autumn art auction 2004
DESCRIPTION
Autumn Art Auction 2004TRANSCRIPT
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
High Plains Reader
KVLY TV
KXJB TV
Leighton Broadcasting
Marshall Field’s
North Dakota Public Radio
The North Dakota Museum of Artis grateful to the following entities
who have given generously to guarantee that
the arts may flourish.
North Dakota Museum of Art
A U T U M N A r t A u c t i o nS a t u r d a y , o c t o b e r 3 0 , 2 0 0 4
Wine and hors d’oeuvres 6:30 pm
Auction begins at 8 pm
Autumn Art Auction is
Underwritten by
High Plains Reader
KVLY TV
KXJB TV
Leighton Broadcasting
Marshall Field’s
North Dakota Public Radio
Auction PreviewOctober 3 until auction time in the Museum galleries
Monday - Friday, 9 to 5 pm, Saturday - Sunday, 11 to 5 pm
Preview PartyThursday, October 28, 7 pm, Museum Director Laurel Reuter
will lead an informal discussion about the work in the Auction.
PatronsBest Western Townhouse
Coldwell Banker/First Realty Encore/Icon
East Grand Floral
Grand Forks Herald
Marshall Field's Community
Office of Academic Affairs, UND
LeadersAltru Health System
Avis Rent A Car
Blue Moose Bar & Grill
Bremer Bank
Bronze Boot
CC Plus Interiors, Incorporated
Chester Fritz Auditorium
Clear Channel Radio
Community Bank
Congress Inc.
Vicki Ericson, State Farm Insurance
Greater Grand Forks Symphony Orchestra
Gustafson and Gluek
James Hawley
Holiday Inn
Hugo’s
Lumber Mart
Master Chorale
Ellen McKinnon
Minnesota Public Radio
Museum Café
National Car Rental
North Dakota Quarterly
Roadking Inn
Rydell Auto Center
Steven Schultz, M.D., P.C.
Summit Brewing Company
Cancer Research, UND
Whitey's
Auction Sponsors continued next page
Endorsing Sponsors4 bLoW zErO
Alerus Financial
Avant
Brown Corporations
Camrud, Maddock, Olson & Larson
Capital Resource Management
Center for Innovation
CEO Praxis, Inc.
Choice Financial
Dr. John Clayburgh, DDS
Farmers Insurance Group
Dr. Greg Frokjer, DDS
Gary and Nancy Petersen
Gregory Norman Funeral Homes
Happy Harry's
James S. McDonald, D.D.S.
Lakeview Inn and Suites
Letnes, Swanson, Marshall, & Warcup Ltd.
Merrill Lynch
North Dakota Eye Clinic
Northern Plumbing Supply
Nuveen Orthodontics
Rite Spot Liquor
Steamomatic
Dr. Curtis Tanabe, DDS
UBS Financial Services
Valley Dairy
Xcel Energy
SupportersA Touch of Magic on the Boardwalk, Chef Nardane
Brady, Martz, and Associates
Browning Arts
Columbia Liquors
Columbia Mall
Dakota Food Equipment
David C. Thompson, Law Office
Drees, Riskey, and Vallager, Ltd.
Edward Jones, Mark A. Larsen
English Department, UND
Randy Fenley, State Farm Insurance
Forks Chem-dry
Forks Frame Up
Grant Shaft, Attorney
Home of Economy
Ink, Inc.
John Deere, Forks Equipment
Monarch Travel
Moosbrugger, Carter & McDonagh
Paul D. Stadem D.D.S.
Polar Communications
Dr. Maxine Rasmussen
Robert Vogel Law Office, P.C.
Travel Lodge
US Bancorp Piper Jaffray
Jack Wadhawan, Crary Homes and Real Estate
Wall's Medicine Center, Inc.
Wells Fargo
Zimney Foster, P.C. Attorneys at Law
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
The Autumn Art Auction exhibition
is funded in part by a
general operating grant from
the Bush Foundation.
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. The new building opened
in the spring of 2004 with the central gallery named in honor of
Judy and Burton Onofrio—gifted by a former patient.
In another corner of his life, Onofrio runs art auctions. For
twenty-six years he was the auctioneer of the Rochester Art
Center annual auction, most often organizing it as well. Both the
Northern Clay Center in Minneapolis and the University of
Minnesota Art Department have called upon him to serve as
auctioneer. For twelve years he has been the announcer of the
Rochester Art Center Art Festival. Onofrio’s days, however, are
spent in Judyland, the garden he created with his wife Judy. And
finally, this is a man who loves animals, in particular his
Burton Onofrio, Auctioneer Dawn and John Botsford, Chairs
Carolyn and Lin Glimm, Co-chairs
Jeanne Anderegg
Carrie Boldish
Ann Brown
Al Boucher and Thomasine Heitkamp
Madelyn Camrud
Cheryl Gaddie
Jim and Lori Ingeman
Jon Jackson
Denise and Jim Karley
Ralph Kingsbury
Cherie Lemer
Rick Mercil
Marsy Schroeder
Bonnie Sobolik
Victoria Swift
Devera Warcup
Autumn Art Auction Committee
Dawn Botsford is a campus events coordinator for the
University of North Dakota Office of Student and Outreach
Services. John and Dawn are graduates of the University of North
Dakota and live in Grand Forks with their sixteen-year-old son,
Tom, a junior at Central High School.
John Botsford works for Alerus Financial in Grand Forks
and is president of Botsford & Qualey Land Company—a
regional land brokerage company. He also serves as president of
the Myra Foundation, a private charitable foundation created by
the late John Myra. Notably, the Myra Foundation has supported
the Museum Concert Series since its inception in the early 1990s.
Carolyn and Lin Glimm will Chair the 2005
Autumn Art Auction.
Rules of Auction
q Each registered guest will receive a bidding card as part of
the price of a ticket. Upon receiving the bidding card, each
guest will be asked to sign a statement vowing to abide by
the Rules of the Auction listed in this catalog.
q Absentee bidders will either leave their bids on an Absentee
Bid Form with Museum personnel in person or by phone, or
bid by phone the night of the auction. Absentee bidders, by
filling out the form, agree to abide by the Rules of the
Auction.
q Each bidder will use his or her own bidding number during
the auction.
q All sales are final.
q In September 2002 the Office of the North Dakota State Tax
Commissioner determined that the gross receipts from the
sales made at the Auction are subject to sales tax. 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 the North Dakota
Museum of Art below which a work of art will not be sold.
As inhabitants of the Northern Great Plains, we struggle to ensure
that the arts are nourished, and that they flourish, because we
know that a vital cultural life is deeply essential to isolated
people. We have concluded that to study the arts is to educate
our minds, for through the arts we learn to make difficult
decisions based upon abstract and ambiguous information. This
is the ultimate goal of education. Furthermore, we have come to
value the arts because they make our hearts wise—the highest of
human goals. Therefore, in the most difficult of times, and in an
environment that might be perceived as alien to the visual arts,
we propose to build a world-class museum for the people of the
Northern Plains.
The North Dakota Museum of Art, by legislative act, serves as the
official art museum of the State of North Dakota. The Museum's
purpose is to foster and nurture the aesthetic life and artistic
expression of the people living on the Northern Plains. The
Museum will provide experiences that please, enlighten and
educate the child, the student and the broad, general public.
Specifically, the Museum will research, collect, conserve and
exhibit works of art. It will also develop programs in such related
arts as performance, media arts and music.
Museum Mission Statement
Six years ago we began the Autumn Art Auction with the
stated purpose of developing a buying audience for our own
artists. A few years earlier we inaugurated the Museum’s first
winter silent auction, and gradually the bidding became more
competitive. Soon people were acquiring larger works and
turning their homes and businesses over to original art. Over the
years, the audience attending these events also shifted from
established, older couples to young people starting their first
homes. Thus, a market was born.
Artists like Walter Piehl always participated, always sold, and
saw the value of his work steadily increase with time. Other
artists, not as well known, sold their works for less than I like, but
they decided to stay in the game. Again, as the public came to
recognize and appreciate new work, buyers stepped forward and
prices became respectable. The fall auction came with a broadly
circulated, full-color catalog; the undiscovered became familiar.
Traditionally, commercial galleries set prices and support them—
and the artist— over the years until the prices become widely
accepted. Auctions have long had the role of ratifying gallery
prices. Things have shifted in our times as auction houses have
gained prominence. Work by young artists is moved to auction
more quickly. Subsequently, the auction becomes the place
where prices are established.
The Northern Plains is another territory. Commercial galleries are
almost non-existent—but still critical. For example, the Rourke
Gallery in Moorhead has sold regional work for decades, and
Gretchen Kottke’s GK Gallery in Cooperstown (now shuttered)
introduced artists such as Mike Marth, Jay Pfeifer, and Kathryn
Lipke to the public outside of Fargo. Occasionally a private buyer
will affect the market, paying premium prices for large bodies of
work. Today we call this the Donaldson effect, in recognition of
the impact Karen Burgum’s buying for her new Fargo hotel had
upon our local market. While a wonderful thing for artists
and for the region, we still don’t know how long-term prices
will be affected.
With this auction we have chosen to bet on our audience by
including several large paintings priced at the high end of our
market. The cover piece from the 2003 auction, Alec Soth’s
photograph of a houseboat on the Mississippi, which was
purchased for $1,250, is now worth five times that amount—if
one could find a copy for sale. Aganetha Dyck’s Triptych on the
cover of this catalog is worth considerable in the Canadian
market. We are organizing a large show of her work next summer
so she generously donated Triptych to help pay costs for
the exhibition.
