A u t u m n A r t A u c t i o nV o l u m e 1 6 , 2 0 1 4
N o r t h D a k o t a M u s e u m o f A r t
Ellen McKinnon (September 25, 1915 – May 20, 2014)
Autumn Art Auction
is held in memory of
Long-time Museum Supporters
Robert Lewis
and Ellen McKinnon North Dakota Museum of ArtBoard of Trustees
North Dakota Museum of ArtFoundation
Board of Directors
Evan Anderson
Ganya Anderson
Julie Blehm, President
W. Jeremy Davis
Virginia Lee Dunnigan, Secretary
Kristen Eggerling
Susan Farkas
Bruce Gjovig
Darrell Larson, Chairman
Mary Matson
Sally Miskavige, Treasurer
Laurel Reuter
Lynn Raymond
Tammy Sogard
Linda Swanston
Kelly Thompson, Vice President
Lois Wilde
Joshua Wynne
Corinne Alphson, Emerita
Kim Holmes, Emeritus
Douglas McPhail, Emeritus
Gerald Skogley, Emeritus
Anthony Thein, Emeritus
W. Jeremy Davis
Nancy Friese
Bruce Gjovig
Darrell Larson
Laurel Reuter
North Dakota Museum of Art Staff
Matt Anderson
Guillermo Guardia
Sungyee Joh
Danielle Masters
Todd Pate
Laurel Reuter, Director
Gregory Vettel
Matthew Wallace, Associate Director
Justin Welsh
Brad Werner
Part-time StaffSara Anderson
Curtis Longtime Sleeping
Sheila Dalgliesh
Erika Gallaway
Nathan Guillemette
Chris Gust
Greg Jones
Kathy Kendle
Wayne Kendle
Leanna Niebeling
Sanghyeon Park
Ben Schreiner
Evan Sprecher
Emily Stenberg
and over fifty volunteersFront Cover: Margaret Wall-Romana, 2014. Oil on wood panel, 24 x 16 x 2 inches
Robert W. Lewis (December 15, 1930 – August 26, 2013)
1
Auction PreviewSunday, October 18 until auction time in the Museum galleries
Monday – Friday, 9 to 5 pm, Saturday – Sunday, 1 to 5 pm
All works to be auctioned will be on display.
Auction Walk-aboutLaurel Reuter, Auction Curator, will lead an informal
discussion about works in the Auction
Thursday, October 30, 7 pm, in the galleries.
patrons — $1,000All Seasons Garden Center 69
Dakota Harvest 71
Edgewood Group 82
Hugo’s 61
JLG Architects 77
Minnesota Public Radio 56
William F. Wosick, MD 53
Sponsors — $750McDonald Dentistry 64
Supporters — $500Acme Tools 67
Amazing Grains 81
Avant Hair and Skin Care Studio 54
Blue Moose Bar & Grill 60
Bremer Bank 59
Chester Fritz Auditorium 63
Curtis Tanabe, D.D.S. 58
Duc Tran, D.D.S. 83
Empire Arts Center 76
First State Bank 79
Fort Garry Hotel 78
Grand Forks Country Club 81
Ground Round 73
HB Sound and Light 65
Auction Supporters continued next page
North Dakota Museum of Art
A U T U M N A r t A u c t i o nS at u r d ay , N o v em b e r 1 , 2 0 1 4
Wine and hors d’oeuvres 6:30 pm
Auction begins at 8 pm
Autumn Art Auction is sponsored by the following
Businesses, Not-for-profits and Individuals:
2
Supporters — $500Little Bangkok 74
Museum Café 65
North Dakota Quarterly 70
Plains Chiropractic & Acupuncture P.C. 80
Prairie Public 54
Reichert Armstrong Law Office 80
Rhombus Guys 79
River City Jewelers, Inc. 75
Sadie's Couture & Event Styling 68
Salon Seva 72
Sanders 1907 55
Sanny and Jerry Ryan Center for Prevention and Genetics 75
Summit Brewing Company 62
UND Alumni Association 62
Wogaman Insurance Agency Inc. 60
You Are Here Gallery 57, 66
Contributors — $250Altru Health System 76
Ameriprise Financial, Debbie Albert 73
Boulder Apartments 57
Burtness Theater 55
Capital Resource Management 63
EAPC Architects and Engineers 58
Economy Plumbing 59
Forx Roller Derby 78
Greater Grand Forks Community Theatre 66
Greenberg Realty, Inc. 76
Henry's Countrypolitan 74
Icon Architectual Group 74
Opp Construction 67
Oxford Realty 70
Kelly Thompson, Oxford Realty 55
Simonson Station Stores 72
Sterling Carpet One 72
Swanson & Warcup, Ltd. 78
The Lighting Gallery 83
Transformations by Twila 59
Truyu 84
Valley Oral and Facial Surgery 67
Xcel Energy 66
Zimney Foster, P.C. 83
Advertisers — $125Artwise 73
Brady, Martz & Associates, P.C. 57
Browning Arts 70
Caribou Coffee 68
Demers Dental, Chelsea R. Eickson,
D.D.S. 68
Demers Dental, Paul Stadem,
D.D.S. 64
Drees, Riskey & Vallager, Ltd. 58
Forks ChemDry 84
Garon Construction 73
Gate City Bank 68
Good Insurance, Bonnie Baglien 64
Marilee Moen, Greenberg Realty,
Inc. 58
Jack Wadhawan, Prudential Crary
Real Estate 84
MayPort Insurance 68
Rose Shop 70
Valley Dairy Stores 63
Vilandre Heating & Air
Conditioning, Inc. 63
Waterfront Kitchen & Bath 57
Buy local. Read the
sponsor pages
to learn about those who
invest in the Museum.
Almost all are locally
3
Ross Rolshoven is a many-sided man. Foremost, he is
an artist who works in assemblage, hand-colored photography,
and painting. Among his exhibitions was a solo show of
assemblages at the North Dakota Museum of Art in 2002. The
work was based in the iconography of The West, in historical
myths and representations of cowboys and Indians. These themes
overlap with family, relationships, and contemporary life.
Rolshoven is a collector of early Western settlement and
American Indian art and artifacts. He is completing his sixth year
on Medora’s North Dakota Cowboy Hall of Fame Board of
Directors. He has been a volunteer for numerous civic events and
charities over the past thirty years, including the North Dakota
Museum of Art.
In addition to making and collecting art, Rolshoven collects and
restores vintage boats. He was North Dakota’s only professional
boat racer for a number of years, having finished as high as fourth
place in the National APBA tournament in Kankakee, Illinois—
and totaled a boat or two along the way.
In everyday life, however, he is a legal investigator who handles
high profile cases involving corporate, civil, and criminal
matters. He owns and operates Great Plains Claims, Inc. along
with his brother Reid, in Grand Forks, North Dakota. His work
routinely takes him across the Upper Midwest—a boon to his
collecting and his need to acquire endless numbers of objects for
making assemblages.
Rolshoven is a Summa Cum Laude University of North Dakota
graduate and father of three children; his oldest daughter, Ashley,
lives in Taos. Daughter Jensen and son Carsen attend school in
Grand Forks.
