology from St. Olaf College in Northfield,

Minnesota. In 1973 she took an M.A. from the University of

Lot # 14

Paula SethreMinneapolis, Minnesota

Spied Piper

Oil on canvas

30 x 30 inches, 2003

Range: $300–600

Tennessee in education for the deaf, a second M.A.

from the University of Minnesota in design in 1984,

and ten years later an M.F.A. from the University of

Massachusetts, Amherst, where she studied visual arts.

Since returning to Minnesota, she has worked as a

visiting artist at the Minnesota Center for Arts

Education, the University of Wisconsin at River Falls,

the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, St. Olaf College

in Northfield, the College of Visual Arts in St. Paul and

at various high schools. She has also exhibited widely

throughout the United States.

Lot #15

Jim DowBelmont, Massachusetts

Root Beer Float, US 12, Delano, Minnesota

Color print from 8 X 10 color negative

Print #1, Edition of 25

Image 16 x 20 inches on 20 x 24 paper, 2002

Range: $1,100-1,300

Jim Dow’s interest in photography began at the Rhode Island

School of Design where he earned an undergraduate degree in

graphic design. Upon completion of college, he was hired as a

printer for Walker Evans and the Museum of Modern Art. Over a

two-year period, he made prints for both the Museum’s 1972

Evans retrospective and the monograph that accompanied the

show. He also began to photograph large projects including

Seagram’s Bicentennial project, The County Court House, which

sent 20 photographers across the country.

He received National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in

1972, 1979, and 1990 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1975. In

1981, the North Dakota Museum of Art received a grant from

Target Stores to allow Dow to photograph environmental folk art

throughout North Dakota. He spent three months in the state

completing that commission. An exhibition of the work toured

throughout North Dakota and the photographs entered the

Museum’s permanent collection.

A sports fan, Dow has photographed numerous places where

people watch games throughout the United States, Great Britain

and Argentina. Sport, he says, is as close to religion as anything

we’ve got. Dow was an official photographer at the Los Angeles

Olympics and has photographed, by commission, all of the

major league baseball stadiums in the country.

He came back to Grand Forks and Minot during the summer of

1998 while photographing the ballparks in the Northern and

Prairie Leagues. Since that trip he has returned to North Dakota

a number of times to continue to photograph throughout the

region with an eye towards publishing a book that will pay

homage to the unique atmosphere and sensibility of the upper

Great Plains. He is working on a concurrent project

photographing the great private social clubs of New York City.

His work is collected by many institutions including the Art

Institute of Chicago, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the

George Eastman House, and the Museum of Modern Art in New

York City.

Jim Dow, who was born in 1942, lives with his wife Jacque and

their two sons, the third generation to occupy the family home in

a suburb of Boston.

Jay Pfeifer created Hush from the everyday materials of his

working life. Wayne Tollefson had been his undergraduate

teacher at North Dakota State University and he said, Jay, find

materials close to you. It doesn’t matter if they are thought of as

art materials. Construct your art from your life. Today Pfeifer

makes his living as a foreman in commercial construction. Hush

has been created from wallboard compound base, bloodwood

sawdust, and polyurethane. His pigments are coffee grounds and

strained concrete. Pfeifer builds up fields of texture to suggest the

land, sky, and horizon, which dominate the Red River Valley of

the North. Plowed fields, wind rows, and undisturbed land

hearken back to his childhood home in Buffalo, North Dakota, to

an earlier time, before the land was worked by the first settlers,

before roads, shelterbelts and cities consumed the vast

landscape. Ultimately, Pfeifer uses non-traditional materials to

depict the visual language of art: line, texture, color, shape, and

space—brought to life through chance.

Pfeifer began his art education at Consumnes River College in

Sacramento, California, earning an A.A. degree in 1984. He

attended the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1985 and

from 1988-90 he studied at the University of Utah, finally

Lot #16

Jay PfeiferFargo, North Dakota

Hush

Mixed media on Lyan board

37 3/4 x 47 3/4 inches, 2003

Range: $1,500–1,800

graduating with a B.A. in 1995 from North Dakota State

University in Fargo. By the mid-1990s, Pfeifer’s artistic career

took off. Paintings began to sell, prices climbed, and he began to

collect awards: most notably from the Plains Art Museum in

Fargo where he received the juror's Choice Award in 1998 at the

Spring Gala, and again in 1999 in the Art on the Plains

exhibition. That same year he had his first solo exhibition at the

GK Gallery in Cooperstown. Most recently, Pfeifer was chosen as

one of seventeen artists with a room dedicated to his work in the

Donaldson Hotel in Fargo, and he inaugurated the dining room

with a solo exhibition in 2003.

Jennifer Onofrio, as the daughter of a working, self-

taught artist, has been surrounded by art since an early age. She

would come home from school and go directly to her mother’s

studio “for a few hours of uninhibited creation.” On weekends

she would join her parents, Judy and Burton Onofrio, as they

explored their hometown Rochester and the surrounding

Minnesota countryside searching for “outsider artists.” Onofrio’s

memory of these experiences and her close relationship with her

parents continue to play an integral role in her work. Most

recently, she has been working on a series of mixed media

sculptural pieces addressing issues of memory, vulnerability, and

mortality.

Onofrio attended the University of Wisconsin from 1984-88

where she received a B.F.A. in painting and sculpture. From

1989-91 she attended the University of California at Davis where

she received an M.F.A. in sculpture, photography, and drawing.

Her background in these disciplines affects both her work in the

studio and in the classroom.

Onofrio has shown her work throughout the Midwest, including

the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and the ARC gallery

in Chicago. She has had solo exhibitions in Kansas City,

Missouri; and Rochester and Mankato, Minnesota; in Augusta,

Georgia; and in Aiken, South Carolina. Onofrio taught sculpture,

installation, photography, and drawing at the University of

Minnesota, Morris from 1991-95, and currently teaches

photography, 3-dimensional design, and humanities at Augusta

State University where she is an associate professor of art.