I am pleased. I have had the pleasure of watching an art
community firmly take hold in the Red River Valley, and it has
opened its arms to those who live far beyond our own place. I am
also grateful to Gretchen Kottke who traveled throughout the
region with me, visiting artists’ studios and selecting works to
include in the auction.
Laurel Reuter, Director
North Dakota Museum of Art
From the Museum Director
Lot #1
Charles BeckFergus Falls, Minnesota
Untitled
Oil on paper
7 x 14 inches, 2003
Range: $350 – $450
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
Lot #2
Byron JohnsonBemidji, Minnesota
Ojibwa Sewing Basket
Black ash and sweet grass with lid
6.5 x 8 x 11.5, 2004
Range: $400 – 600
exciting because 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 #3
Linda WhitneyValley City, North Dakota
Crater Horse
Mezzotint, edition 1 of 11
Image 5.9 x 7. 8 inches, 2004
Range: $300 – 400
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, specializing in black ash.
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.
The black ash reeds used in this auction basket are combined
with sweet grass, the smell of which will linger for a long time.
Linda Whitney, a native of Devils Lake, received both her
BA and her MFA from the University of North Dakota with a
specialization in printmaking. Today she is an associate professor
of art and chair of the Art Department at Valley City State
University. In 1999, Whitney received the North Dakota
Governor’s Award for the Arts in recognition of her long years of
service to the arts in North Dakota. This has included such
activities as giving printmaking workshops throughout the region;
serving on numerous boards including the 2nd Crossing Arts
Center, Valley City, and Print Studio Advisory Board, Plains Art
Museum, Fargo; various positions at the North Dakota Museum
of Art including Head Docent; visiting artist at such institutions as
the University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, North Dakota State
University, Fargo, Northern State University, Aberdeen, and the
Blackduck, Minnesota, public schools in conjunction with a
touring visit by the Rolling Plains Art Museum.
Whitney’s work in the auction is a small mezzotint, which is a
labor intensive, intaglio drypoint process. Mezzotint is among
the most physically demanding mediums in art, one tried and
quickly abandoned as “too difficult” by many a printmaker. A
copper plate is “rocked” with a curved, notched blade until the
surface is entirely pitted. At this stage, an inked plate would print
a rich, uniform black. The artist then uses a scraper or burnisher
to flatten the raised parts, a little for dark grays, a lot for light
grays, completely for white (after inking and wiping, the plate
holds no ink where it is smooth). Colors are achieved by similarly
working one or more supplementary plates.
The result of this process is an image emerging from pitch black
“nothingness” — a true analogue to Creation. Outlines are
simplified by absence of line, while substance is rendered with a
virtually infinite range of tonal subtlety. —Fitch-Febvrel Gallery
Rachel Hellner was born in 1968 in London, England, to
a Canadian (Winnipeg) mother and an American father. They had
moved to London in the mid 1960s from New York, in response
to both the Vietnam War and growing crime in the Unite States.
According to the artist, My father, a Rabbi, was offered a job
leading a small congregation in Finchley, a suburb of London. My
mother and sister Marni accompanied him to their new home by
boat. This crossing of the Atlantic Ocean seems to be a theme
with our family.
My mother’s father was born in Poland and was fortunate to have
escaped the holocaust by moving to Canada when he was a
child. Her mother, whose parents were from Russia, was born in
Winnipeg. My father’s side was from the Ukraine. His father
moved to the States from the Ukraine; his mother was born in
London while the family was en route to the United States from
Russia. My father, in the 1960s, moved from the States to London
and then I, in turn, moved from London to Canada. The
accessibility of travel by this time allowed me to travel much
more frequently than previous generations.
My early years were relatively uneventful. As a family, we were
fortunate to be able to travel and spent every summer camping
abroad. We spent a lot of time in Israel, and, although the 1970s
were a time of relative peace between Jews and Arabs, the
obvious tension made a deep impression on me, as did films that
my father wanted us to watch about the holocaust. He wanted us
to be aware of the atrocities committed to our people, to be
proud of our heritage. I was traumatized by what people were
able to do to each other. I was, as a child, very aware of rifts, pain
and persecution that seemed to be prevalent in relationships
between different peoples. I would soon experience this on a
personal level.
When I was eleven, my parents divorced and my mother and two
sisters moved to Canada. I remained in England with my father.
For the next twelve years, I visited my family during vacation
time. It was a painful separation, considering the distance
involved, and mapping the journeys back and forth provided
inspiration that I would later use in my art.
My work is about relationships, portrayed through figurative and
landscape images. I explore the balance and tension that is ever
present in life, and the interconnectedness of time and memory.
The images I use are often partial or silhouetted. Marks, colors
and negative spaces represent figures, often incomplete,
disappearing and reappearing, representing a state of being and
a suggestion of the memory each of us will be and the legacy we
will leave. Much like fossils, we are fragile and beautiful, yet
hardy and preserved through the imprints we make on the world,
allowing us to exist in a time beyond our own.
Hellner received her undergraduate honors degree in painting
from Saint Martin’s School of Art, London, before moving to
Victoria, British Columbia, where she currently resides and is a
practicing artist. As well as completing her Masters in Art
Education at the University of Victoria, she is teaching at the
College of the Rockies in Cranbrook, BC. Rachel is a studio
Lot #4
Rachel HellnerVancouver, British Columbia
Standing Figure
Acrylic and graphite on paper
22 x 28 inches, 1998
Range: $400 – 700
Lot #5
Laura YoungbirdWhapeton, North Dakota
Dress
Silkscreen and collagraph
38.5 x 23 inches, 2000
Range: $400 – 600
Laura Youngbird was born on December 26, 1954.
Youngbird is from Grand Portage, Minnesota, of German and
Anishanabe descent. She is the oldest of seven children and has
four children of her own. Youngbird’s parents met in Arizona. Her
mother and family were moved there by the United States
government in the early fifties during the Relocation Act. Her
father was stationed in the Air Force and the family traveled all
over the United States while they were growing up.
Youngbird studied mechanical drafting after high school and had
a career as a mechanical designer before finally going back to
school to study art. She completed her MA in drawing and
printmaking from Minnesota State University, Moorhead. She
now teaches art at the Circle of Nations School in Wahpeton,
North Dakota, a therapeutic, off-reservation boarding school.
Youngbird works in series and her recent work deals with the
effects of the early boarding school experience. Her grandmother
and mother grew up in boarding schools. Many of the images
Youngbird works with are based on old photographs of her
grandmother, who scratched her face out of nearly every
photograph. Her grandmother died of cirrhosis of the liver and
alcoholism when she was 35 years old.
Her work has been exhibited at the Memorial Union Gallery,
North Dakota State University, and the Spirit Room, Fargo, North
Dakota; Two Rivers Art Gallery, Minneapolis, Minnesota; GK
Gallery, Cooperstown, North Dakota; Ojibwe Art Expo, Plains
A COLLAGRAPH is a print made from a collage plate. The plate is
created by gluing other material such as a cloth dress,
cardboard, aluminum, string, sand, and so forth, onto a firm
surface such as a piece of Masonite. Dampened paper is placed
on top of the inked collage plate and run through the printing
press. This allows the printmaker to introduce greater texture to
the usual layering of ink. The final print is both embossed and
printed. In this print Youngbird has combined collage with
silkscreen in order to enrich her image.
Art Museum, Fargo, North Dakota; Women’s Network Annual Art
Show, Moorhead, Minnesota; McKrostie Art Gallery, Grand
Rapids, Minnesota; and the Rourke Gallery, Moorhead,
Minnesota. She is an Artist-in-Resident for the North Dakota
Council on the Arts having completed workshops for the Fargo
Public Schools. In the summer of 2003, the artist was awarded a
Jerome Fellowship to work and study with master potter Richard
Bresnahan at Minnesota’s St. John’s University.
Mary-Celine Thouin-Stubbs, a native of Hibbing,
Minnesota, graduated from Saint Cloud University. She has
explored many art forms over the years, including ceramics,
jewelry, metals, and photography, but woodturning remains her
passion. She is self-taught in this art form, having discovered it by
accident in 1974 while taking an elective college course in
upholstery. The chair she was working on required a lathe, and as
she watched a fellow student help her, she was completely taken
with the woodturning process. Since there were no teachers
available to her, she began to explore on her own. According to
the artist, “I am as captivated with woodturning now as I was
thirty years ago.”
Today her art always encompasses woodturning but she is
equally fascinated with the process of Turkish Ebru marbling,
with its rich history and the patterns and colors characteristic of
the craft. Typically, marbling is applied to paper and fabric.
Thouin-Stubbs, however, is a pioneer in marbling on wood.
Today she works with both techniques, both separately and
combined.
Thouin-Stubbs has been widely recognized for her exquisite
work in wood. Among her honors are invitations, with funding,
to attend two New Zealand International Artists Collaborative
Conferences and the International Marblers Convention in
Gatlinburg, Tennessee. She has served as a resource artist to an
Lot # 6
Mary-Celine Thouin-StubbsLeonard, Minnesota
Torso Windswept Series
Manzanita wood
Heights range from 4.5 – 6 inches
Diameters various, 2004
Range: $275 – 300 for all three
international artist conference in Whangarei, New Zealand, and
for the Lake Emma Canadian Collaborative Conferences in 1996,
1998, 2000 and 2002. She was selected into the Assistantship
Program at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Tennessee and
featured in Minnesota Monthly magazine and on Venture North,
a television program in Duluth, Minnesota.