Ross Rolshoven, Auctioneer Auction Committee
COLETTE ANDERSON
ANUBHA BANSAL
SADIE GARDNER CHILLY GOODMAN
NATALIE MUTH
APRYL MOLSTAD
These wonderful Grand Forks women
decided to operate as a Committee of
the Whole rather than Chairs and a
Committee. They live full lives. Some
have always lived in Grand Forks;
others are new to the community,
having moved with their families.
Collette Anderson works as an
OBGYN physician at Altru. Anubha
Bansal is a full-time mom and
community volunteer. Sadie Gardner
started her own business, Sadies
Couture Floral & Event Styling. Chilly
Goodman is a full-time mom and
community volunteer. Apryl Molstad
works in psychiatry at Altru Hospital.
Natalie Muth is a chiropractor. Denise
Wood is an author who owns two
companies.
Denise Wood
4
From the Museum Director
• Each registered guest will receive a bidding card as part of
the price of admission. Upon receiving the bidding card,
each guest will be asked to sign a statement vowing to abide
by the Rules of the Auction listed in this catalog.
• Absentee bidders will either leave their bids on an Absentee
Bid Form with Museum personnel in person or by phone, or
arrange to bid by phone the night of the Auction. Absentee
bidders, by filling out the form, agree to abide by the Rules of
the Auction.
• Each bidder will use his or her own bidding number during
the Auction.
• All sales are final.
• In September 2002, the Office of the North Dakota State
Tax Commissioner determined that the gross receipts from
the sales made at the Auction are subject to sales tax of
6.75%. This does not apply to out-of-state buyers who have
works shipped to them.
• In the event of a dispute between bidders, the auctioneer
shall either determine the successful bidder or re-auction
the item in dispute.
• Purchasers may pay for items at any point following the
sale of a work but must pay for all art work before the
conclusion of the evening unless other arrangements are
in place. Absentee bidders will be charged on the evening of
the Auction or an invoice will be sent the next business day.
• Works of art in the Auction have minimum bids placed on
them by the artist. This confidential “reserve” is a price
agreed upon between the artist and the North Dakota
Museum of Art below which a work of art will not be sold.
This past year we lost two of our beloved friends, both of whom
served as Museum Trustees, Robert Lewis and Ellen McKinnon.
They were with us from the birth of the institution, and dear to
me personally. Bob Lewis was my graduate school advisor and
my editor for all Museum publications. His red pen was ever
present in my writing life. He also chaired the Museum Board in
the 1970s. Ellen McKinnon, after decades of Board work, was
voted Trustee Emeritus in 1997, as was Bob. Until her recent
death, she paid for a half-page ad in the Auction catalog just
because she wanted to—the only individual ever to do so.
They brought wisdom, elegance, and deep ties to the larger
community along with generous financial assistance. They were
with us when we held our inaugural Autumn Art Auction in 1999,
as we took up the task of building a buying audience for the
artists who live among us.
This Auction set the precedent for paying artists before paying
ourselves. We never ask artists to donate art—although some do.
These are the rules of the game: Artists set a minimum price,
which they are guaranteed to receive. Work that doesn’t reach
the artist’s minimum is brought in by the Museum and returned.
Any amount over the reserve and the Museum’s equal match is
split 50/50. For example: Reserve bid is $1,200. If the work sells
for $1,395, the artist receives $1,200 and the Museum receives
$195. If the same work sells for $2,400, it is split evenly.
Others in the region have adopted our policy. Instead of always
being asked to donate, artists can count on actual income from
auctions. And, bless you buyers for not forgetting that this is also
a benefit for the Museum, so we greatly value your generosity.
Remember, when you buy through the Auction, the price
includes framing. Frames are often custom made by the artists or
Rules of the Auction
framed by the Museum staff who use archival materials. This adds
significant value to most artworks, often as much as $400 in the
Grand Forks market but considerably more elsewhere. Please
note that sales tax is charged on all art that stays in state.
Each year we widen our pool of artists with ties to our audience,
thus creating a richer environment for art to flourish. New to the
auction this year are Ned Krouse who once taught at Minot State
University; Ryan Stander and Micah Bloom, currently teaching at
Minot State; Jay Pfeifer who was last in the Auction in 2001; Don
Miller of Grand Forks who has returned to working in the studio
after years of chairing the University of North Dakota’s Ceramics
Department; Zhimin Guan’s brother, Yamin Guan, who lives in
China; Zhimin’s annual choice of a student painter, Brittney
Anderson; John Brummel of Grand Forks; Les Skoropat of Pelican
Rapids; Greg Edmondson of St. Louis; and Mary Bonkemeyer of
Santa Fe whose exhibition of abstract paintings was on display
this summer.
We could not publish this catalog without the underwriting of
our sponsors. Please take your business to these companies and
individuals, thank them for their significant contributions, and
note how most are locally owned and operated. Sometimes they
say, “I don’t care if I get an ad, I just want to give to you guys.”
Supporting cultural life is not in the interest of most chains but
rather has become the business of the butcher, the baker and the
keeper of bees, that is, those who live among us. Thank you.
—Laurel Reuter, Director
Above: Barton’s Place, an installation in the Museum of the lateBarton Lidice Benes’s collections as installed in his New York Cityapartment, where he lived for decades as a practicing artist.Barton’s Place opened on November 16, 2013 as a re-creation ofthe original apartment.
The Artists
5
The Museum
Listed by lot number
#1 Dan Sharbono
#2 Dan Sharbono
#3 Dan Sharbono
#4 Mary Bonkemeyer
#5 Micah Bloom
#6 Alana Bergstrom
#7 Milena Marinov
#8 Milena Marinov
#9 Milena Marinov
#10 Milena Marinov
#11 Marley Kaul
#12 Mollie Douthit
#13 Mollie Douthit
#14 Vivienne Morgan
#15 Jon Solinger
#16 Alexander Hettich
$17 Alexander Hettich
#18 James Culleton
#19 William Harbort
#20 Robert Wilson
#21 Duane Shoup
#22 Duane Shoup
#23 Guillermo Guardia
#24 Dyan Rey
#25 Dyan Rey
#26 Don Miller
#27 Adam Kemp
#28 Adam Kemp
#29 Albert Belleveau
#30 Albert Belleveau
#31 Margaret Wall-Romana
#32 Dave Britton
#33 Madelyne Camrud
#34 Marlon Davidson and
Don Knudson
#35 Nancy Friese
#36 Brittney Anderson
#37 John Brummel
#38 Jessica Christy
#39 Timothy Ray
#40 Walter Piehl
#41 Les Skoropat
#42 Armando Ramos
#43 Brian Paulsen
#44 Todd Hebert
#45 Chris Pancoe
#46 Jessica Mongeon
#47 Ned Krouse
#48 Pirjo Berg
#49 Jessica Matson-Fluto
#50 Tim Schouten
#51 Lisa York
#52 Shawn O’Connor
#53 Mariah Masilko
#54 Kelly Thompson
#55 Ryan Stander
#56 Jay Pfeifer
#57 Jenny O
#58 Yamin Guan
#59 Zhimin Guan
#60 Greg EdmondsonListed by page number
3 Auctioneer
Auction Chairs and
Committee
4 Rules of Auction
5 Director’s Introduction
Back cover, Trustees and Staff
6
Lot #1, #2, #3
Dan SharbonoMinot, North Dakota
Left to right:
Blue Crown, 2013
Painted assemblage on wood
8.5 x 11 inches
Range: $130 – 160
Bosch, 2013
Painted assemblage on wood
30 x 5 inches
Range: $175 – 250
Peerless, 2013
Acrylic on wood
23 x 8 inches
Range: $190 – 220
Dan Sharbono is a Minot artist, designer, and free-
lance graphic designer. He is known for his three-
dimensional murals and painted assemblages.