Onofrio is scheduled to exhibit her work at the North Dakota

Museum of Art in the fall of 2004.

Lot #17

Jennifer OnofrioAiken, South Carolina

Natural Defense

Graphite, wood and straw

53 x 9 x 9 inches, 2003

Range: $1,200–1,500

Detail on right

Samuel Johnson, who was born in Breckenridge,

Minnesota, in 1973, decided early on that he wanted to be an

artist. He began as an undergraduate at the University of

Minnesota, Morris, where he received his B.A. in 1996 in

studio arts with a concentration on painting. While there he

took ceramics classes from Jenny Nellis and Kevin Flicker. This

led him to embark upon a self-tailored study of ceramics. He

spent the next three and a half years at Richard Bresnahan’s

Saint John’s Pottery as a Grotto Foundation Apprentice. The

pottery, home of the largest wood-burning kiln in North

America, is an internationally recognized center of ceramic

ferment as scores of artists and apprentices come and go.

He then left for Europe having been invited as a guest artist to

spend a year at the Danish Design School in Copenhagen.

This resulted in an invitation to be part of a group exhibition

at the Sak Museum in Svendborg, Denmark, along with a

South African, another American, and two Danish artists.

Always seeking new experiences, he worked for a number of

potters including Ann Linnemann in Copenhagen. He threw

porcelain for Christian Bruun in Copenhagen, fired with Johan

Strom in rural Sweden, and worked at the International

Ceramic Center in Skaelskur, Denmark. While at the center,

he spent a month as a technical assistant at an international

ceramics symposium, and he was fortunate to fire with Fred

Olsen who built an experimental wood fire kiln. In June 2000,

Johnson traveled to La Borne, France, to research kilns.

Upon returning to the States, Johnson apprenticed with Jeff

Shapiro in upstate New York for three months and then left

for Japan to work as an artist assistant in the studio of Ryoji

Koji in Tokoname City, Aichi Prefecture. He helped build a

wood kiln, worked on exhibitions, and used this

opportunity to travel in Japan to visit ceramic centers.

In 2002, Johnson moved to Iowa City where he enrolled in

the graduate studio arts program with a concentration in

ceramics. Students receive both an M.A. and an M.F.A., but

must complete the M.A. before they are invited to continue

in the M.F.A. program. Johnson has made that hurdle and

will receive his terminal degree in two years. He hopes to

set up his studio and build his own wood-burning kiln

somewhere in Minnesota.

Of his work in the auction, Johnson says, While studying at

the Royal Porcelain Factory in Copenhagen, I became

interested in the chalky quality of porcelain that’s only fired

to around 1,100 degrees centigrade—rather than the

translucency that’s possible at higher temperatures.

Lot # 18

Samuel JohnsonIowa City, Iowa

Jar

Low-fired porcelain with borax and iron glaze

14 1/2 inches high, 2000

Range: $500–600

Gretchen Kottke studied French and art at

Jamestown College and the University of North Dakota. After

college, she left North Dakota and worked in the medical

field both as a health care worker and as an administrator.

Thirty years later, she returned to Cooperstown, North

Dakota, and opened the GK Art Gallery. It proved to be one

of the most rewarding challenges in her life, a gift to the

people of North Dakota, and a major support system for

artists from the three-state region. According to Museum

Director, Laurel Reuter, Gretchen’s work in Cooperstown is a

stellar example of the difference that one person can make

in creating a lively cultural life in a rural place. Kottke closed

the gallery in June 2003 in order to devote her time to art.

Kottke, a painter in private life, recalls, I have been making

art since I can remember. As a student at Cooperstown High

School, I made Christmas sets. I also had a piece accepted

for an exhibition at North Dakota State University while still

in high school. My work has always focused on the human

spirit. Through painting I explore relationships with others

and connections with the environment. While studying

French during the 1960s, I discovered Existentialism. Over

the years I have worked extensively in the Civil Rights

Movement and with the Sierra Club. These interests have

impacted my work profoundly. She is also a Master

Gardener, an interest that led her to commission a public garden

in Cooperstown created by a team of artists led by Kathryn Lipke.

Thoughts, the painting in the auction, grew out of the artist’s

experience of the last year during which time her mother died

and her good friend and supporter, Jim Wold of Cooperstown,

died. The sense of loss and helplessness in the face of grief is

reflected in the figure without hands, about to be encompassed

by the sea. Kottke writes: Thoughts created itself out of just

wanting to paint as though I was alone. I imagined that I was

adrift and found myself stranded in a sea of grass when the

fishing lines were put in. I wanted to create for myself a space

that would be absolutely empty—where I would be alone with

nothing but the horizon and an empty space. I would have only

my thoughts and understanding. . . I would only exist for myself.

I wouldn’t be asked by anybody for anything. Nobody would

need my help. My absence wouldn’t make anybody sad and

everything would be quiet. Thus I created my own emptiness.

Kottke has exhibited in group exhibitions in Los Angeles, Denver,

the Puget Sound area and North Dakota. While mounting solo

exhibitions for dozens of artists in her gallery at Cooperstown,

she never gave herself that privilege. Her first solo exhibition was

in Tumwater, Washington.

Lot #19

Gretchen KottkeCooperstown, North Dakota

Thoughts

Oil on canvas

40 x 60 inches, 2003

Range: $800-1,000

Marley Kaul has maintained a studio in Bemidji,

Minnesota, for the past thirty-five years. Working in both acrylic

and in egg tempera, his colorful 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

symbolism with social and political issues, transforming simple

images into complex metaphors. His paintings are at once

autobiographical and social commentary on daily life. Marley

Kaul’s paintings are included in many collections including the

North Dakota Museum of Art; Wiesman Art Museum,

Minneapolis; 3-M Collection, St. Paul; Anderson Center, Red

Wing, Minnesota; the Plains Art Museum and Hotel Donaldson

Collection, Fargo, N. D.; and Tweed Museum, Duluth,

Minnesota.