When speaking about the work in the exhibition, the artist says,
There are times when I choose a piece of wood for a particular
form. In these instances I take very specific control over the
shaping of the finished piece. Then there are times when I put a
unique piece of wood on the lathe, and I allow the wood to
speak to me as I turn and shape it. This taps into a completely
different side of me—a mind set that is more free and one that
requires me, as the artist, to let go of control.
Watching a raw piece of wood unfold on the lathe, as I turn away
the bark and the weathered exterior, is a rich way for me to
appreciate the inherent beauty in nature. The wood then
becomes my teacher, inviting me to both see and listen in
MARLON DAVIDSON and DON KNUDSONhave been collaborators for decades and each has had an
individual career in the arts: Marlon as a teacher at Bemidji State
University and as a painter and a printmaker, Don as a sculptor.
Both have exhibited widely, have been in many juried
exhibitions, and have work in collections locally, nationally, and
internationally. Both artists attended Bemidji State College (BSU)
and the Minneapolis School of Art (MCAD). Marlon and Don
live in Bemidji where they continue to make collaborations and
individual works.
According to the artists, We draw our inspiration from and hope
to express a reaction to our natural environment. In addition
there are elements in our work that are reactions to our complex
twenty-first century culture. We have a high respect and seek to
continue our knowledge of the history of world art and hope to
react to critique we receive in a variety of forms. Our materials
are found and collected objects and include wood, paper, paint,
ink and metal.
Lot #7
Marlon Davidson and
Don KnudsonBemidji, Minnesota
Thirteen Woodland Windows
Mixed media
59 x 60 x 10 inches, 2003
Range: $1,000 – 1,300
It should be obvious to the viewer that Don Knudson is
responsible for the wood sculptural elements of the work and
Marlon Davidson for the collage, paper and painted areas of
the work. Both artists are responsible for the actual design of
the piece and it is impossible to say which comes first, the
collage elements or the sculptural portion of the piece. They
happen simultaneously.
The work Thirteen Woodland Windows was executed about two
years ago and has been exhibited in a two-person exhibit at the
Bemidji Community Arts Center. Since then it has been a part of
the artists’ collection and has hung in their home. The wood
elements are elder brush collected near Bemidji and the paper is
a mixture of D’Arches and Daniel Smith illustration board,
acrylic paint and India ink. The work has a coat of preservation
media. Glue, paper and materials are as archival as the artists
can make them.
Ingrid Restemayer is a printmaker and fiber artist
originally from North Dakota now living and working in
Northeast Minneapolis. Influenced by generations of fine
crafters, Ingrid’s work reflects traditional embroidery techniques
and hand-stitching while often incorporating intaglio
printmaking, photography and/or found objects.
Ingrid studied overseas at Whitecliffe College of Art and Design
in Auckland, New Zealand, and in 1996 earned her BFA in
Printmaking, Fiberarts and Mixed Media Visual Arts at the
Lot #8
Ingrid RestemayerMinneapolis, Minnesota
The Year of the Shrub
Solar print, cotton paper, cotton thread
22.5 x 15.25, 2004
Range: $800 – 1,000
University of North Dakota. In the past several years, Ingrid has
shown extensively and gained gallery representation across the
US and overseas. Recently, Ingrid has been a partner/owner of a
small gallery in Minneapolis.
As well as being dedicated, full-time, to producing and
exhibiting her artwork, Ingrid also serves as a board member of
the Northeast Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce and is heavily
involved with the development of the Northeast Minneapolis
Arts District.
Lot #9
Loral Iverson HannaherFargo, North Dakota
Helicopter Seeds
Pastel on paper
24 x 36.5 inches, 2001
Range: $750 – 900
Loral Iverson Hannaher was born in 1956 in Fargo,
North Dakota, and grew up in Moorhead, Minnesota. She
received her BA in painting in 1978 from Minnesota State
University Moorhead. In 1981 she received her MFA in painting
from Michigan’s Cranbrook Academy of Art. After graduate
school she taught in the North Dakota Artists in Residence
Program for five years. Since 1987, Hannaher has taught drawing
at Minnesota State University Moorhead. Her work has been
exhibited in St Paul’s Minnesota Museum of Art; The Minneapolis
Collage of Art and Design Gallery; the Plains Art Museum, Fargo;
Provincetown Museum, Massachusetts; North Dakota State
University Gallery, Fargo; Western Montana College Gallery and
Museum, Dillon; and the Winnipeg Art Museum. She most
recently exhibited in Serious Moonlight 2004 at the Cranbrook
Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
According to the artist, My drawings and paintings are an
exploration of my world, Since childhood I have been drawn to
woods, beaches and my backyard. I am inspired by nature’s
creativity, including human creativity. My choice of subject is
often the humble everyday objects I collect, often from nature:
objects I observe and meditate on. Each object reveals qualities
of its character—and my own—in its form, shape, textures, color,
and scale. I am interested in ideas such as open form and closed
form, inside and outside, wholeness and fragility. In Helicopter
Seeds I began with an interest in the beautiful form of a child’s
head illuminated from an obscure light source, and, importantly,
with a great love for this particular child, my daughter Lily. The
“helicopters” came later; the atmosphere created is meant to
reflect the expression of the child’s face and some of the wonder
of nature and of childhood itself.
Donovan Widmer recently graduated with his MFA in
jewelry design and metalsmithing from Illinois State University,
Normal. He accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Art in
metalsmithing at the University of North Dakota starting in the
fall of 2004. He arrives in North Dakota with good exhibition
and collection experience. Among his career highlights are
work in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in
London and inclusion in the international exhibition Anti-War
Medals that is touring throughout Europe and the United
States (through 2005).
The work in the auction, Fishing Lures for Homosapiens, is a
series of three separate units, intertwined in composition and
principle. The individual lures serve as brooches. Two brooches
are assembled from chocolate, sterling silver, 24 karat gold foil,
which are encrusted with garnets. In the third brooch, the
chocolate has been replaced by a cigarette. The lures hang from
three fishing poles.
Lot # 10
Donovan WidmerGrand Forks, North Dakota
Fishing Lures for Homosapiens
Mixed media with sterling silver
Installation 72 x 36 inches, 2002
Range: $2,000 – $2,500
In describing his work, the artist says, The denotation of jewelry
as a type of lure is the result of materiality. The most blatant
example is found in the assemblage of fishing lures and hooks.
The colorful fishing lures are overwrought with faceted stones,
referencing the classic jolaire style of jewelry. The refined beauty
of the pedestrian object, coupled with the value of the materials,
forces the viewer into a position of defense. The viewer must
choose between the risks presented with regard to the end gains.
Choosing between the irrational response to an addiction and the
rational logic of the fear pain. The final decision is left to the
Details
Lot #11
Zhimin GuanMoorhead, Minnesota
The Book
Oil on paper
25 x 32 inches, 2003
Range: $800 – 1,000
Zhimin Guan was born in China in 1962. He started to
paint when he was nine years old, influenced by his father,
Chintian Guan, a traditional Chinese calligrapher and ink
painter. Zhimin received rigorous training in calligraphy and ink
painting before he was fifteen years old. At the same time, he
developed a strong interest in the Chinese philosophy of Taoism
and in ancient Chinese poetry. In college, he concentrated on oil
painting and again received rigorous training in drawing and
painting in the Western classical style. From 1985 to 1994, he
taught painting, drawing, and design at Dalian Institute of
Industrial Design in Dalian, China. Besides teaching, Guan
devoted himself to his art practice.
In the spring of 1995, Guan came to the United States, driven by
the desire to examine the complexities of Western contemporary
arts. After three years, he earned his MFA in painting and drawing
at Fort Hays State University, Kansas. Guan has successfully
blended his academic training in visual art with the aesthetics of
Eastern philosophy. As an artist, he is deeply committed to
unifying the West with the East in his own distinctive manner—a
new synthesis of technique underpinned by a holistic philosophy.
Today Zhimin Guan is an Associate Professor of Art at
Minnesota State University Moorhead.
Guan’s art works have been exhibited throughout China and
the United States in such institutions as the China National Art
Gallery in Beijing; China Academy of Fine Arts Museum,
Hangzhou; Singapore Asian Arts Gallery; the Salmagundi
Club, New York; CCC/USA, Philadelphia; The Minneapolis
Institute of Fine Arts; Dunton Gallery in Chicago; Fraser
Gallery, Washington, DC; Museum of Southwest Texas, Corpus
Christi; Plains Art Museum, Fargo; and the North Dakota
Museum of Art.
His works have been published in art journals such as Asian
Artists (Singapore), Observation (Beijing), China Picture Story
(Beijing), Lincoln Journal Star (Lincoln, Nebraska), Marvelous
Color (Dalian, China), The Metropolis (Shanghai), and Who’s
Who of Chinese Art (Beijing), among others.
Beauty, texture, surface, light,
color, the same issues that
concerned the Renaissance
painters and the Dutch masters,
are the issues that concern me.
—Zhimin Guan
Jim Dow has formed the single, most important body of
photographs about North Dakota that exists, according to
Museum Director Laurel Reuter. 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.