Most of Sharbono’s work is about observing the things
around him and learning to appreciate them for their
inherent aesthetic qualities—signs of a personality, loyalty,
and a past filled with experiences most people can relate
to. He rescues found objects and materials from flea
markets, yard sales, old barns and garages, and the
occasional curbside. They are recycled into his artwork,
thus drawing attention—and hopefully appreciation—to
things that pass unnoticed in everyday life. Collected, his
most recent series of paintings/assemblages, is about
appreciating individuality.
According to the artist, my lovely wife Alyssa and I own
and operate 62 Doors Gallery and Studios, a community
of artists comprised of a small group of crazy art people,
in downtown Minot. We’re lucky to have such an amazing
arts community in our small midwest town. It keeps us
busy, makes us crazy, keeps us all making art.
Being part of a group is a great way to learn to appreciate
individuality, which is more obvious when we are given
the opportunity to compare and contrast ourselves with
others. Our strengths and weaknesses together make us
each invaluable parts of the group.
7
Lot #4
mary BonkemeyerSanta Fe, New Mexico
Lilies, 2014
Watercolor
22 x 15 inches
Range: $500 – 700
mary Bonkemeyer: If I were to identify myself as
an artist, it would be as a poet/painter or a painter/poet.
I was born in North Carolina. From there I went to the
University of Iowa where I studied under Phillip Guston
and earned my MA degree. During those years, I met some
fine artists. I also studied with Richard Diebenkorn and
Nancy Graves. For the last twenty years I have lived in
Santa Fe, New Mexico. Today, I spend my time between
Santa Fe and Marfa, Texas.
I’d like to think of myself as having intentions that arise
from the heart, rather than the head. The unintended
consequences of my process, I think, would be similar to
the poet’s in that I discover what I want to say through
accidents and what I like to think of as gifts. The gift comes
from the material, and when the intention of the heart
works with the material, it is just great. Of course, if I am
working from the heart, I am fueled by passion rather than
a “computerized,” calculated, schematic process that my
head guides me through—I hope that our politicians will
begin to work from the heart as well.
According to an ancient sage, there is a fine line between
genius and one who hasn’t a clue. I like to stick with the
one who doesn’t have a clue (laughter) and stay open to
these wonderful gifts and accidents that the material
affords me. I like to get right in there with the material,
with the unpredicted and the unpredictable.
I have just run across a photograph of the heart showing its
frequencies or computerized patterns that operated within
the body. I like to think of these frequencies as somehow
being connected with the earth. Everyone’s heart is
regulated by these same frequencies. It’s a lot to think
about, but it’s all there and it is something I enjoy
pondering.
I’ve been struggling all my life with the idea of trying to
define what it means—the difference between the literal
and the poetic. To what extent are reality and the literal
opposites? This brings us to the definition of words. I have
been thinking about power, as a word. Power, in my
world, is about governments exploiting people (I didn’t
mean to get political so fast, but here I am). The real
definition of power is found in giving up power. To be able
to give up power, I think, to embrace the other. The
opposite of power, or the giving up of power, becomes the
reality of power.
—Interview conducted by Patricia Goodrich in 2004
8
Lot #5
Micah BloomMinot, North Dakota
Codex Triptych, 2013
Pigment and print media
14 x 14 inches
Range: $1,000 – 1,500
Micah Bloom writes about this series: On June 22,
2011, the Souris River ravaged Minot, North Dakota.
Forcing its way through homes, it seized thousands of
precious items carrying them to new resting places.
Foremost among the displaced were hundreds, possibly
thousands, of books. Strewn in trees, across roadways,
along railroad tracks . . . these books were pilfered from
shelves, floated through broken windows, and recklessly
abandoned to fend off the natural elements. These books
were vessels—surrogates of human soul, shelters, housing
our heritage—displaced, now driven over by boomtown
commuters and shredded by oil tankers from the Bakken
oil fields. It was this surreal situation that stirred me to alter
the fate of these books.
When I was a child, my parents instilled in me a reverence
for books. Books were not to be stepped on, sat upon or
abused, because they contained something mysterious
and powerful. Beyond their mere physical composition of
wood fibers and ink, they played some indispensable role
that demanded respect and preservation. In a magical
way, they were carriers of that which was irreplaceable;
they housed an intellect, a unique soul. None was more
protected than the Holy Bible; to cause damage to its
substance was to denigrate its message. In our home,
books were elevated in the hierarchy of objects; in their
nature, deemed closer to humans than furniture,
knickknacks, or clothing. Under these impressions, I was
forced into this relationship with displaced books.
I’ve now spent over two years with these books: spring,
summer, fall, winter, night, day, wind, rain, dust, snow,
dew, nests, eggs, webs, sprouts, sticks, leaves, ice, snow,
bulldozers, trains, trucks, duck weed, worms, spiders,
birds, muskrats . . . they are becoming homes to animals,
analogies for excess, progress, and harbingers of the
encroaching digital age. Over days, weeks, and months,
they have persuaded me to tell their story: a story of
necessity, ignorance, loss, and valediction.
Micah Bloom is an artist and educator who lives in Minot,
North Dakota and teaches at Minot State University.
Bloom holds an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the
University of Iowa and has been selected for numerous
artist–in–residence fellowships. His works have been
published in literary and art journals, and he has shown
work nationally and internationally, including private
galleries in China and the Shanghai Museum of
Contemporary Art. Bloom is currently working on a multi-
media project with flood-dispersed books. This work, titled
Codex, involves film, photography, and installation, and
explores various cultural themes using the book as subject.
Married for thirteen years, Micah and his wife Sara share
four daughters and one son, and they all love to make
things.
Lot #6
Alana BergstromNorth and South Dakota
Tim, 2013
Acrylic on canvas
42 x 30 inches
Range: $700 – 1,000
Alana Bergstrom: The painting Tim is anemotional response to my brother-in-law Tim, aretired Air Force Major B-52 pilot. Stationed inGrand Forks, he married my sister Nicole thusopening up her world with love, happiness andfamily. This new and vibrant life continues toreverberate and grow. Using a three-inch brush,I dragged many layers of cobalt bluehorizontally across the canvas in order tocapture the sensation of vibrations of energybuilding upon each other and bouncing off oneanother while moving into the future at a steadypace. With each layer the density and the depthincrease, just like the love and life he continuesto give to my sister. The density is palpable, yetthe expanse feels deep, similar to the miragecreated by a B-52 engine exhaust that heats theair to a high degree.This makes it vibrate into amass that seems to be densely collectable inyour hands as something to hold. However, itslides right through your fingers, magicallyleaving only the heat of its existence and theimage of a world imagined.