Lot # 20

Marley Kaul

Bemidji, Minnesota

Sending a Message

Egg tempera on panel

14 x 12 inches, 2003

Range: $600–800

Lot #21

Kasey KeelerKaycee, Wyoming

Summer Storm

Oil on birch board

Image 8 x 8 inches

Range: $250–400

According to Kasey Keeler, Summer Storm comes

from her series Five Shares, which is inspired by her family’s

ranch in Sussex, Wyoming. I have spent most of my life at this

place, which has been in my family for over 100 years and is one

of the last large-scale, family owned ranches in the state. In Five

Shares, I am investigating the land and my perception of it as a

large but precious and ever-changing place.

Kasey Keeler studied at Northwest College in Powell, Wyoming,

and received her B.A. in painting, drawing and art history from

Montana State University at Billings in 2002, graduating magna

cum laude. After traveling in Europe and studying in Santa Fe, she

is currently living and working as a farmer and shepherd on the

family ranch in Johnson County, Wyoming.

The artist’s recent exhibitions include Art of the New West at the

Dahl Art Center in Rapid city, SD, where juror Ted Waddell gave

her an honorable mention; ANA 31 at the Holter Museum in

Helena juried by Gerald Peters; and 5 Shares, a solo exhibition

at St. Vincent’s Women’s Center in Billings, Montana.

Alec Soth: I made a road trip down the Mississippi River. I

found that the river functioned exceptionally well as both guide

and metaphor for my own photographic pursuits. This is not to

suggest I’ve made a documentary on, say, riverboats. The project

is more "elastic." It is hard to describe the subject matter that

attracts me. I just try to stay attentive to the prosaic until my heart

thumps and I stumble on the poetic. I’ve gathered a wide range

of images: landscapes and portraits, still lifes and interiors.

Through this wide lens I hope to have captured a glimpse of the

broad, clumsy, and occasionally beautiful Mississippi. The result

is the series Sleeping by the Mississippi.

Ted Hartwell, Curator of Photography at the Minneapolis Institute

of Arts, says, Alec Soth is clearly working within and expanding

on the tradition of the lyrical documentary which his

photographs so clearly honor and advance. I know of no other

photographer in his age group who surpasses his eloquence and

poignant sense of place. His mastery of the medium has always

been notable, and his eye for the telling nuance, gesture and

inflection exceptional.

In January 2003 Soth exhibited the Mississippi photographs at the

Weitman Gallery at Washington University in Saint Louis. When

the accompanying book is published the North Dakota Museum

of Art will bring that show to North Dakota. He has also showed

the work in solo or two-person exhibitions at the Museum of

Lot #22

Alec SothMinneapolis, Minnesota

Peter's houseboat, Winona, MN

From the photographic series Sleeping by the Mississippi

C-Print, 2002

Image 16x20 inches

Range: $500-700

Contemporary Photography, Chicago (October 2003), and will

show at Yossi Milo Gallery in New York in February 2004. Earlier

exhibitions took place at the Minnesota Center for Photography,

the Icebox Gallery and the Minneapolis Photographer’s Gallery,

all in Minneapolis.

Soth is in the collection of the Walker Art Center, the Minneapolis

Institute of Arts, Odged Museum in New Orleans, Carleton

College and the North Dakota Museum of Art. Alec Soth teaches

photography at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. He

has won the Santa Fe Prize for Photography (2003), the

Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship (2001), the Jerome

Fellowship (2001, the Jerome Travel and Study Grant (2001) and

the McKnight photography fellowship (1999).

According to Tim Ray, When I began making paper

pieces in 1980, my intent was to do “studies” for larger canvas

works. Twenty years later I am still doing studies. Since about

1990, however, I have been making paintings derived in some

ways from the paper pieces. I wanted to include spontaneity and

improvisation. I wanted to make abstract images focusing on

color and texture with an indirect reference to the natural order

of things. Almost all these efforts were discarded or recycled. At

one point I laboriously translated, mark for mark, a Landsat

satellite image of the Athabasca Tar Sands in Alberta. At the time,

I thought it a great abstract painting in its own right, but the

translation ended up being very bland. Some years later, I found

that this failed work provided a good underpainting for my

method of applying and then scraping off thick acrylic gels. The

color ended up more like Spain than Alberta, I thought, and the

pop tune of the title came into my head as I was finishing the

piece—now in this auction.

Tim Ray was born in 1940 at Indian Head, Saskatchewan, and

grew up in Regina. He received degrees from the University of

Manitoba and the University of Arkansas, then taught from 1970-

1996 at Minnesota State University Moorhead. He has mounted

solo exhibitions most recently at the GK Gallery, Cooperstown,

ND (2003); Concordia College, Moorhead, MN (2002); <Site>

Gallery, Winnipeg, MB (2001) and Nine Artists Gallery, Fargo

(1998). Ray’s work has been exhibited in Toronto's Damkjar

Gallery, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Minneapolis Institute of

Arts, and was a part of Old Friends, New Art at the North Dakota

Museum of Art in 1998. He received the First Award at the 2001

Winter Invitational exhibition at the GK Gallery.

Lot #23

Tim RayMoorhead, MN

Little Spanish Town

Acrylic on canvas

60 x 40 inches, 2003

Range: $900–1,000

Jen Wright Champlin, while living in Wyoming, counts

Grand Forks, North Dakota, among her homes. This is where her

grandparents live, Bill and Lee Geer, and Harold and Betty

Anderson. This is where she received her B.F.A. in visual arts in

1994. While at UND, she studied ceramics, art history, and

secondary education, graduating cum laude. She left for

Syracuse University, the home of a strong ceramics faculty, and

graduated with an M.F.A. in 1997. It wasn’t long before she

landed a teaching job at Northwest College in Powell, Wyoming.