Dow returned to the State during the summer of 1998 while
photographing the ballparks in the Northern and Prairie Leagues.
Once again he fell in love with North Dakota. Since that trip he
has come back several times a year, widening his focus to
include Northwest Minnesota, expanding his subject beyond folk
art as he seeks out the markings humans leave upon the
landscape. It soon became apparent that Dow’s work added an
important dimension to the Museum’s larger Emptying Out of the
Plains project. Subsequently, the Museum is in production stages
of a book of over 125 photographs, funded by the Elizabeth
Firestone Graham Foundation and the Nathan Cummings
Foundation. Publication is set for early 2005.
The magnificent photograph in the exhibition is of St. Stanislaus
Church, the spiritual and social center for the mostly Polish
descendants of the Warsaw community. The historic Gothic
Revival style Catholic church was dedicated in 1901. Easily the
Lot #12
Jim DowBoston, Massachusetts
St. Stanislaus Church, Warsaw, North Dakota
C print
16 x 20 inches, 2001
Range: $1,200 – 1,400
biggest and most impressive building for miles around, the brick
structure was added to the National Historic Register in 1979.
After restoration several years ago, it is still a remarkable place of
worship and numbers among North Dakota’s most important
historical buildings.
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 in series, including
Seagram’s Bicentennial project, The County Court House, which
sent twenty photographers across the country photographing
court houses.
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 has
also photographed the University of North Dakota’s old hockey
rink as well as the playing fields and locker rooms in small towns
across North Dakota—the places where men come to remember
and youngsters come to dream.
Dow 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. The North
Dakota Museum of Art, however, owns the largest holding
of his photographs.
Jim Dow, who was born in 1942, lives with his wife Jacque and
Lot #13
Marley KaulBemidji, Minnesota
The Gardener Attempts to Tame the Universe
Acrylic on canvas
60.5 x 52.5 inches, 2002
Range: $3,700 – 4,700
Marley Kaul is one of the region’s most senior artists. Now
retired, he was long-time chairman of the art department at
Bemidj State University. He continues to paint daily in his studio
near Lake Bemidji, to exhibit generously throughout the region,
and to see his work moving into significant private and public
collections. For example, he was one of the artists chosen to fill
a room at the Hotel Donaldson in Fargo. And he remains a
teacher, leading the public into an understanding of his paintings.
According to the artist:
The Gardener Attempts to Tame the Universe is one of the eight
large paintings that directly relate to the garden metaphor. The
garden illustrates birth and rebirth, a place to meditate on our
relationship to the earth, a symbol of faith, time and acceptance
of failure.
Some symbols to contemplate:
• The pigeon as a messenger
• The icon of Gabriel as a messenger
• Pie from last year’s apples
• Tea for the gardener—a time to stop work and reflect
• Tools for cutting, digging, and planting
• The natural rhythms continue through seed planting, cuttings
(geraniums), and through natural sounds and our own music
• Natural light, gro-lights and shelter contribute to growth
This painting is drawn from the artist’s experiences with natural
processes and a poetic response to everyday life.
Jennie O is a self-taught visual artist born in 1975 in a town
house on Dixie Road in Mississauga, Ontario. Raised in
Winnipeg, Manitoba, she studied anthropology but with three
classes left to graduate she decided to pursue a career in art.
Aside from her own drawing, painting, textile work, and doll-
making, she makes art with kids at Art City, an inner-city drop-in
center founded by international artist Wanda Koop.
According to the May issue of Border Crossing, Jennie O tells a
story that could break a girl’s heart. Sitting in her studio,
surrounded by fragments of fabric and numerous pairs of scissors,
by paintings and dolls, and framed by a canopy of fetching
lingerie that hangs from a makeshift clothes line, she explains
why she makes the art she does. I guess the doll thing stems from
when my parents split up. I had a million dolls and we had a
garage sale and I sold every one of them. It was a rash decision,
and I suppose I’m trying to make up for the ones I sold.
Once the artist makes the small dolls, she places them in three-
dimensional settings and either photographs or paints them. The
art work comprises both the representation of the doll and the
doll itself, which is normally hung or placed in proximity to its
two-dimensional image.
Jennie O describes the work in the auction: Rita is a doll portrait
of my mother’s dead sister. My mother Raymonde Ferrari is one
of twelve children. They grew up really poor and had no toys to
play with, only cut out dolls from the Eaton’s catalog. My
Lot # 14
Jennie OWinnipeg, Manitoba
Rita
Mixed media doll, digital photograph, 2004
Doll, 7 inches high; photograph, 11x14 inches
Range: $500 – 600
grandfather made doll houses out of shoe boxes for the children.
My grandmother sewed all of the doll’s clothes. I have only met
my French-Italian family a few times as they live in a small
Arcadian town in New Brunswick, Canada. The dolls and photos
are representations of the stories my mother tells of her family.
Aganetha Dyck was born in the Depression and raised on
a Manitoba grain farm near Marquette by her immigrant
Mennonite parents. Her sense of beauty is intimately connected
to a sense of the well-worn, the used, the secondhand, to objects
that make up the fabric of daily existence. Possessing a close
affinity with the language of objects, Dyck developed an
uninhibited attitude toward art, a partiality for commonplace
things, and a heightened visual and conceptual sense that
combines to make art defined not only by its ambiguity and wit,
but also by its persistent aesthetic questioning.
After moving to Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, in 1972, Dyck
began to break out of the social mould that shaped the lives of
middle-class women of her generation. She enrolled in art
courses, including various textile classes, none of which suited
her temperament—especially weaving. The accidental shrinkage
of fleece she was washing led to the body of work that would
establish her reputation. In 1981 she produced Close Knit, an
installation of sixty-five shrunken sweaters whose configuration
presented a strong affinity to the human form. They looked like
miniature beings both comical and sinister. The clothing has
come to serve as a metaphor for the human condition. The
enigmatic and shifting relationships between clothing, the body,
the psyche, our subjectivities and society, open up a space for the
expression of fantasy and imagination. Clothing, like fantasy,
captures our imagination and allows us to explore alternatives.
—quoted in part from Canadian curator, Shirley Madill
The work in the exhibition comes from a much larger series titled
Sizes 8 - 46. They were/are women’s adult sizes. Many
components of Sizes 8 - 48 have been exhibited and documented
in museum publications internationally. Most of the works in this
series are in permanent collections in major Canadian museums
and galleries including The Canada Council Art Bank in Ottawa;
The Winnipeg Art Gallery; Musee de Rimouski, Rimouski,
Quebec; and in private collections internationally.
Aganetha Dyck soon moved into the bee yard, making whole
bodies of work in collaboration with bees. Today this Winnipeg
artist is considered one of Canada’s most original and significant,
attested to by her extensive exhibition record. In the summer of
2006 she will create an exhibition in the North Dakota Museum
of Art, collaborating with both bees and her photographer son as
part of the Museum’s Emptying Out of the Plains project.
The artist’s work is represented in numerous public collections
including the Canada Council Art Bank, Manitoba Arts Council
Art Bank, Calgary’s Glenbow Museum, Saskatchewan Arts Board,
Winnipeg Art Gallery, The University of Winnipeg, Montreal’s
Concordia University, Vancouver Art Gallery, North Dakota
Museum of Art, as well as many private collections in Germany,
England and the United States.
Lot #15
Aganetha DyckWinnipeg, Manitoba
Triptych, from series Sizes 8 - 46, 1976-81
100% wool, Eaton (department store) labels
Three units, each 11 x 16 x 1 inch flat
Range: $2,800 – 3,500
Mark Browning lives in Miles City, Montana, where
he also directs the Custer County Art Center and continues to
work as an artist. From 1981 through 1993 he lived in Grand
Forks as co-owner of Browning Arts, a gallery and frame shop.
Browning is a self-taught artist in both watercolor and wood
constructions, having never completed a degree program. This,
however, has not hampered his career as he has shown in over
seventy-five solo, group, juried, and invitational exhibitions in
the Untied States and Canada. These have included such
prestigious exhibitions as Watercolor USA in Springfield,
Missouri, National Watermedia Biennial in Rochester, New York,
and Montanascapes at the Yellowstone Art Center in Billings.
He has always accepted leadership roles in the arts including
serving on the, Board of Directors of the Montana Art Gallery
Directors Association, member of the North Dakota Council on
the Arts from 1990-1993, and President of the Greater Grand
Forks Arts & Humanities Association form 1986-1988.
The work in the auction is donated to the Museum by Mike and
Kitty Maidenberg, thus all proceeds from the sale go to enhance
the Museum’s permanent collection.
Lot # 16
Mark BrowningMiles City, Montana
Untitled
Watercolor on paper
26.5 x 17.5 inches, 1984
Range: $500 - 700
Lot # 17
Cyrus SwannPine River, Minnesota
Box with Bottles
Thrown and altered soda-fired stoneware,
found rusted steel box
5.5 x 14 x 6 inches, 2003
Range: $150 – 200
Cyrus Swann lives and works in Pine River, Minnesota.
After receiving his BFA from Bemidji State University, he moved
back to his home town and developed a studio by remodeling the
out buildings on his family farm. He works in a diverse range of
materials, blending functional ceramics with his interest in image
making and salvage art.