Layers of cobalt blue produce a mystic qualitythat seems to glow, to transfers itself onto theviewer. Similar to an Air Force officer, it is ascold as it is professional yet it leaves you feelingcalm, safe, and ready to act. The silver suggestsdanger and the solidity of metal. It captures thelight and shoots it back in thin stands,highlighting the delicacy of each decision andthe calculation of every move. Tim is a paintingof confidence and self-abandon. It holds withinit the life of a man that is vibrant and deep,calculated and exposed, as well as constantly inmotion and progressing forward.
Alana Bergstrom was born in Rapid City, South
Dakota. She grew up in various places in the
Dakotas and completed high school in Grand 9
Forks (2001). She graduated from Massachusetts College of
Art under full scholarships. Bergstrom joined the Army and
became a member of the Military Police. Her reason: She
needed to know more about life in order to become a
really good artist.
Spc. Alana Bergstrom, a military police soldier with the
527th MP Company, 709th MP Battalion from
Grafenwoehr, Germany was named Warrior of the Year in
May 2011. Deployed to Afghanistan, she spent the next
years training officers to work in the communities to
establish peace. Having finished up her military service,
she was accepted twice—in different art divisions—at the
Maryland Institute College of Art, graduating in 2013. And
across town and as an officer, she taught full-time in the
ROTC program at Johns Hopkins University. Currently she
is in Ft. Sill, Oklahoma for six months of Air Defense
Artillery training.
Lots #7, #8, #9
Milena Marinov
Fargo, North Dakota
St. Michael the Archangel,
St. Ambrose, St. Nicholas
2013
Egg tempera on wood panel
with glazes
Each 18 x 11.5 inches
Range: $800 – 1,000 each
Milena Marinov was born in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. She
fell in love with orthodox religious art during her
employment as an art conservator with the Bulgaria
National Institute of Cultural Heritage and the Gallery of
Old Art. Milena has many pieces in collections throughout
the world. She maintains her studio and lives in North
Fargo with her husband and two sons.
Theologian Martin Luther (1483 – 1546) forever changed
Christianity when he began the Protestant Reformation in
16th-century Europe.
St. Michael the Archangel is the Patron Saint of Police and
Warriors. He is also the Patron of Grocers, Mariners, and
Sickness. He protected God from the rebellious and
disloyal angel, Lucifer. Loyal and trustworthy, he is
believed to be the Patron of Pilots and the Airforce in
Greece. He is also believed to lead the souls of the dead
to heaven. This has led some people to associate him with
the god Hermes. He has been present in mythology and
biblical texts at least since the Old Testament was written.
St. Ambrose (c. 340 – April 4, 397 CE) is the Patron Saint ofBees and Beekeeping. Legend has it that when Ambrosewas an infant a swarm of bees settled on his face while hewas lying in his cradle and didn’t leave behind a sting, buta drop of honey. This prompted his father to declare it wasa sign that his son would become a sweet-tonguedpreacher of great significance. He did eventually get thetitle “Honey-Tongued Doctor” because of his speakingand preaching ability.
St. Nicholas (c. 350 CE) One of the most popular saints inGreece, he is the Patron Saint of Sea Farers. Ourknowledge of him is based on legend, but we know hecame from Asia Minor, and was a bishop of Myra in Lycia.
St. Michael the Archangel St. Ambrose St. Nicholas
Lot #10
Milena Marinov
Fargo, North Dakota
Luther, 2013
Oil on canvas board
23.5 x 17.5 inches
Range: $1,500 – 2,00010
11
Lot #11
marley kaulBemidji, Minnesota
Between Light and Shadow, 2013
Egg tempera on board
16 x 20 inches
with commissioned cherry frame
Range: $2,500 – 3,000
marley kaul: When I was fifteen, I attended a Sunday
morning service in our small rural church. There was a
young pastor whose sermon was about seeds. The seeds
we grow and the seeds that are planted in our minds. I
remember that the young pastor had placed on the altar
bowls of seeds that the farmers were planting that spring:
corn, oats and soybeans. He said, ‘the seeds will grow if
we have faith in the seed and in the process of planting.’
This past year I began a series of secular icons that honor
small life events using my understanding of basic tenets to
build meaning. Many of these icons utilize symmetry and
color to establish spatial relationships.
This painting, Between Light and Shadow—or Darkness
and Light as he sometimes calls it—is dedicated to those
who plant the seeds.
I continue to work daily in my studio with more than one
work in progress. My rhythm of working has become a
meditative journey, one brushstroke at a time.
Marley Kaul’s work in both content and energy
emphasizes his connection with natural forms and
poetic metaphor. Born and raised in Good Thunder,
Minnesota, Marley Kaul was educated at Mankato State
University and the University of Oregon. Now retired, he
was long-time chairman of the Art Department at
Bemidji State University. Kaul’s work has been collected
by almost every major museum in Minnesota and North
Dakota, which speaks to a tireless commitment to his
development as a painter and his desire to explore the
world around him. In 2009, he completed the design for
a stained glass window for the First Lutheran Church in
Bemidji, where in 2001 he had designed another
window for the chapel, and created a painting for the
altarpiece. Ultimately, Marley Kaul became a superb
painter with a scholarly bent who is widely respected
and loved within the region he calls home.
Like northern European artists of long ago, Kaul paints
domestic life: the world surrounding his home in
Northern Minnesota, his garden, what he sees out of his
windows, the birds who come to the feeders, his
grandmother’s tea pot, and all the other utensils and
accruements of daily existence. During my career as a
painter, Kaul says, my artistic concepts have revolved
around ecological issues, natural growth and decay, and
what I witness every day in my yard, garden, and
community.
In October 2013, the exhibition, The Art of Marley Kaul,
opened at The Anderson Center in Red Wing, Minnesota.
Marley Kaul’s painting
is sponsored by
Hugo’s
12
Lot #12
mollie douthitGrand Forks, North Dakota
Mix and Sticko, 2014
Oil on panel
8 x 11 inches
Range: $1,000 – 1,400
Lot #13
mollie douthitGrand Forks, North Dakota
Rent of it all, 2014Gouache on paper
11 x 6 inches Range: $400 – 600
mollie douthit: My practice is about sitting with
and looking at objects, relaying with paint what I see.
Through a demanding and disciplined practice I intuitively
select the objects I want to see through paint. Often the
objects I paint are items I have collected, or saved, which
remind me of people and places in my life. The subject of
each painting exists in a field of non-representational
space. This use of space allows size and identification of
the objects to be questioned. The images are initially
sparse, and the subjects simple, but formal elements such
as color, composition, and paint handling visually request
closer investigation of the surface. The paintings become
complex, as subtleties in the application of paint are
revealed. I believe that through the medium of paint,
transcendence of emotion can be relayed in the
description of these objects, asserting their presence, while
questioning the space they consume.