Today she juggles her life as a full-time art teacher, a wife, the

mother of two-year-old Brent, and her work as an artist.

The beaded skull in the auction is a prelude to the mammoth

works she will be creating for her exhibition at the North Dakota

Museum of Art in August 2004 when she will move from

modestly-sized skulls to gigantic buffaloes. The beads will be

replaced by pottery shards. According to the artist, her husband’s

grandfather legally harvested a cache of 900-year-old shards in

New Mexico in the 1960s. He gave them to Jennifer, who found

art in the aged pieces. Following her experience with the beaded

skull, she decided to cover a fiberglass buffalo with ceramic tiles

based on the beauty and uniqueness found in the pottery shards.

Her first buffalo will be auctioned on September 5, 2003, at a

fund raiser for the Nicolaysen Art Museum and Discovery Center

in Casper, Wyoming. Then she will begin on her North Dakota

buffalo.

Champlin also works in fiber creating small, delicate works in

silk to be held, looked at, or hung on the wall. According to the

artist, I love art and what drives me is the passion for creative

problem solving. Champlin is young in her career, fueled with

energy and intelligence, generous to her community, and

possessing a keen aesthetic sense. She is an artist to keep one’s

eye on.

Lot #24

Jen Wright ChamplinPowell, Wyoming

Purple Passion

Beads, beaded skull

19 x 22 x 10 inches, 2003

Range: $600-800

According to Melissa Lovingood, Theinspiration for my work comes from marine invertebrate and their

underwater environment. They glide and float in their oceanic

surroundings, moving with an elastic grace and undulating

rhythm. This type of movement and color is found in the

functional objects that I try to create. Lovingood’s use of pearls

reinforces her marine themes.

She continues, In contrast, my jewelry has a heavily eroded

appearance contrasted by a limited color palette. The series is

reminiscent of worn stones or heavily textured shells. The jewelry

has flowing curves among ridges and valleys creating objects that

are a mix of marine life and habitat. Both types of work allow me

to explore the avenues of shape, size, color, preciousness and

function. I consider each aspect equally important.

Lovingood received a B.F.A. in applied design with a

Lot #25

Melissa LovingoodGrand Forks, North Dakota

Habitat from the Beach Stone Series, 2000

Sterling silver, 14k gold, fresh water pearls

Pennant: 4 x 2 1/4 x 3/4 inches on 24 inch pearl chain

Range: $400-450

concentration in metals from the East Carolina University in

1990, followed by an M.F.A. from San Diego State University.

She is currently working as a visiting professor in jewelry and

metals at the University of North Dakota. She has filled

temporary positions and taught workshops at Long Beach City

College, Cal State University at Long Beach, University of Illinois,

Winston-Salem’s Sawtooth Center for Visual Art, Oklahoma State

University and the Appalachian Center for the Crafts in

Tennessee, among others. As part of her training, she has worked

as an artist’s assistant for Jamie Bennett, Kris Patzlaff, and Arline

Fisch.

She has shown extensively throughout the United States in juried

and group exhibitions such as LOOT! 2000 at the American Craft

Museum in New York and The Knife, The Fork, The Spoon: Pieces

that Serve, the 1999 SOFA exhibition in New York, which was

organized by the Yaw Gallery in Michigan.

Adam Kemp, born in 1962, grew up grew up forty miles

northeast of London in the Essex countryside. His father worked

in advertising and acted in amateur theater. His mother, primarily

a mom to her four sons, taught biology and tennis and was a

restaurateur. Both parents were passionate gardeners and their

children endlessly built walls and paths and created spaces out-

of-doors. According to Kemp, My dad would paint with flowers.

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

B.F.A. in 1986 but not before studying for a year in a wood

restoration school in Florence, Italy, and working with a

Newcastle blacksmith on and off 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 invited him in. 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 took an M.F.A. degree from the University of North Dakota

where he learned to cast bronze in the new foundry. Using skills

acquired as a sculptor, Kemp makes a living building things. He

finds a symbiosis between his construction work and his art

work. Sometimes it is a successful relationship; sometimes not.

But he has the ability as an all around contractor to put the

mistakes right. Kemp, committed to recycling materials and

collaborating with people, maintains that more than ever, the

process is the art. I have always done shows with groups of

people. I run the Museum’s Children’s Camp sessions as

collaborative process.

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 6

through 12 year-old children enrolled in the 2002 Museum of Art

Summer Arts Camp for Children; 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.

Lot #26

Adam KempGrand Forks, North Dakota

February

Oil and acrylic on canvas

72 x 24 inches, 2003

Range: $600-800

Michael Madzo was born in 1950 in St. Paul, Minnesota.

He grew up, however, on the family ranch near Medora, North

Dakota. Trained as a carpenter and furniture maker, he brings

these skills to his art practice even though the most notable

object in his Saint Paul studio is his sewing machine. The other

notable thing about his studio is that it is one door away from that

of his artist-brother, David.

According to the Los Angeles Couturier Gallery where Madzo

has frequently shown, There is an unmistakable air of mystery to

the collage paintings of Michael Madzo. This enigmatic

ambiance suggests the atmosphere of Marc Chagall and the

visual construction of Picasso. But Madzo's work is original and

unique in terms of both method and substance.

Michael Madzo takes art history as his literal material and starting

point, cutting up reproductions of classic paintings and

reassembling or "suturing" their visual elements back together in

faintly disturbing and dreamlike configurations which he then

paints over with a deft matching of color values and textures.

These collage paintings are oddly compelling mutations that

achieve a kind of graceful beauty by the artist's very refusal to

resort to a more cosmetic, and superficial, form of assembly.