Box with Bottles comes from my explorations and recoveries of
particular junk pieces I salvaged from an old farm dump. I would
pass by on walks, usually something would draw me in, and I
would start sorting and thinking. My attraction seemed to lean
toward the patina surface developed on rusted metal. I saw so
many similarities to the surfaces I was developing on my work in
clay, in my mind I would see them together. A series of four tool
and tackle box pieces fitted with flask and medicine bottle
shapes re in part the result of my diggings.
Lot #18
Adam KempGrand Forks, North Dakota
More Bloody Daisies (Labor Day, 2004)
Conté crayon, graphite, carpenter’s pencil,
oil pastels on board
38 x 88 inches, 2004
Range: $800 – 1,000
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.
Kemp continues to teach popular week-long sessions in the
Museum’s Summer Art Camp.
Antonin Boubin II was born in 1903 in Czechoslovakia.
In 1954, he married Vera Kapkova. Boubin practiced dentistry
before running afoul of the Communist government. Until his
death, he bore the marks of beatings incurred over a three-and-
a-half year period of prison internment for refusing to capitulate.
In retaliation, his lucrative dental practice in Prague, his home,
artist studio, and all his belongings were confiscated. He was
forbidden to practice the dental profession in any manner and,
although allowed to paint, was forbidden the sale of paintings as
a livelihood.
Many Prague citizens signed papers to join the Communist party
preferring dictation to total loss of security. Others, like Boubin,
preferred this loss to the suffocation of individual freedom, and
still others committed suicide rather than accepting either.
Boubin turned to the only form of work allowed him: that of a
farm laborer or woodcutter. Many lean years followed coupled
with harassment from neighbors who submitted to Communism.
Boubin and his wife had two sons and all four occupied a six-by-
eight foot room for over three years. One day, desperate for food,
Mrs. Boubin took a painting from the room in an attempt to
obtain money, milk, or food in exchange. Again a neighbor
informed and this time both wife and youngest child underwent
severe interrogation by the police before they were released.
In 1967, an engineer in Vienna who had seen and remembered
some of Boubin’s earlier works, commissioned him to paint
family portraits. It was through this official’s letter that first
Boubin and then his family were allowed to leave Prague. Shortly
after, all emigration from Czechoslovakia was denied.
In Vienna, Mr. Boubin approached the American Consul
General who referred him to the Untied States Catholic
Conference for Migration and Refugee Service in New York. The
family soon arrived in New York and, after three weeks without
finding work, accepted an invitation from the Sisters of St. Joseph
in Crookston to move to Minnesota. The Sisters, joined by the
whole community of Crookston, welcomed the Boubins to their
new home where the artist was to live out his life as a painter.
As a young man, Boubin studied at the Artist’s Academy in
Prague and in Cairo, Egypt. His work reflects the quality and
technique of old Europe where painters mixed their own colors
from ground powders and practiced glazing techniques. Paint
brushes, canvas, and tiny bags of colored pigments were part of
the very few possessions the family brought out of
Czechoslovakia.
Today Boubin’s paintings are sought by the government of the
Czech Republic where their value is ten times what they fetch in
the United States. Yet they remain dear to those who live in the
Red River Valley as part of the cultural and immigrant history.
Boubin’s wife Vera joined the staff of Sanders restaurant when it
first opened in Grand Forks. If you eat there today, order the
duck, still made from Mrs. Boubin’s recipe.
—Quoted in part from the Crookston Daily Times, 10/28/70
Lot #19
Antonin Boubin II(1903 - 1974)
Untitled
Oil on Canvas
24 x 30 inches, 1972
Range: $1,000 – 1,500
Ewa Tarsia, a Polish artist now living in Winnipeg, speaks
eloquently of the impetus behind her art: Nature, natural forms
and the human figure are sources of unending interest to me —
discovery and awareness of form as three-dimensional reality, the
way light reveals forms, how commonplace objects and the
human figure no longer exist as just objects, but as shape and
forms in space. All of these caused a lot of excitement years ago
for me, and since then I have been exploring these concepts.
Painting, tapestry, paper installations, intaglio techniques and
sculpture are my favorite disciplines. They enable me to express
form in depth and simplification of surfaces combined together to
produce a synthesis of two-dimensional movement (dynamic
patterns) and three-dimensional volume.
Some spatial relations in my work are purely abstract, others are
with mathematical formulae, and some have emotional attributes
such as mysterious, sinister, happy. Very often repeated elements
in my compositions (pierced areas, ropes that are uneven in their
thickness, tiny or large shapes attached or separated) are used in
order to make an abstract form and space, and to create shadows
and rhythms.
Although I use different media for wall hangings, sculpture and
paintings, all these disciplines have the same form and similar
character and they are built on a base of similar feelings and
emotions. The materials I use in my work enable me to achieve
Lot #20
Ewa TarsiaWinnipeg, Manitoba
My Blues for Mr. Miro
Monoprint, one of two
Image 12 x 12 inches, 2002
Range $200 – 250
harmony between form and content. In the process of
development, I discover the spirit and different personality of
materials I choose to work with. I work from imagination, based
on stored information derived from nature and our sophisticated
civilization. This enables me to bring a three-dimensional solidity,
showing the shape by means of color, light and texture.
Ewa Tarsia was educated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw,
Poland. Later she studied sculpture in Austria and advertising art
in Canada. Today she makes her home in Winnipeg.
She began her active exhibition career in 1988 in Poland. In
2002-03 she showed in international print biennials in Montreal,
Spain, France, and England. In 2004 she participated in the San
Diego Art Institute Multimedia International Exhibition.
She has work in private collections in Poland, Austria, Germany,
Canada, United States, Japan, Chile, Brazil, France, Spain,
Holland as well as in several public collections including
Ministry of Heritage and Culture in Manitoba, Intercity Papers in
Winnipeg, Agentur Barth in Germany, Consulate of the
Netherlands in Winnipeg, Tama University in Tokyo, Japan, and
French Embassy in Gdansk, Poland.
Her awards and grants include a Winnipeg Arts Council Grant,
2003; Manitoba Arts Council Grant, 2002; MPA grant to
promote work of three Winnipeg artists, 2002; Gordon Eliasson
When I first learned about Linda Welker’s work, I had no idea
how powerfully it resonates within space, how masterfully and
deeply she interacts with materials, and what a completely
sensitive artist she is. Linda’s two installations on the Reed
College campus have created spaces of heightened sensitivity
concerning memory, longing, notation, sound, loss, and hope.
The work is sometimes painfully quiet, but as one begins to
listen, the imagistic voices rise and crescendo with a persistence
sensual, especially in the time/experience equation that it
requires the viewer to solve in order to be absorbed. There is a
mysterious quality of “pre-existence” to the two bodies of work
at Reed. In their pre-verbal or metalinguistic states, Welker’s
pieces collide with the present, and ask us whether anything has
changed, whether and how objects speak, and how they
fundamentally reaffirm the importance of nuance—i.e., ART—in
organizing experience along a continuum. These are but a few
of the reasons why it has been an honor having Linda’s
work at Reed.
Stephanie Snyder, Director, Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College
Lot #21
Linda WelkerPortland, Oregon
Convoke
Mixed media collage with paper,
silk, indigo and pigment
Image 10.5 x 52 inches, 2004
Range: $800 – 1,000
Linda Welker had a solo exhibition at the North Dakota
Museum of Art in the fall of 2004. At that time the Museum
acquired a major installation, Text, from her Navigation Series.
Welker began her studies at Reed College and then completed a
BFA in painting at the Museum Art School (now Pacific
Northwest College of Art). She subsequently studied tapestry,
complex weave structures and handspinning with various
instructors including Christine Laffer, Marcel Marois, and
Madelyn Van der Hoogt. Welker has exhibited at numerous
galleries throughout the country and was awarded an Individual
Artist Fellowship from the Oregon Arts Commission in 2002 and
Regional Arts and Culture Artist Project Grants in 2000 and 2002.
Works such as Convoke incorporate, as the title suggests,
allusions to erasure/overwriting, tallying, and/or the rhythms and
phrasing which are part of musical notation. At first glance, the
work seems to display actual text; upon closer examination, it
presents the viewer with text-like marks. In format and spacing,
these stitched or scratched markings suggest real language, but
are in fact undecipherable.
The structure of language clearly has a counterpart in the
structure of musical notation. Both require cadence and rhythm
to be comprehensible, and both involve the visual and aural
senses. The correlation between the written word that recounts
experience and relies on memory, and the use of the tally mark
to record the simple occurrence or presence of an experience or
thing, is interesting. It leads to ways of looking that allow the
viewer to think of experience and memory in either the extended
narrative of poetry or written prose, or its more cryptic version as
a mark symbolic of an experience.
Annette Cyr’s paintings, in both content and energy, evidence a
love and connection with nature and life forces. Her heritage
includes ancestors from the Northern Plains of the United States.
Her mother was born in Duluth, Minnesota, of a
French/Chippewa father and Dutch/Scottish mother. Her father
was born in Butte, Montana, of a French Canadian/Manitoba
father (whose parents arrived from Arcadia via covered wagon)
and Irish/British/Mennonite mother.
In high school, she was immersed in the art and culture of
Tuscany for one year as a foreign exchange student, then for one
year in collage in Paris, drawing from the sculpture in museums
and studying every film in the archives of Cinematique. The
Europe years gave her direct contact with the grand tradition of
European painting with which she has been mischievously
working ever since.