Mollie Douthit was born in Grand Forks in 1986 and
received her BFA in 2009 from the University of North
Dakota. In 2011, she earned a Post-Baccalaureate
Certificate from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She
followed up with an MFA from Burren College of Art,
Ballyvaughan, Ireland. Her work has been included in the
2013 MFA edition of New American Paintings, Museum of
Fine Arts; Boston Medal Award Auction; and the Royal
Dublin Society Student Art Awards Exhibition. Her work
has been featured on Saatchi Art (online), as well as the
Saatchi Gallery in London. Upon completing her MFA,
Douthit was nominated for the New Sensation Prize
through Saatchi Art.
Douthit exhibited in the 2013 Royal Hibernian Academy
Annual Exhibition and received the Hennessy Craig
Award. Douthit moved to Kilkenny in September 2014 to
begin the year-long Tony O’Malley Residency.
Forthcoming in January 2015, she will have a solo
exhibition in the Ashford gallery space at the RHA, Dublin.
Mollie Douthit’s paintings
are sponsored by
William F. Wosick, MD
Docks are a place of transition
a place to stand suspended
solid over liquid.
A place to stand
or gather in the silence
momentarily suspended between answer
and question.
Vivienne Morgan: I am an English woman who
has lived in Bemidji for longer than I have lived anywhere
else, but it still isn't quite home. Like many immigrants, I
draw from distant memories of an idealized home and in
an effort to find comfort in my surroundings, I make
comparisons between places in England and America. I
began a series of typologies in 2010, pairing similar
environments of lake and wood in Beltrami county, with
those in Cumbria, in the North of England. These
typologies categorize the familiar: a dock on a lake in the
early morning, a woodland path, or the expanse of an
open field. In these pairings, England and America meld in
subtle ways; there is the same subject, a similar
composition, but different light, different weather, an
inexplicable difference. The gap of time and place
between the paired images becomes important. What is
and is not seen, and what happens in the connection
between each image is the nexus of the work.
Vivienne Morgan was born in England in 1958. In 1979
she moved to the United States and earned her MFA from
Bowling Green State University. She now lives in the
countryside near Bemidji, Minnesota. In 2008-09 the
North Dakota Museum of Art mounted a one-person
exhibition of Morgan’s photograhs: “A Sense of Place.” 13
Lot #14
Vivienne MorganBemidji, Minnesota
Testing Boundaries
Lake Windermere, Cumbria, England;
Lake Julia, Beltrami County, Minnesota
2014
Archival digital print
Image 18 x 52 inches
Range: $1,100 – 1,500
ABOUT THE AUTUMN ART AUCTION
In general, artists take with them their past, and that fuels
their work. I recently read Painting Below Zero, the
autobiography of James Rosenquist. As our work is
different, in aspects such as scale and our process of going
about choosing what to paint, I found great comfort in his
words about coming from a place like North Dakota. I
have been living in Ireland so coming home for a few
months this summer allowed me to reconnect with the
place that will forever be home. The objects I was painting
were items unique to America, or my home state—things
you never thought you might miss until they no longer are
available. Being away, I have a stronger connection to
North Dakota because distance can induce clarity of
place. For me, having work in this auction that I created
while in North Dakota is an honor and allows me to feel
that sense of support from home, even at a distance.
—Mollie Douthit
14
Jon Solinger: Cats in Barn is from my current
project, in which I seek to make aesthetically strong
images while investigating the meaning behind rural
landscapes, lyrically documenting people and their
workplaces. The project explores attachment to a place
through work, looking at how human labor transforms a
particular piece of land, and, in turn, how the land shapes
the life of the worker. I will publicly exhibit “Working
Land” in August 2015 at the Hjemkomst Center in
Moorhead, Minnesota.
Although showing no humans, this image is about the
relationship between people and domesticated animals in
the rural workplace, a branch of agricultural tradition
stretching back over the millennia. It shows the interior of
a dairy barn at a small farm in Erhard’s Grove Township,
Minnesota. The dairy farmers have a working relationship
with the Holstein cows in the photograph, breeding and
keeping them for their milk production, providing a
livelihood for both cows and farmers. Anyone familiar
with farm life knows cats are part of the scene; they
maintain their own social system and provide rodent
control, companionship, and entertainment in return for a
warm place to sleep and some milk to drink. The cats in
the image display the family resemblance of their clan,
which has made this farm their home for many cat
generations.
Although the project has a documentary component, my
intention is primarily artistic. I do not attempt to convey
journalistic facts; rather I work intuitively, aiming for a
quiet and subtle, but elegant visual style that speaks from
another category of truth.
People I know who live and work in my rural
neighborhood have a relationship to the land unlike my
urban-dwelling friends; they develop a special intimacy
with a place by deriving at least part of their livelihoods
from it, and by leading lives less buffered from natural
processes. By choice or by birth, their lives’ center of
balance inclines them toward the natural world, making
urban culture feel distant. My ancestry, like that of many
others here, includes people who made a living by
working directly with the land in some way. These
personal and universal roots in a working relationship with
a specific piece of land inspire my project.
Jon Solinger grew up at his family’s summer resort business
on the shore of Lake Lida in rural Minnesota’s Otter Tail
County. He earned a BA degree in art with an emphasis in
photography from Minnesota State University Moorhead
in 1985. He lived and worked in Minneapolis and
Moorhead, Minnesota, for a number of years. Solinger, his
wife, and their daughter now reside on Lake Lida, where
he maintains his creative photography workplace and is
the third generation owner of Solinger’s Resort.
In 2000, the North Dakota Museum of Art secured a grant
from the Nodak Electric Foundation to allow him to
photograph the shelterbelts of the Red River Valley. The
book documenting the work will be published by the
Museum in early 2015.
Lot #15
Jon SolingerPelican Rapids, Minnesota
Cats in Barn, 2013
Digital pigment print
Image 20 x 13.5 inches
Range: $500 – 800
15
Lot #16
Alexander HettichGrand Forks, North Dakota
Fields, 2008
Oil on canvas
36 x 48 inches
Range: $800 – 1,100
Alexander Hettich was born in Tajikistan, the
southernmost republic in the former Soviet Union. He
grew up in a valley surrounded by the Soviet Union’s
tallest mountains. In 1993, a civil war forced him to flee to
a small collective farm in Belarus where the climate and
scenery were quite different from what he was used to.
During long Belarussian winters—cold like those here in
North Dakota—as he struggled to settle into a new place,
he started taking painting lessons from a local artist. He fell
in love with the process of creating art, from stretching a
canvas to the final steps of framing a painting. His works
are images of nature—the beauty he has learned to see in
the many landscapes where he has lived.
After several years of looking for a new homeland and
unable to return to Tajikistan, Alexander settled in Grand
Forks where he lives with his wife and three children. He
works in information services at Altru Health System. His
wife Bella is Director of the ESL Laanguage Centers
(English as a Second Language).