Madzo exposes all his handiwork, and in so doing achieves a

kind of poetry as the delicate traceries of stitches underlying his

constructions emphasize a wistful yearning and vulnerability that

Lot #27

Michael MadzoA Condition of Curiosity

Paper, acrylic, cotton thread

Image 18 x 13 inches, 2003

Range: $1,200–1,500

invests all his work.

The critic Judith Hoffberg writes of Michael’s work: Madzo’s

technique is remarkable in that it culls any number of

disparate images, most from art history, and maintains barely

recognizable allusions to great works of art. In Madzo’s

figures there is usually an enlarged head with a single eye (or

a dominate eye) and sometimes an emphasized mouth or no

mouth at all. This is not to say the figures are silent, for they

speak chapters to anyone willing to spend the time

contemplating them.

Madzo has frequently exhibited his work in California. Other

solo exhibitions have been in New York, Minneapolis,

Scottsdale, Atlanta, Mexico City, and Paris. His work is in

private and corporate collections in France, England, and in

many locations in the United States.

Michael and David Madzo, while continuing to live and work

in the Twin Cities, have returned to Medora to jointly build a

summer home on the family homestead—one house but

separate studios.

Lot #28

David KruegerHyattsville, Maryland

A Wish for French Fish

Oil on canvas

32 1/4 x 40 1/4 inches, 2003

Range: $1,800–2,200

David Krueger was born in Jamestown, North Dakota. He

graduated with a B.A. from the University of North Dakota and a

M.F.A. from the University of Maryland. He has exhibited in

many major cities in the United States, and has work in the

collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City

and the North Dakota Museum of Art. He is a recipient of the

Fine Arts Work Center Visual Fellowship, Provincetown;

Individual Visual Artists Grant, Maryland State Arts Council; and

a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Krueger's concerns for the

environment emerged in his work as hunting and fishing themes

in an exhibition entitled Backwater, shown at the North Dakota

Museum of Art in the spring of 1997. In 1998 he was awarded a

three-month fellowship through the Lila Wallace Foundation, the

National Endowment for the Arts, and the Claude Monet

Foundation to paint in a studio in Monet’s gardens at Giverny,

France. The painting in the auction, A Wish for French Fish,

combines Krueger’s love of fishing with his experience in Monet’s

garden.

Lot #29

Byron JohnsonBemidji, Minnesota

Covered Basket

Reed with birch bark trim

18 x 13 1/2 inches, 2003

Range: $150–250

Byron Johnson became a basket maker by working

in the woods and through the guidance of his seventy-five-

year-old great aunt. Back in 1991 she asked him, What do

you do with those downed black ash trees? He replied, It is

junk wood. We either use it for firewood or leave it in the

woods. Soon he was delivering logs to her. Then she took

him to the Headwaters Basket Guild meeting where Peg

Solberg of Lengby, Minnesota, was demonstrating. Next

thing he knew he was learning to make baskets.

In 1992 Johnson made his first basket of #2 round

commercial reed. He was hooked, but mostly on making

baskets of black ash. The wood costs nothing and, when

properly worked, takes on a beautiful sheen. So he spends

many a day pounding away with a three-pound shop

hammer on newly felled logs until gradually the growth rings

separate. Once the growth rings are cut, they can be stored

for five to six winters—the season in which a farmer makes

baskets. If he needs birch bark for trim, he simply goes to the

wood pile and strips away the bark. The reed, however, is the

one material he purchases commercially.

Johnson, born in Bemidji, runs a nearby small farm that his

father acquired in 1986. He also participates in the regional

craft community. Of all the teachers he has taken workshops

from, John McGuire of New York, who also works in black

ash, has influenced him the most. He also learned from his

Indian friend, the late Frances Keahna, a White Earth Elder

from Naytahwaush, Minnesota, who is widely recognized as

a master of the black-ash basket. Until she died at the age of

92 in 1998, they helped each other. He delivered ash to her

and they would demonstrate together, with Johnson assigned

to splitting the ash, of course.

Kristín Jónsdóttir frá Munkapverá was born in

Ejafjordur, Iceland, seven decades ago but has spent most of her

adult life in the capital city, Reykjavik. She studied at the

Icelandic College of Art and Crafts (1949-52) and the

Copenhagen College of Art and Crafts (1954-57). She furthered

her education in France and Italy in 1959 and 1963-64. Today

she is considered one of Iceland’s truly important living artists.

She also holds an important place in the lexicon of international,

contemporary textile artists. She is widely known for making

poetic, ethereal, transcendent works of art in gentle materials.

With felted wool, paper and Plexiglas, she creates works that

allude to the history of her own people. Calligraphy is the

dominant presence in her art—either on paper or embedded in

felt. Felting of wool is an ancient method of providing warmth

and shelter. It calls to mind ancient Northern European farming

and shepherding traditions. Jónsdóttir fashions her felt into soft

tablets and then, acting as scribe, she posts the record. It might

be a registry of names of abandoned farms from different regions

of Iceland—often all that remains of those who once inhabited

the region. It might encompass all the emigrants to the United

States and Canada between the years 1873 and 1903. Movement

and loss are briefly recorded on cloth ledgers with written words

that in themselves seem transient.

In 2001 Jónsdóttir’s felt banners and wall pieces were included in

A Scandinavian Sensibility: Contemporary Fiber Work by 15

Nordic Artists that was shown at the North Dakota Museum of

Art. In March 2003 she came to the Red River Valley as part of an

exchange between North Dakota and Iceland, giving workshops

in the Cavalier Public School and at Carl Ben Eielson Elementary

School on the Grand Forks Air Force Base. Her projects, Links

Between Two Worlds, concern connections with nature, history

and people’s lives from the time immigrants arrived in North

Dakota from Iceland and neighboring Scandinavian countries.

The Museum mounted a show of her work in conjunction with

her visit.