Lot #22
Annette CyrNew York, New York
Still Life with Dead Cat
Oil on canvas
65x 52 inches, 2000
$6,000 – $7,000
Returning to the University of California, Santa Barbara, Cyr
was accepted into the highly selective College of Creative
Studies. Upon graduation she was awarded the Richard O.
Anderson Scholarship to attend the Skowhegan School of
Painting and Sculpture in Maine. She went on to receive her
MFA in painting from Yale University and upon graduation was
awarded Yale’s prestigious Winternitz Fellowship. Cyr’s
painting has received numerous awards including a NEA
Fellowship in painting, as well as grants from Art Matters, Inc.,
and New York State Council on the Arts, and artist residencies
at Yaddo and Macdowell art colonies.
Still Life with Dead Cat was inspired by the French painter Jean
Chardin (1699-1779) whose unsentimental genre and still-life
paintings of 18th century bourgeois Paris often included dead
animals, recently killed for the family table.
Kim Fink is an associate professor of printmaking at the
University of North Dakota, Grand Forks. He is also frequently
invited as a guest artist or professor at other institutions. For
example, he spent the falls of 2001 and 2003 at American
University, Corciano, Italy. In the summer of 2002 he was a
resident instructor at the Chautauqua Art School in Tennessee.
Fink received his MFA in printmaking from the Tyler School of
Art, Temple University, studying at Philadelphia and at the branch
in Rome. He created Ballad of Sexual Dependence, the work in
the auction, as his contribution to a suite of prints by artists from
Print Arts Northwest for the Gordon Gilkey Center for Print
Collections at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon. In a similar
venture, Fink and his students have produced a portfolio of prints
by artists exhibiting at the North Dakota Museum of Art over the
past four years. The portfolio will be published in late 2004 by
Sequoia Press, of which Fink is the founding coordinator and
printer. The artist and his family moved to Grand Forks in 1999
from Las Vegas, Nevada.
According to the artist, BALLAD OF SEXUAL DEPENDENCE is part of my
series exploring the role of females in our American society.
Inspired by my two daughters, Kirsten, who is moving out on her
own and learning to navigate the world, and Kathryn, who is just
beginning her journey into womanhood. I see both young
women attempting to create and define themselves as women.
Kathryn collaborated with me on this piece. The central figures
are symbolic portraits of my daughters. The border is infused with
Kathryn’s drawings: a fan letter to Mariah Carey—whom she now
despises—and fashion drawings done as she follows her dream
Lot #23
Kim FinkGrand Forks, North Dakota
Ballad of Sexual Dependence
Lithograph / serigraph
22 x 15 inches, 2000
Range: $250 – 300
to write and to become a fashion designer. The drawings
symbolize the dreams and desires of a typical American girl—that
is, the self-image of a thirteen-year-old girl attempting to find
her place.
Born and raised in the American West, I am in love with its truly
postmodern expressions of popular cultures. I look for common
links over the centuries. I have an interest in across-the-centuries
and around-the-globe cultural relationships. I incorporate
traditional hand-printing processes and drawing with computer
assisted images, mixing them with collage and chine colle. I
appropriate images from mass media sources such as newspaper,
internet, magazines, and found objects, altering them to fit my
needs. I transfer them to paper, layering images to achieve a
Baroque-like over-richness in images, color and textures.
I am inspired by music, jazz in particular. incorporating an
improvised variation on the theme to art making, I create visual
hybrids by combining aspects of painting, drawing and
printmaking. Using metaphor, I suggest multiple interpretations.
My work is twenty-first century pop, where multiples create a
vast obsessive-compulsive reference to the history of our
Lot #24
Belkis AyónHavana, Cuba (1967 – 1999)
Untitled (La Sentencia)
Serigraph, edition 5/70
Image 32.25 x 27 inches, 1993/2004
Range: $1,200 – 1,400
According to Darryl Couturier—the artist’s Los Angeles dealer—
Belkis Ayón was, without question, one of the most important
contemporary artists among the current generation living and
working in Cuba. Her untimely suicide in September 1999, at the
age of 32, took away a brilliant artist, master craftsman and
technician working in a medium (collography) few artists the
world over work in today.
Belkis was also a visionary addressing issues of contemporary
Cuban life and culture using a vocabulary she originally based
on a Cuban secret society of men called Abakœa. The early work
of the late 1980s and early 1990s was more literal in its
interpretation and representation of the origins, rituals and
symbolism of Abakœa. By the latter half of the 1990s, Belkis
began introducing herself into the imagery as an onlooker and
later as a more fully developed figure to begin addressing her
own feelings about being a woman in her own daily world. At the
time of her death, Belkis’s own image was becoming more
prominent, sometimes the sole figure in a work, describing very
personal issues. What some of these issues were are still open to
conjecture, as she took her secrets with her.
The work in the auction is a serigraph, published in April 2004 in
a limited edition of seventy, reproducing the image of one of
Belkis Ayón’s most important collographs. It was originally
published in an edition of six in 1993, followed by a second
edition of three a year later. The current series was published by
the estate of Belkis Ayón in order to fund the publication of her
Catalogue Raisonné under the sponsor of Daros Latin America,
Zurich, and the Belkis Ayón Estate, Havana. This edition is limited
to seventy serigraphs and the buyers will be mentioned in the
publication due out in 2005—including whomever purchases
print number five in this auction. Belkis was born in 1967, and
graduated from the Institute of Superior Arts in Havana in 1991.
Lot #25
Gretchen KottkeCooperstown, North Dakota
Going Home
Oil on canvas
16 x 12 inches, 2004
the death of his grandfather and his return to Nepal for the
lighting of the pyre. To me, the piece is central to what my work
is currently centered around in that no two people can have the
same experience of anything, can they? Because even if the thing
is the same, the people having the experience are different.
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.
Kottke 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.
Since closing her gallery, Kottke has begun work as a volunteer
curator at the North Dakota Museum of Art. In January 2004 she
selected the work for the Museum’s Silent Auction. She also
traveled with Director Laurel Reuter making studio visits in
North Dakota, Minnesota, and Manitoba to select work for this
current auction.
Kottke has exhibited in group exhibitions in Los Angeles, Denver,
the Puget Sound area and North Dakota. While mounting solo
exhibitions for dozens of other artists in her gallery at
Cooperstown, she never gave herself that privilege. Her first solo
exhibition was in Tumwater, Washington. She is currently
showing at the Spirit Room in Fargo.
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 painting.
Kottke 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.
Going Home was inspired by my sort-of-adopted son, Ashu, on
Lot #26
Kevin FlickerMorris, Minnesota
Coiled and Paddled Jar with Ten
Impressed Patterns
Wood-fired stoneware
20 x 8 inches, 2004
Range: $200 – 300
Kevin flicker, a fourth generation Minnesotan, was born in
St. Cloud in 1952 and grew up in Rochester. In 1974, after
graduating from the University of Minnesota, Morris, with
degrees in Psychology and English, he enrolled in a ceramics
night course and became immediately infatuated with clay. Over
the course of the next ten years he developed a personal clay
aesthetic via numerous ceramics courses and workshops from a
variety of teachers, but his most influential training was a
rigorous apprenticeship served with Master Potter Richard
Bresnahan at St. John’s University in Minnesota in 1985.
Flicker has been teaching ceramics courses at UMM since 1987.
As a teacher he is committed to a standard of excellence that has
led many of his students to continue their studies after UMM in
graduate or apprenticeship programs. He was recently awarded a
Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of Minnesota’s
College of Continuing Education. While Flicker has exhibited his
work throughout the region, he especially enjoys producing
affordable, high quality functional pots for the local population
using as many local natural materials as feasible.
Flicker, who is uninterested in fleeting ceramic trends, strives for
his pots to have a certain timeless quality. Though primarily
trained as a production thrower, he is also deeply attracted to
hand built ceramic forms, as in Coiled and Paddled Jar with Ten
Impressed Patterns, the work in the auction. Flicker often makes
pots like this in multiples of four or five, working his way
patiently from one to the next. He feels that working in series in
this manner gradually allows the important elements of a
particular form to reveal themselves. He explains, As I explore
variations within successive sets of series, I draw closer to the
essence of that particular form. Cretan forms intrigue me enough
that I return to them again and again, honing them down over the
years as they continue to evolve, however subtly.
The pot in the auction was fired in UMM’s woodfired kiln, which
was built last year by Flicker, along with a group of current and
former students. Constructed primarily from industrial waste
material that was otherwise destined for the landfill, the kiln is
designed to yield decoration on the pots from the firing process
itself rather than from applied glazes. A veritable “river of fire and
ash” snakes its way through the tightly packed pots in the kiln’s
interior, giving color and texture that cannot be achieved in any
gas or electric kiln.
Flicker lives in Morris with his wife Judy in a Craftsman-style
Judy Jennings was born in Winnipeg, although she spent
twenty years in Ontario as a nurse before returning to her home
town. She gave up the medical field in order to concentrate on
glass. According to Jennings, I began working with glass years
ago. I have cut it, leaded it, melted it, fused it, torched it, painted
it, and even blown it. Glass is an endlessly fascinating medium
that keeps challenging me to learn new ways of using it
in my designs.
Most of my stained glass work is commissioned which gives me
the opportunity to work with the clients to develop a design to
suit thee space, the light, and the people who will be living with
my art. When I am not working on a large stained-glass project, I
play with compatible glass, fusing it in the kiln and working it
with a torch. I will work with glass forever because it always has
more to teach me.