Lot #17
AlexanderHettich
Grand Forks, North Dakota
Crab Apple, 2014
Oil on canvas
14 x 11 inches
Range: $300 – 500
All proceeds from the sale of Crab Apple are donated to
the Museum by Alexander Hettich
16
Lot #18
James CulletonWinnipeg, Manitoba
Guitar (Oscar Brand’s Guitar), 2010
Waterjet cut steel
45 x 21 inches
Range: $600 – 800
James Culleton: In 2011, I was commissioned by
the Winnipeg Folk Festival to create a sculpture as a gift to
Oscar Brand on the occasion of his receiving their Artistic
Achievement Award. I did several drawings of the guitars
Brand used over the years and settled on the one from the
cover of his 1955 album Bawdy Songs and Back Room
Ballads. I created two of these; the first I gave to Oscar
Brand and the second is for this Museum auction. As far as
the process to create the piece is concerned, first I
sketched the guitar as a blind contour drawing, then I
redrew the piece in AutoCAD and finally that drawing was
used to guide a CNC waterjet which cut the piece out of
steel.
James Culleton studied art at the University of Manitoba
where he received his BFA with Honors in 1997. While
living in Montréal in 2006, he received a grant from the
Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec to rediscover his
French roots. He published his first book in 2009,
Contouring Québec, in which he used a GPS and blind
contour drawings (made quickly while looking at the
subject and not down at the pen or paper) to document his
movements through Québec.
In 2010, Culleton was awarded a commission to create a
series of steel sculptures for the facade of the West End
Cultural Centre in Winnipeg, Manitoba. In 2011 he
published Lyrical Lines, a book of drawings and paintings
that depict a visual Who’s Who of Canada’s roots music
scene in some of Winnipeg’s most venerable music
venues. In 2012, he released his fourth music CD,
Memento. He is currently the Design Director at Palliser
Furniture and an instructor at Red River Community
College in Winnipeg.
The father of two children, the artist invited his eight-year-
old son to accompany him during his tenure in August
2013 and in 2014 at McCanna House, the North Dakota
Museum of Art Artist-in-Residence Compound. During this
time, the artist dug back into the history of McCanna,
McCanna Farms, and its historic family. This became the
beginning of what will evolve into many drawings and
songs as well. Drew, the son, made assemblages from the
metal bits he found on the gravel roads surrounding
McCanna House, having been told that this was a place
where artists come to make things.
17
Lot #19
William Charles Harbortaka Billy chuckMinot, North Dakota
Summer Love, 2014
Mixed media collage
49 x 48 inches
Range: $900 – 1,400
William Charles harbort who is also known
as Billy chuck: Paint-by-numbers, coupons and clip
art are just a few of the ingredients often found in our
popular culture landfill, says Harbort. I am fascinated with
each individual ingredient and the infinite messages that
can be expressed by combining and juxtaposing them. It is
through this process that I discover meaning and express
thought. Allusion, suggestion and investigation become an
important part of the viewing experience.
Bill Harbort is a professor in the art department at Minot
State University. He teaches art foundations, graphic
design and illustration courses. He is a co-founder and co-
organizer of NOTSTOCK, MSU’s signature live arts event
that spotlights the arts on campus and in the community.
Prior to teaching, he worked in New York as a package
designer for a major cosmetics company, an art director for
a children's educational software company, and built a
reputation as an award-winning automotive artist. He
specialized in airbrush renderings of muscle cars and his
work has appeared in over twenty-five different popular
automotive magazines.
The artist is best known for his pop art, mixed-media
collages that celebrate calendar girls, clip art,
advertisements, and ephemera from pop culture. He often
signs his work as “Billy Chuck,” a pseudonym that is taken
from his first and middle name, William Charles. He
currently exhibits at many lowbrow art galleries. His
success at the Museum’s auctions forced him to raise his
also lowbrow prices.
Harbort was one of six artists commissioned by the North
Dakota Museum of Art to work with the people of North
Dakota’s Spirit Lake Reservation to create a body of
artwork about contemporary life on the Reservation. An
exhibition of the first round of work was shown at the
Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Project Space in New
York’s prestigious Chelsea Art District in June 2013,
followed by a tour to Fort Totten on Spirit Lake, and finally
to the North Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks.
During the second year of the Rauschenberg collaborative
project, Harbort has returned to Spirit Lake for long blocks
of time, again working with local people to jointly make
art. The results will be seen in an exhibition at the Museum
in 2015.
Bill Harbort’s painting
is sponsored by the
Edgewood Group
18
Lot #20
Robert WilsonWinnipeg, Manitoba
Covered Vessel, 2013
Turned wood, aniline dyes, Tung oil
13.25 x 6.5 inch diameter
Range: $900 – 1,100
ROBERT WILSON: According to Helen Delacretaz,
Chief Curator and Curator of Decorative Arts at the
Winnipeg Art Gallery, “Robert Wilson’s work is defined by
its beauty, sensual finish, and meticulous craftsmanship.”
His proportions are based upon the Greek’s golden mean.
The vessel is divided into thirds with the widest point two-
thirds up from the bottom. The bulbous, high-shouldered
vessel is balanced by the delicate, elongated finial, which
he then designs and then turns on a lathe. The finial is
mahogany dyed black. This vessel rests upon a contrasting
matte finished base.
Before retiring, Robert Wilson was a sheet metalist for the
railroad where he worked on engine heat shields among
other things. And he taught himself about wood. He read
every book he could find on wood turning in order to learn
techniques. His sense of art, however, came down through
his family. His brother paints and his great-great
grandfather, William Thomas, was a watercolorist. Living
in Brighton, England, Mr. Thomas became known for his
paintings of ships. A collection of his paintings dating back
to 1850 hangs on Wilson’s Winnipeg living room walls
where he lives with his quilt-making wife, Diana.
His labor-intensive vessels are sometimes colored with
aniline dyes, the most light-resistant dye on the market for
wood. The color holds for many years if kept out of direct
sunlight. When the basic form is complete, Wilson applies
up to fifty coats of Tung oil in order to achieve the
remarkable visual depth of the surface.
Over the years, Robert Wilson has won many Juror’s
Awards from the Manitoba Craft Council. One of his
career highlights was when Princess Anne, visiting
Winnipeg for the 1999 Pan Am Games, chose a piece of
his work as a Manitoba memento. Susan Sarandon also
chose a piece of his when she visited Winnipeg for the
movie Shall We Dance. Robert’s work is also in the
collection of Great West Life & Annuity Insurance
Company. The prize-winning prototype for the work in the
Museum’s 2011 Autumn Art Auction was included in the
touring exhibition “Prairie Excellence” along with work
from Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta.
“Clearly, a Robert Wilson sculpture is a work of art of the
highest order, despite its resistance to be photographed,”
says North Dakota Museum of Art Director Laurel Reuter.
19
Duane Shoup, grandson of a carpenter, grew up in
Maryville, Indiana, south of Gary. By his late twenties, he
felt the urge to break out so he went fishing in Minnesota.
This self-taught furniture maker ended up buying forty
acres near the small town of Shevlin, building a house and
all its furnishings, and embedding himself in Northern
Minnesota’s deep woods. There he could find the
hardwoods he needed to establish his studio, Wildwood
Rustic Furnishings.
Shoup says, I use only renewable woods—oak, ash,
cherry, walnut, maple, and pine as well as downed and
damaged trees that showcase the color and featured wood
grains only nature can produce.