Lot #30

Jason LarsonBismarck, North Dakota

Tree the Be

Mixed media on particle board

12 x 36 inches, 2003

Range $200 – 250

Lot #31

Kristín JónsdóttirReykjavik, Iceland

Untitled

Wool, cotton fabric, oil crayons, ink

10 1/4 x 20 3/4 inches, 2003

Range: $600–800

Jason Larson was born in Orange County, California, in

1970. At age eight, the family moved to Bismarck where he

continues to reside. For three years in the early nineties, Larson

studied at Bismarck State College and the Minnesota State

University Moorhead, switching majors often in his search for his

rightful field. Then he found art and dropped out of college to

pursue black and white photography. He became skilled at

photography but longed for an art form that was more immediate.

This led him to painting and drawing.

Larson’s artistic career came into focus through family trauma.

He was in his mid-twenties when his wife Deanna developed a

large tumor on her face. The young couple, like so many young

couples, was uninsured. Immediately the local Bismarck

community mounted a fund raiser for Deanna and raised half of

the needed $20,000. Family members contributed the rest. When

the surgeon at the University of Minnesota cut into her face he

found a benign tumor. As Larson moved through the experience,

he found himself compelled to make art. Life had been given

back to him; suddenly living became extraordinary. A sense of

immediacy entered his life and his art. He had to paint. In nursing

his wife back to health, he came into his maturity—and he found

his life work. Today he continues to live with his wife and three-

year-old son Van in Bismarck where he works at the YMCA to

support the family and the art.

When speaking about his work he pays homage to the abstract

expressionists, to artists such as Robert Motherwell, to film and

to music. Film was the first art form to affect him as a child. As

he says, I understood art when I first began to see films. Music

was intertwined: the likes of John Coltrane and Bob Dylan. I

think my art is like a moving picture. My mixed media works are

sections in an on-going stream. I feel it is ethereal, as film is

ethereal, as time itself is the most ethereal of all, moving, moving

onward.

Nedra Newby received her education in visual arts at

Georgia State University and the State University of New York

at Albany before studying for an advanced diploma in

printmaking at the Central School of Art and Design in London

on a Fulbright grant. She returned from England in 1979, intent

on pursuing her career in New York City. When prohibitive

rents extinguished her hopes of settling in the newly

fashionable artists' district of Soho, she adjusted her search to

the Lower East Side, locating a studio at 71 Clinton Street.

Newby's middle-class values conflicted at once with the alien

street culture of this rough, run-down, arson-scarred

neighborhood. She began to draw her surroundings as a way

to come to terms with the ills of poverty, crime, and drug

addiction that impinged on her everyday experience of the

cityscape. By the late 1980s, Newby had moved to the

suburban perimeters of New York City, where she continues to

work.

The artist’s passion to know the City, however, never waned

and she was pleased to be invited along with eight other

landscape painters to share an expansive studio in the

northeast corner of Tower I of the World Trade Center, courtesy

of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Studioscape

Residency Program. For three months, their easels were to

stand guard at the east and north windows as the artists

Lot #32

Nedra NewbyMiddle Village, New York

City Hall from the 91st Floor of the

World Trade Center

Conte crayon on paper

25 1/2 x 31 1/2 inches, 1991

Range: $1,200-1,500

struggled with one of the most daunting cityscapes on earth. Then

on 9/11/01 the Towers came down. A year later, on August 13,

2002, the North Dakota Museum of Art opened an exhibition of

those nine painters, Re-Imagining New York. The painters, more

than making paintings, were forced to confront what it is to know

a city. And then, what it is to relocate that prior knowledge,

tempered by everything that happened after the original paintings

disappeared into 9/11. Only an occasional sketch made its way

home with an artist to become the basis for new paintings.

Newby’s drawing, City Hall from the 91st Floor of the World

Trade Center, was a highlight of that exhibition. With great

reluctance, she decided to allow it to come back to North

Dakota, to be owned by a member of the Museum’s community.

Newby‘s work has been shown in a number of solo and group

exhibitions at such spaces as the Olin Gallery, Kenyon College,

Gambier, OH; Washington and Jefferson College, Washington,

PA; the Bridge Gallery, White Plains, NY; the Polish American

Museum, Port Washington, NY; the Katonah Museum of Art,

Katonah, NY; the Broom Street Gallery, New York; and the

Museum of the City of New York. Her work is included in the

collections of PepsiCo, Inc; the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the

Knight Publishing Company; and the New-York Historical

Society, among others.

Walter Piehl, born into a family that raised rodeo stock,

rode horses as a matter of course. Likewise, he drew 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.

But before that, at the beginning of his experience with the world

outside of Marion, North Dakota, Walter went to Concordia, a

small private 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.

The art coming out of Concordia College was too abstract for me.

It took me a long time to appreciate the stylization, the

abstraction, the simplification. I wasn’t one of the stars. I was one

of the guys on the outside looking in, trying to figure out what

they were doing. But I was desperate to stay there, I didn’t want

to go back to that haystack. Even though I wasn’t a great student,

Running was willing to stay with me, to teach me."

Piehl went on to draw and paint horses, year after year, never

wearying of his subject, never despairing in his quest to create

Lot #33

Walter PiehlMinot, North Dakota

Full Charge

Sweetheart of the Rodeo Series

36 x 50 1/2 inches, 2002

Range: $2600-3000

contemporary Western art. In the beginning he worked alone,

one of the very first to turn his back on the established ways of

painting and bronze casting, rendered into cliché by followers of

Frederic Remington and Charles Russell.

By 1978 Piehl and his horses were well on their way. 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.

As he matured, his skill as a painter matured as well. Just as he

was interested in observing the subtlety of a crick bottom, he

wanted his surfaces to dance with subtle variations. Drips,

feathered edges, scumbled paint, the judicious use of glazes, all

contribute to his rich surfaces.*

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.

*Extracted from an essay written by North Dakota Museum of Art Director Laurel

Reuter for the catalog for Piehl’s 2003 retrospective exhibition at the Plains Art

Museum in Fargo.