Her greatest challenge came from St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in
Rochester, Minnesota. They wanted a series of artists to each
create a stained-glass window for their modernist building.
Jennings convinced them to let her make all of the windows.
They agreed and she began designing the windows for the church
sanctuary and lobby, moving forward one window at a time
as the church community raised the funds. The entire project
involves over a thousand square feet of glass and took six
years to complete.
Working with glass was a seduction that drew her in about
sixteen years ago while designing a suncatcher in a night school
class. After that one project she was hooked. As inspiration she
Lot #27
Judy JenningsWinnipeg, Manitoba
Red
Stained glass
25 x 25 inches, 2004
Range: $500 – 650
recalls one of her teachers telling her that working with glass
always makes something beautiful, but there still has to be a
purpose behind it. To that end she has pursued the study of both
historical and contemporary glass and has traveled extensively
exploring stained glass, glass painting, kiln fired glass,
architectural glass design, mold making, sand casting,
sandblasting and relief carving.
For example, Jennings went to Japan for a Glass Arts Society
Conference and workshop; to England, Ireland, Wales, France,
Switzerland, and Germany with study groups of fellow glass
artists; to Japan for a paper making workshop, to Pilchuch Glass
School in Washington for workshops, to New Hampshire to study
glass painting with Richard Millard; to Syracuse, New York, to
study advanced mold-making, sand-casting, and sandblast relief
carving with Eric Hilton; to Mexico on several occasions to study
with Narcissus Quagliata, Eric Hilton, and Dan Fenton, all major
glass artists.
Judy designs windows and screens in glass, using age-old
techniques of leading, etching and painting to create
contemporary works that dance with light and color. Her work is
represented in many private collections as well as the Province
of Manitoba, the Manitoba Provincial Legislative Building, Holy
Redeemer Church, and Young United Church. You can see her
works throughout Winnipeg at Holy Redeemer Church, Young
United Church, Westwood United Church, Charleswood United
Church, and Chevra Mishayayes Synagogue.
Jennings has submitted work to the Museum’s winter silent
auction for several years. Museum Director Laurel Reuter has
been so impressed with her wit, her sensitivity to color, and her
creativity, that she has invited Jennings to mount an exhibition in
the near future—either a solo exhibition or a show in
conjunction with the glass artists with whom she has studied.
Walter Piehl, born into a family that raised rodeo stock,
rode horses as a matter of course. When he arrived at graduate
school at the University of Minnesota in 1969, Bill Goldstein,
now the Director of Universal Limited Art Editions but then a
fellow student, commented that from the beginning Walter drew
with great confidence and skill. We were beginning students
and he arrived full-blown. He put his hand to paper and the
lines flowed. And he drew horses.
But before that, at the beginning of his experience with the world
outside of Marion, North Dakota, Walter went to Concordia, a
small Lutheran college in Moorhead, Minnesota, enrolling in
1960. Cy Running was his teacher. Walter was the skittish colt. I
was so used to calendar art, to illustration, to cowboy art as it
appeared in the magazines, I had a hard time.
Piehl went on to draw and paint horses, year after year, never
wearying of his subject, never despairing in his quest to create
contemporary Western art. In the beginning he worked alone,
Lot #28
Walter PiehlMinot, North Dakota
Ice Angel: Sweetheart of the Rodeo
Acrylic on canvas
48 x 36 inches, 2002
Range: $2,400 – 2,900
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 creek 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. In 2003 the Plains Art
Museum mounted a retrospective of his paintings and drawings.
Jon Olson received his MFA from the University of North
Dakota in 2001. For his Master’s exhibition, Olson’s series of
portraits showed his interest in how, Each of us harbor many
identities within and without ourselves. The large body of work,
Informed by observation, self-examination and cathartic
episodes—indeed, life and death, came after seven years of
making art, according to the artist.
Olson earlier painted under the tutelage of Walter Piehl at Minot
State University. It was in Piehl’s presence, Olson says, I really
began to understand the possibilities of painting, and I pursued
painting in a fashion I had not previously known.
Lot #29
Jon OlsonMinot, North Dakota
Untitled
Oil on two joined canvases
32 x 20 inches, 2004
Range: $650 – 750
Olson moved from direct figurative painting to abstraction and
back again. In his current portraits, Olson intends that the figures
transcend themselves. The paintings have very little to do with
the individuals themselves, he says, and everything to do with the
application of paint on the surface. He is interested in the
universality that can be found in individual models. His
enjoyment comes from taking a traditional form of painting, such
as portraiture, and attempting to turn it into something new.
This is the third painting Olson has made of the man in the
auction painting. Yet in looking at all three, the viewer would not
know each was based upon the same person.
Olson teaches on the art faculty of Minot State University. In
Marjorie Schlossman’s work will be familiar to the
audience at the North Dakota Museum of Art where she had her
first museum exhibition in the summer of 2004. Blessed Be the
Ties, the painting in the auction, was in that exhibition but
because the artist has never set out to sell her work, almost
nothing has come on the market. This represents a rare
opportunity for someone to acquire a major painting by this well-
established North Dakota artist.
The Museum produced a catalog for Schlossman’s exhibition
which draws heavily upon her own writings in her journals. In it
she says, It is the habits of painting that we recognize in the work
of an individual artist. I wonder about these habits or patterns.
Are they an unresolved issue being worked through again and
again? Or attacked many times, the unexamined oversight? Or
are they like fingerprints or a handwriting style?
It would take years for Schlossman to develop her own “painting
style or voice.” She was born in California but moved to Fargo,
her mother’s home town, shortly after World War II ended. Years
later she would return to California where she was to become a
painter, influenced by both the California light and West Coast
Lot #30
Marjorie SchlossmanFargo, North Dakota
Blessed Be the Ties
Oil and acrylic on canvas
60 x 92 inches, 1998
Range: $3,500 – $4,500
attitudes toward painting. But first, she took a degree in literature
from Northwestern University. Over a decade later she returned
to Fargo to raise her seven children and to paint.
The artist toyed with becoming a composer, having studied
violin since childhood. She concluded that she could only
devote her time to one thing and chose painting and to play as
an amateur in the Fargo-Moorhead Symphony.
Around 2000, Schlossman began to work on the Roberts Street
Chapel, a private venture she carved out of an old building in
Fargo. She has completed two sets of paintings for the chapel.
and will finish the third before 2004 runs out. Soon the Chapel
Lot #31
Ione Thorkelsson
Roseisle, Manitoba
Blackbird
Blown glass with layers of color
7.5 x 5.5 x 5.5
Range: $400 – 500
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.
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 show titled,
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 addition to her active exhibition schedule, Thorkelsson accepts
commissions. These have included a 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 Blizzard 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 #32
“Miskomin” Anthony R. La FromboiseGrand Forks and Dunseith, North Dakota
Traditional Basket
Birchbark
22 x 13 x 12 inches, 2004
Range: $400 – 500
Lot #33
David MadzoMinneapolis, Minnesota
Untitled
Acrylic on board with painted frame
22.5 x 15.25 inches, 2002
Range: $600 – 1,000
David Madzo is not only a maker of magical paintings, he
is a technically accomplished craftsman. He handles 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 auction work
was created with washes of acrylic paint on board, and the image
was extended onto the frame.
Madzo graduated with a BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art
and Design (1977) and an MFA 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 Minneapolis 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). In addition to painting, the artist
has an enviable position as the only paid person on Habitat for
Humanity construction sites where he oversees dozens of
volunteer "carpenters."
“Miskomin” Anthony R. La Fromboise was born in
Ft. Lewis, Washington, in 1952 to Dan La Fromboise and
Ramona Anquot. His parents were enrolled members of the
Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. His father was in the military
for 20 years so the children attended various schools. In 1968 La
Fromboise followed in his father’s footsteps into the military. After
three years in the Marine Corps, he received his GED.
Shortly after completing service, he moved to Missoula to attend
the University of Montana. In 1974 he graduated with a bachelor
degree in social work and psychology. A year later, while living
on the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation, he married Rebecca
Cree, the daughter of North Dakota’s famous traditional
basketmakers, Francis Cree and Rose Machippiness Cree.
La Fromboise also wanted to make baskets but not the willow
baskets his wife’s family were known for. He consulted his great
aunt and she taught him to work with birchbark.
The basket in the auction is based upon the shape of a traditional
Chippewa utility or storage basket used to store dried corn,
beans, or wild rice. His baskets have been sold and exhibited
widely including in the Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C.,
and in the Museum of Man and Nature in Winnipeg. They can
also be found in the North Dakota Museum of Art Shop. In
addition to basketmaking, he has been cited by the North Dakota
Council on the Arts as a Master Artist in Storytelling.
La Fromboise is currently enrolled in graduate school at the
University of North Dakota studying educational leadership.
Barbara Hatfield's vision and sensibility is shaped by the
openness of her native landscape, North Dakota's Red River
Valley, and further developed by her interests in the poetic and
philosophical lessons of Asian art. The work reflects nature's
directness and it's paradoxical strength and fragility. It brings the
distillation of a moment and the effort to depict its essence.
Works on paper in ink, watercolor, and pastel exemplify her
willingness to let the abstract speak and allow viewers ample
space for their own inquiry and imagination. The work is
animated by a subtle energy and often meditative, opening a
view both from and to a contemplative space.
Hatfield earned a Bachelor's degree from Minnesota State
University in Moorhead and a Master of Fine Arts in Painting from
What birds plunge through is not the intimate space
in which you see all forms intensified.