Inspiration for my work flows from the natural world all
around me and the north woods I call home. Each log,
slab, twig, bentwood, or free-form composition represents
materials purposefully selected on site and processed at
my own mill, giving me complete control of the creative
process from forest to final form. Finished pieces preserve
the force of nature in furnishings and have the potential to
become family heirlooms.
He follows in the footsteps of Sam Maloof, who also
created his own private world where he made furniture
masterpieces known for their simplicity and practicality—
he won an early MacArthur Genius Award, the first
craftsman to do so. As his own master, Shoup does what
he wishes, challenges his already-formidable skills, uses
beautiful woods, and makes a living in the process.
The bench was made with the root of a huge walnut tree.
The white linear section on the top and bottom of the back
rest results when wood is freshly sawed and not steamed
allowing it to remain light in color. The stringers under the
seat are white ash. Both pieces are made from sap wood
right under the bark.
Advice from Duane Shoup: If you buy a piece, take it
home and wax the surface. Sam Maloof developed the
finish I used on the table: equal parts polyurethane
varnish, Tung oil, and linseed oil. You add the final wax.
Lot #21
Duane ShoupShelvin, Minnesota
Bench, 2014
Black ash with white oak stringer
34 inches high, 40 long, 20 deep
Range: $1,100 – 1,500
Lower left: Lot #22
Duane ShoupShelvin, Minnesota
Small Table, 2014
Walnut root with white oak base
Maple plug
21 inches high, 27 long, 21 deep
Range: $700 – 900
Duane Shoup’s bench
is sponsored by the
All Seasons
20
Lot #23
Guillermo GuardiaGrand Forks, North Dakota
Ocllo, You Shall Not Pass, 2013
Ceramic
22 x 20 x 8 inches
Range: $2,000 – 2,500
Guillermo Guardia (Memo) was born in Lima,
Peru, in 1975. He hails from an ancient pre-Colombian
ceramic tradition. From the time he was little, he was
steeped in the images and materials of those early potters.
In particular, he loved the work of the Mochica culture, a
pre-Incan civilization that flourished on the northern coast
of Peru from about 200 BC to 600 AD. It was known
especially for its pottery vessels modeled into naturalistic
human and animal figures.
Ocllo, You Shall Not Pass, continues his “Baby Devil”
series. Ocllo is a female Quechua name. According to
Inca legend, the god Sun created the first two humans:
Manco Capac (male) Mama Ocllo (female). Sun ordered
them to search a privileged land to establish what would
become the Inca Empire.
Ocllo’s surface is covered with Mochica designs. Mochica
is one of many cultures that developed in northern Peru
before Spaniards arrived in the New World. Guardia’s
Ocllo holds a samurai sword.
Although the samurai sword originated in Japan, there is a
strong connection between Peru and Japan. Many
Japanese immigrated to Peru in the early twentieth
century; one of them was my grandfather. In fact, Peru
hosts one of the largest Japanese communities outside the
Japanese mainland.
Ocllo, You Shall Not Pass continues the line of previous
baby devils but adds a deeper look into the Peruvian
culture and heritage.
Guardia came to North Dakota in 2002 to pursue his MFA
in ceramics at the University of North Dakota. He stayed
on at UND to finish an MS in Industrial Technology. Now
he works at the North Dakota Museum of Art as the artist-
in-residence. He is a studio member of Muddy Waters
Clay Center in Grand Forks, where he continues producing
his own art. Memo has been included in many important
juried art exhibitions throughout the United States.
All proceeds from the sale of this sculpture are donated to
the Museum by Guillermo Guardia
21
Lot #24
Dyan ReyGrand Forks, North Dakota
Still Life with Lilies, 2013
Oil on paper
30 x 15 inches
Range: $900 – 1,200
Dyan Rey was born and raised in Grand Forks. She lived for
twenty years on the West Coast (California, Oregon and Seattle)
and also spent five years on the East Coast in Provincetown,
Maine and New York City. She received a BFA from
the University of Oregon and an MFA from the University of
North Dakota.
Rey has exhibited her work both locally and nationally for over
thirty years. Her artwork has been seen in seventeen solo shows
and in over fifty group exhibitions. Rey’s artworks have been
acquired by many private and public collectors, including
Microsoft Corporation, SAFECO Insurance Company, Tacoma Art
Museum, City of Seattle, the North Dakota Museum of Art, and
the Washington State Arts Collection. She has been represented
by the Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle, the Albert Merola Gallery
in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and The Dakota Collection in
Grand Forks.
The painting, Veranda, will bring back memories of the
downtown Grand Forks restaurant, Lola’s, where it hung for some
time. It has recently come on the market. In 2010-2011, Rey
exhibited the “Vase Series” at the North Dakota Museum of Art
and the Northern Art Gallery at Mayville State University. The
cutouts were created as a collaboration with poet husband Eliot
Glassheim after they traveled to China. She cut out vase shapes
Lot #25
Dyan ReyGrand Forks, North Dakota
Veranda, 1996
Oil on canvas
72 x 42 inches
Range: $1,900 – 2,500
that suggest Chinese bronzes and porcelain from abstract black
and white paintings on paper she made years earlier. They were
published along with Glassheims poems in Foreign Exchange,
published by the North Dakota Museum of Art in 2010.
Dyan Rey maintains a studio/gallery in downtown Grand Forks.
She has taught in the Art Department at the University of North
Dakota and currently teaches at Northland College, East Grand
Forks, Minnesota.
Dyan Rey’s paintings
are sponsored by the
North Dakota Museum of Art
22
Don Miller, Professor Emeritus at the University of North
Dakota, taught ceramics at UND for forty-two years. When he
retired in 2012, he decided to return to his life as a studio potter.
Little did he expect to find such joy in the studio. He said, I felt
a certain amount of misgivings about working in clay again. My
wife and I have a special needs kid and that takes time. I worried
that I would become our daughter’s full-time mentor whem
retired. With her entry, however, into a small college in
Minneapolis, the Minnesota Life College, I was freed up to spend
time in the studio. I joined Muddy Waters Clay Center, a non-
profit studio for local potters and found great colleagues who
were willing to let me let my past go and move on to new ideas
and work. In the past I moved more slowly. Now I can pick and
choose earlier ideas and work that I want to pursue.
This was a gift they gave me. They were after me to do a show in
the Muddy Waters Gallery. I didn’t at first. For several years, I put
them off. But about a year ago, we set a February 2014 date,
which gave me about a year to get ready for the show. The work
in this auction was included in that show.
I love doing functional work. Part of it is living with and using
functional and utilitarian objects. I find myself going back to
sketches I made years earlier that I never pursued. Baskets were
one, and I think these baskets I am making are lovely.
They speak to a way of enclosing the space but keeping it
transparent. I love the shadows they cast. The positive creating a
negative space, but the image is exciting to me. Like a hug
Lot #26
Don MillerGrand Forks, North Dakota
Untitled Basket, 2013
Stoneware
13 x 13 x 12 inches
Range: $600 – 800
almost. The clay feels like it has taken to the air. Loose, combined
with informal fluting.