Fargo native Marjorie Schlossman earned a

B.A. in literature from Northwestern University while continuing

to study violin. She then moved to the West Coast and for eight

years studied with Richard Bowman, whose academic career

included a stint at the Art Institute of Chicago—where he taught

Joan Mitchell—and Stanford University, Palo Alto, California.

Schlossman developed her aesthetic while in California as she

absorbed the West Coast life style, art, and landscape. Richard

Diebenkorn lived nearby. Painters practicing a California brand

of abstraction, coupled with a keen interest in the perception of

light, abounded. Out of this came her mature style.

The work in the auction, Maragoli, represents the flowering

Schlossman’s talent. Maragoli is the town in Kenya near Lake

Victoria where her son, Herbie Ludwig, served in the Peace

Corps. Like so many of his peers, he quickly learned the local

dialect, immersed himself in the culture, and began to tackle

water issues. East Africa was in great turmoil; civil and tribal wars

threatened. Herbie finished up his Peace Corps term only to be

hired by CARE to work in a refugee camp swollen with fleeing

Somalis. His charge: provide pure water and sanitation. War hit,

he went into the battle zone in Mogadishu, Somalia, to work for

UNICEF to bring food, shelter and medical equipment to mothers

Lot #34

Marjorie SchlossmanFargo, North Dakota

Maragoli

Charcoal, matte medium and acrylic on paper

50 1/4 x 40 inches, 1989

Range: $2,000–2,500

and children and soon, the twenty-six-year-old North Dakotan

was talking to dignitaries, distributing food, issuing tarps for

shelter. The Red Cross pulled out; Herbie remained, wearing an

arm band instead of carrying a gun.

Marjorie Schlossman, the mother, was back in California,

pregnant, unable to reach her son. Frantic, she began to paint. As

one sorts through the abstractions in Maragoli, one sees on the

right an African mother figure, laden with bundles, a child

clutching her leg. Across her, shrouded in blue, might be a

mother saint. Faces abound. The landscape is the desert, its

essence defined by California but suggesting the African desert

inhabited by her son. Helicopters hover at the top of the picture.

The colors and lines are calm, peaceful. The picture becomes the

prayer of a mother for a far away son.

Schlossman returned to Fargo in 1992 and quickly became active

in the local art scene. When the Plains Art Museum opened its

new building in the fall of 1997, Schlossman was president of the

Board of Trustees, having spent several years collaboratively

developing architectural plans and raising funds. She is currently

completing her M.A. in liberal arts with a concentration in

philosophy from Minnesota State University Moorhead, writing

her thesis on the sublime.

Zoran Mojsilov was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in

1955. From early childhood, he excelled in wrestling, having

discovered that sissies make art, but wrestlers aren’t sissies; so to

make art I became a wrestler. His experiences as a wrestler

evolved into a love for the physical form. He learned how the

body functions from the inside out. This, combined with

schematic knowledge of the muscular system, would inform his

art for a lifetime. But first, Zoran had to make his way into art,

starting with a degree from the University of Belgrade in 1979.

After working as an artist and teaching for a year in a small

village elementary school, Mojsilov left for Paris in 1983. It was

here that he moved away from the highly polished, classical

sensibility that came with his European Beaux Arts education. He

began to combine materials into assemblages, thus discovering

abstraction. While in Paris he met the American painter, Ilene

Krug, who convinced him to move to Minneapolis. They were

married in Minnesota in 1986.

Wood, stone, and steel are my basic materials, said Mojsilov.

Natural forces have imprinted themselves on wood and stone,

and these elements are revealed in the primary structure of a

sculpture. Links are completed with steel or iron that is one step

removed from its natural setting. Wood trunks, granite fragments,

and steel rods are cut, chiseled, stacked, and bent according to—

or sometimes in—near opposition to the laws of gravity.

Mojsilov's work began to receive recognition in 1985 when he

was awarded the Paris Gallery Centrale Gold Medal Award for

Lots #35, 36, 37

Zoran MojsilovMinneapolis, Minnesota

Three Chairs (may be purchased separately)

Coldspring Minnesota Granite and steel rod

40 x 38 x 35, 41 x 34 x 38, 42 x 36 x 35, 2003

Range: $2,000 – 2,500 each

The photo above shows the artist with two of the chairs.

sculpture. In 1987 he received the McKnight Foundation Visual

Art Fellowship. In 1990 Mojsilov was the artist-in-residence at

the Vie des Formes and Athena Foundation in France. He was

awarded the Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Assistance

Fellowship in 1994. He was named the Lacoste (France) School

of Art research fellow in 1996. That same year he won an Artist

Fellowship from the Bush Foundation in St. Paul. His solo and/or

group exhibitions have appeared throughout the Midwest and in

Pennsylvania, New York, California, Arizona, France, Taiwan and

the former Yugoslavia.

His first commission came in 1988 from the Socrates Sculpture

Park in Long Island City, New York. It was followed by a dozen

more including three memorial benches for the Museum Garden

of the North Dakota Museum of Art (installed in 2002).

Mojsilov’s relationship with the North Dakota Museum of Art

began in 1990 when he participated in the exhibition Nature’s

Materials. The artist’s first retrospective exhibition will be

organized by the North Dakota Museum of Art in 2004-05.

Lot #38

Ione Thorkelsson

Roseisle, Manitoba

Laguna Vase, 2001

Blown glass

9 1/2 high x 4 7/8 diameter at top

Range: $300-400

Ione Thorkelsson works as a glass blower in her studio

and home near Roseisle, Manitoba. Primarily self-taught, she first

established a studio in 1973 after taking a short workshop at the

Sheridan College School of Design, Mississauga, Ontario. She

has supported herself by making glass ever since. Her personal

explorations in hot- and warm-glass techniques have been

augmented by attendance at workshops and conferences.