(Out in the Open, you would be denied
your self, would disappear into that vastness.)
Space reaches from us and construes the world:
to know a tree, in its true element,
throw inner space around it, from that pure
abundance in you surround it with restraint.
It has no limits. Not till it is held
In your renouncing is it truly there.
—Ranier Maria Rilke
According to the artist, Rilke offers us instruction: ‘throw inner
space around it.’ He invites us to see not only with our eyes but
wholly, to allow ourselves the fullness of experience that
openness can bring. What arises as you allow yourself to ‘look’
wholly?
Lot #34
Barbara Hatfield
New York, New York
Left: Forming
Right: Integration
Watercolor on paper
12 x 9 inches, 2003
Range: $750 – 1,000, pair
Lot #35
José M. ForsHavana, Cuba, and Spain
Los Objetos II
Serigraph, edition 1/5
21.75 x 59.25 inches, 2004
Range: $1,200 – 1,500
José Manuel Fors was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1956 and
grew up to become a significant photographer whose work was
seen in the North Dakota Museum of Art in 2001 in the
exhibition Conceptual Art from Cuba.
Fors is an obsessed collector of objects and family memorabilia
that he utilizes in his constructions, photographs, and prints. He
rephotographs the family archive of photographs and mailed
postcards in a number of processes to convey the layers of
meaning and memories they accumulate with time. This includes
processes such as double exposing negatives with both sides of
the postcard and working the negatives with scratches and other
manipulations before printing. The resulting prints are then
heavily toned. The artist places the photographs in tableaux
where they take on a calendrical or diaristic significance based
in time, memory, and space.
Of his work, Fors says that, rather than a story, he wants to
convey a frame of mind, his way of seeing and assimilating what
is around him in his process of assigning permanent meanings to
things past. He seeks to reconcile personal histories and family
association with the collective experience.
Fors was educated in Havana where he studied at the Academia
de Arte San Alejandro from 1972 to 1976, and at the Instituto de
Museologia from 1983 to 1986. He began exhibiting his work in
Cuba in 1983 in solo exhibitions, in Venezuela in 1993, in Japan
in 1997, in Belgium in 1998, and on a regular basis at the
Couturier Gallery in Los Angeles in 2000. His work has been
seen in important group exhibitions around the world including
the 2001 exhibition Shifting Tides: Cuban Photography after the
Revolution at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Fors is included in numerous public collections including Casa
de Las Américas, Havana, Cuba; Phototeca de Cuba, Havana,
Cuba; Fototeca de Pachuca, Pachuca, México; Fundación Museo
de Bellas Artes, Caracas, Venezuela; Los Angeles County
Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California; Museo Las Américas,
Managua, Nicaragua; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana,
Cuba; Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, Fort Lauderdale, Florida;
Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Houston, Texas; and the
University of Virginia Art Museum, Charlottesville, Virginia.
Lot #36
Sjoerd DotingNew York, New York
Clouds over New Jersey
Oil on board
10 x 12 inches, 2001
Range: $200 – 300
Sjoerd Doting was one of nine artists who lost their
studios on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center on September
11, 2001. A year later the North Dakota Museum of Art opened
an exhibition of paintings by those artists, many of which were
recreated from sketches or memory. Only a handful of finished
paintings survived, having been taken home for some reason.
Several artists had sketches back at their studios or in their
carrying bags. This exquisite little painting by Doting was saved
and appeared in the North Dakota exhibition. It is a sketch of
what he saw as he worked at his easel by the window on the 91st
floor. Large detailed paintings would grow out of quick sketch
paintings such as this.
According to the artist, After living in New York City for eighteen
years, painting from the 91st floor of the World Trade Center
seemed like a dream come true. For me, the view from up there
tied together all the previous New York cityscapes I had done.
There were the bridges I had painted from. The buildings,
churches, smokestacks, and distant hills also appeared in my
paintings. I could now see the City as part of the greater
landscape and, most of all, surrounded by water—almost like
Holland, where I am from. And cycling to the WTC every
morning, I would take note of buildings and streets that, in fifteen
minutes, I would be painting from the 91st floor.
It was an unusual summer, with many incredibly clear days,
when it seemed I could see forever, beyond New Jersey,
Brooklyn, and Long Island. With the light, shadows, and colors
constantly changing, revealing endless possibilities, it seemed
impossible at first to chose one spot or one time of day, because
there was so much of everything, so much that I wanted to paint.
And when the weather did change, I could see storms
approaching from far away—moving too fast to capture except in
a quick sketch—until they would finally reach the Towers and
envelop them.
I was constantly struck by the silence in our huge empty space—
something I never experienced in the city, even at home. All
you could hear, barely, was the hum of the air conditioning.
The silence made the city below seem oddly serene, so unlike
New York. The experience of the view was overwhelming and
inspiring. It was the most exhilarating period of painting I ever
had. I could not keep away. I wanted to see the sun rise, the
sun set, even the night. I did not want to leave my perch,
even for lunch.
The memory of that summer and those magnificent views has
made me want to recreate the paintings I lost, even though I
know they could never be the same paintings. But I hope they
will convey some of that view that is forever etched in my mind.
Sjoerd Doting is originally from Holland and studied at the
University of Amsterdam, the National Academy of Design and
the Art Students League, both in New York. Doting had a solo
show at the 175th Annual Exhibition at the National Academy of
Design, New York; the 35th Juried Exhibition at the Parrish Art
Museum, Southampton, NY; the National Competition at the First
Street Gallery, New York; the Small Works Show at the
Washington Square East Gallery, New York University; and at the
Cork Gallery, Lincoln Center, New York. Doting has received two
Nessa Cohen Grants from the Art Students League and a merit
Lot #37
Gretchen BedermanBismarck, North Dakota
Riding
Oil with wax on canvas
48 x 72 inches, 2002
Range $1,700 – 2,000
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.
Bederman grew up in Houston, Texas, and settled in North
Dakota after a 1980 visit. She completed her undergraduate work
at Minnesota State University Moorhead and received an MFA in
painting from the University of North Dakota in 1996. While in
Grand Forks, she served as a docent for the North Dakota
Museum of Art and worked as an Artist-in-Residence at Lake
Agassiz Elementary School.
The painting in the auction represents Bederman at her grandest,
taking on what appears to be history painting. The accurately
painted horses are emerging out of a Cézanne-like landscape
formed by shapes of color. The riders with their almost masked
faces are “everyman.” The setting could be anywhere. According
to Museum Director Laurel Reuter, this edgy painting ushers in
“another Bederman” for those who have followed her
development over the years.
This past year Bederman represented the North Dakota Council
Explore . . . Endure . . . Evolve . . .
North Dakota Quarterly, PO Box 7209, University of North Dakota, Grand Forks ND 58202, (701) 777-3322 e-mail: [email protected] www.und.nodak.edu/org/ndq
North Dakota Quarterly is proud to participate in theNorth Dakota Museum of Art’s Autumn Art Auction, con-
tinuing our ongoing promotion of art and artists in theupper midwest. Our Lewis and Clark issue (71.2) features
the work of nine North Dakota artists, and our covers regularly feature artwork from the region and beyond.
Other recent issues include Hemingway: Life and Art (70.4)and The Fiction Issue (71.1), only $12 each.
Mention this ad when ordering a subscription to receiveeither a free previous issue or a $5.00 discount from our
regular price of $25.00 for four issues.Kathryn Lipke, Birch Tree
North Dakota Museum of Art, Post Office Box 7305, Grand Forks, North Dakota 58202-7305 USAPhone: 701.777.4195 Fax: 701.777.4425 E-mail: [email protected] www.ndmoa.com
North Dakota Museum of ArtFoundation
Board of DirectorsNorth Dakota Museum of Art
Board of Trustees
Ann Brown, Chair
Charles Christianson
John Foster
Cheryl Gaddie
Robert Gallager
Betty Gard
David Hasbargen, Vice-President
Jean Holland
Sandy Kaul
Gretchen Kottke
Darrell Larson
Judi Paukert
Brian Petersen, Treasurer
Laurel Reuter, President
Annette Rorvig
Pat Ryan
Gerald Skogley, Honorary Chair
Mary Wakefield
Wayne Zimmerman
Anthony Thein, Emeritus
Corinne Alphson, Emerita
David Blehm, Emeritus
Julie Blehm, Emerita
Virginia Dunnigan, Emerita
Bruce Gjovig, Emeritus
Ellen McKinnon, Emerita
Sanny Ryan, Emerita
Rex Wiedereanders, Emertus
Barb Lander, Emerita
Robert Lewis, Emeritus
Douglas McPhail, Emeritus
Kevin Fickenscher
Nancy Friese
James E. Gjerset
John Gray
Daniel E. Gustafson
Darrell Larson
Fern Letnes
Margery McCanna-Jennison
Betty Monkman
Gerald Skogley, Chair
Pat Traynor
North Dakota Museum of Art Staff
Elizabeth Ackerman
Rachel Bushaw
Sheila Dalgliesh
Justin Dalzell
Deborah Douglass
Jill Erickson
Rachel Evenson Kopp
Suzanne Fink
Amy Hovde
Kathy Kendle
Brian Lofthus
Kile Martin
Laurel Reuter
Anna Shields
Jennifer Verlinde
Gregory Vettel
Matthew Wallace
Stacy Warcup
and over fifty volunteers