Her formal training is in architecture, which she studied at the

University of Manitoba from 1965-69. In 1999 she accepted a

one-year appointment as an adjunct professor in the faculty of

architecture at the University of Manitoba.

Thorkelsson’s work has appeared in one-woman and group

shows across Canada, the United States, and in Hong Kong. In

1998 the Winnipeg Art Gallery mounted her retrospective titled,

David Madzo, born in 1954, grew up on a ranch in

Medora, North Dakota, in the German immigrant community of

southwestern North Dakota. About it he says, I’m from a divided

household: German Catholic and agnostic. We call it renegade

Catholic. This blended background continues to surface in his

paintings fifty years later. Although the family left the farm

decades ago, David and his brother Michael have recently built

a home on the family property so they can return with their

families. Their next project is to add two studios so the brothers

can spend summers making art.

Madzo, a voracious reader of contemporary fiction, is attracted

to the 15th and 16th century mystical realists. He is also drawn

to the turn-of-the-century painters who specialized in social and

Christian symbolism. Given the artist’s entanglement with myth

and mysticism, archetypes such as the hermit, the fool, the

monkey, the searcher, the martyr, and the winged woman

dominate his paintings. Madzo explains, As with many other

painters, I am also inspired by reading, positioned somewhere

between the word and the image. I have a painting of a brown

bear which started off with something I read about Cortez

attacking and burning the castle of the Incas and then I read in

the newspaper about the bear in Sarajevo which was the last

animal in their zoo. The people did not have much food but they

still brought scraps of food to feed this bear, which came to

represent the struggle of their culture to survive.

David Madzo is a technically accomplished painter. He handles

Unwilling Bestiary: Retrospective and Recent Work. In

conjunction with the exhibition, the Museum produced a catalog

and she created a book, The Unwilling Bestiary, with the poet

Lea Littlewolf (Winnipeg: Turnstone Press, 1998). In 1993 the Art

Gallery of South Western Manitoba, Brandon, mounted a major

exhibition and produced a catalog as well.

In addition to her active exhibition schedule, Thorkelsson is often

commissioned for special projects. These have included:

Commission to produce the Green Globe Awards for the West

End Biz Association, Winnipeg, 1999; Carey Awards for We Care,

1995 et seq.; award-winning series of stoppered bottles by Fusion

Group for the Flax Council of Canada, 1994; the Blizzared

Awards for the Manitoba Motion Picture Industry Association,

1993 et seq.; chalices for St. Alphonsus Church, Winnipeg, 1990;

and altar vessels for St. Mary ‘s Cathedral, Winnipeg, 1998.

Lot #39

David MadzoSt. Paul, MN

Untitled, 1992

Acrylic on paper

Two images framed separately

Each image 65 x 22 inches

Range: $1,500-2,000 for the pair

pigment, washes, and glazes like a master, according to North

Dakota Museum of Art Director, Laurel Reuter. Using thinned

acrylic, he builds up layer after layer of transparent washes, the

surface made rich with both under- and over drawing. The

winged angels in this auction were created with washes of

acrylic paint on paper, as opposed to board or canvas, common

supports for his paintings.

Madzo graduated with a B.F.A. from the Minneapolis College of

Art and Design (1977) and an M.F.A. from the University of North

Dakota, with a concentration in painting in 1980. Following

graduation he moved to the Twin Cities where he still

paints in his downtown St. Paul studio. He was quickly

picked up by the Thomas Barry Gallery where he had his

first solo exhibition in 1986 and he continued to exhibit

for the next decade. Madzo has a long relationship with

the North Dakota Museum of Art which culminated in a

solo exhibition that opened in January 2003.

Madzo has been the recipient of a Jerome Foundation

Fellowship (1983), a McKnight Foundation Fellowship

(1985) and a Bush Foundation Fellowship (1987).

'2003 Marshall

North Dakota Museum of Art, Post Office Box 7305, Grand Forks, North Dakota 58202-7305 USA

Phone: 701.777.4195 Fax: 701.777.4425 E-mail: ndmoa@ndmoa.com www.ndmoa.com

North Dakota Museum of ArtFoundation

Board of DirectorsNorth Dakota Museum of Art

Board of Trustees

Corinne Alphson, Emerita

David Blehm, Emeritus

Julie Blehm, Emerita

Ann Brown, Chair

Charles Christianson, Secretary

Virginia Dunnigan, Emerita

John Ettling

John Foster, Vice Chair

Bruce Gjovig, Emeritus

David Hasbargen, Vice President

Jean Holland

Cynthia Kaldor

Sandy Kaul

Barb Lander, Emerita

Darrell Larson

Lisa Lewis

Robert Lewis, Emeritus

Mary Loyland

Ellen McKinnon, Emerita

Douglas McPhail, Emeritus

Chester E. Nelson, Jr.

Judi Paukert

Brian Petersen, Treasurer

Laurel Reuter, President

Annette Rorvig

Pat Ryan

Sanny Ryan, Emerita

Gerald Skogley, Honorary Chair

Anthony Thein, Emeritus

Mary Wakefield

Rex Wiedereanders, Emeritus

Candice Wood

Wayne Zimmerman

Karen Bohn

Merlin Dewing

Daniel E. Gustafson

Richard Larsen

Darrell Larson

Fern Letnes

Sarah Lutman

Margery McCanna

Betty Monkman

Laurel Reuter

Gerald Skogley, Chairman

North Dakota Museum of Art Staff

Heather Bush

Natalie Bowen

Reanna Dixon

Sharon Ennis

Kara Evenson

Sue Fink

Ellen Gagnon

Amy Hovde

Kathy Kendle

Rachel Evenson Kopp

Jennifer Kotrba

Brian Lofthus

Laurel Reuter

Bonnie Sobolik

Liz Stempinski

Sissy Stempinski

Jayne Stempinski

Greg Vettel

and over fifty volunteers