At Muddy Waters, I continue to teach four or five classes.
Throughout the UND years my students ranged from rank
beginners to incredible professionals like Memo Guardia.
I don’t need to be in the headlines. I like what I am doing. I like
the quiet peace of my life. I can go into the studio and take some
time, half-days, a day or two, whatever, and I can think about
what I want to do. I believe a regular work cycle provides
opportunities for fresh ideas to emerge.
Miller received his BA at North Dakota State University, his MA
from New Mexico Highlands University, and his MFA from Mills
College. Among the highlights of his career are his cataloging of
UND’s extensive historic pottery collection and his receipt of the
Remele Fellowship in 1995 from the North Dakota Humanities
Council. This support led to the 1999 publication of University of
North Dakota Pottery: the Cable Years (1997). His corresponding
exhibit was held in two locations: the North Dakota Museum of
Art and the Columbia Mall in Grand Forks. The show celebrated
the fiftieth anniversary of the retirement from UND of former
ceramics professor Margaret Kelly Cable.
In 2008, Miller’s book was followed by his North Dakota Clay:
The Cable Years video production, which won first place in the
documentary category at the Midwest Journalism Conference (in
competition with other entries within a six- state region).
23
Adam Kemp: High Water was begun in 1990 and finished
twenty-two years later. Adam occupies the out-of-doors, most
often in the company of Hanna, the special needs child he
cosseted under his wing when she was a little girl. He observes,
builds, walks, swims, and captures what he sees in drawings and
paintings. High Water grew out of his recognition that we on the
Northern Plains are experiencing a changing relationship with
water. It is marked by the abundance of geese that travel along
shorelines in spring. In particular, he noted an area surrounding
the Point Bridge that straddles Grand Forks and East Grand Forks.
Here in the spring, the Red and Red Lake rivers swell into a large
lake where elegant masses of Canada geese set down.
The artist’s paintings are highly biographical. For example, High
Water contains references to the Douglas Gallery, one of the first
downtown Grand Forks galleries established by Deb Cook (Deb
Douglas). Adam volunteered. Embedded in the collage are
photos of his workshop, children (including Hanna) responding
to the Lewis and Clark exhibition mounted by the Museum in
2004, and a page from a Sears Roebuck catalog he found in a
basement where he once lived.
Such themes of water and the philosophy of water management
have occupied Adam for the last couple of years. The work Crane
is one of three in a series that harkens back to the 1997 flood and
the building of the dike to protect the twin cities. He painted on
site as the last section of the dike—behind the Myra Museum—
was constructed. The sand-colored dike is on the left and notable
because it danced around a couple of beautiful old trees, clearly
an attempt by the city to save them. On the right side of the
painting is a tree that didn’t make it. Adam ponders, “Given that
today’s construction is completely intertwined with equipment,
the crane itself is a fantastic structure. I can’t compete with it
sculpturally but I can reference it in my work.”
Lot #27
Adam KempGrand Forks, North Dakota
High Water, 1990 – 2012
Collage with acrylic on paper
26 x 36.75 inches
Range: $1,200 – 1,700
Lot #28
Adam KempGrand Forks, North Dakota
Crane, 2014
Acrylic on paper
24 x 12 inches
Range: $800 – 1,200
Kemp was born in Ugley, Essex, England. He received a BFA from
Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1986. His studies were based in the
rigorous learning of technique and art history. He came to Grand
Forks to cast the sculpture that stands on the northwest corner of
University Park, having studied bronze casting in Italy. He stayed
to earn his MFA from the UND in 1989. Adam continues to
actively work within the regional arts community, generously
showing his work on the streets and in local galleries. His
workshops with teens and children are in great demand
throughout the region, including the weeklong sessions through
the Museum’s Summer Art Camps. He concludes, “I still look at
the landscape around here as a pleasantly surprised outsider.”
24
Albert Belleveau: Rock Hound and Rock a Bye
Birdie are created from red rhyolite stone, which the artist
collected along the shores of Lake Superior near Silver
Bay. The stone displays the volcanic geologic history of the
continental rift region—the earthquakes, silica infiltration
and subsequent erosion, the cleaving and wave tumbling
that produces these marvelous stones used to create
unique sculpture.
Born in Minneapolis in 1959, Al Belleveau started working
with metal in his father’s fabrication shop at the age of five.
At age eleven, he moved to his grandparent’s farm, where
he endlessly roamed the hills and valleys of Minnesota’s
Maple Ridge Township.
Today he lives with his wife in a log house north of
Bemidji, surrounded by the fullness of nature that inspires
many of his works. He says, I have primarily created with
metals in my mature years, but I have always collected
sticks and stones and glued them together to create my
little sculptures—primarily between the ages of seven to
sixteen. After joining the work force as a welder at
seventeen, I often spent my coffee and lunch breaks
welding sculptures at my various places of employment.
Even then I was haunted by the shapes and possibilities of
cast-off materials. The last ten years I’ve worked vigorously
developing Rock Iron Art.
Rock Iron Art is the synthesis of a life-long, love affair that
I have had with two of northern Minnesota’s most plentiful
resources: rocks and metal. I transform them into
sculptural forms to depict humorous life forms, unique
functional furniture, and decorating accouterments.
I collect the wind and wave-softened stones during my
frequent kayaking trips on Lake Superior and I sculpt them
at my Puposky studio. The rocks are selected according to
size and color, then thrust into cages of steel, formed and
tightened under enormous pressure, then welded into my
sculptural vision. The finished sculpture is sandblasted to
even the surfaces and sealed with two coats of lacquer or
left to rust.
The human form shaped from the stuff we often overlook
leads us to the excitement of ‘seeing the new in the
familiar’ as all art is simply “SEEING” better.
All proceeds from the sale of Rock a Bye Birdie are donated to
the Museum by Al Belleveau
Above: Lot #30
Albert BelleveauPuposky, Minnesota
Rock a Bye Birdie, 2014
Stone and steel
9 x 10.5 x 14 inches
Range: $150 – 300
Right: Lot #29
Albert BelleveauPuposky, Minnesota
Rock Hound, 2014
Stone and steel
14 x 12 x 9 inches
Range: $700 – 900
Lot #31
Margaret Wall-RomanaGolden Valley, Minnesota
Other Seasons, 2014
Oil on wood panel
24 x 16 x 2 inches
Range: $1,800 – 2,500
25
Margaret Wall-Romana: I made this piece
specifically for this auction, beginning it while I was Artist-
in-Residence at the North Dakota Museum of Art’s
wonderful McCanna House. One day while standing in
the kitchen, I observed a ruby-throated hummingbird. It
came to the window and lingered outside there for some
time, having confused a red cooking pot (hanging from a
pot-rack close to the window) for a flower. That’s when I
realized that the painting I had been working on might be
“missing” a hummingbird.
Making large paintings is what I do. It’s unusual for me to
make something small that isn’t in the nature of a study for
a larger painting, and even that is a rare occurrence. That’s
what I had set out to do—a kind of study—but the more I
worked on it, the more interested I became in pursuing it
as a painting proper. In the end, I would describe it as a
“large” painting that happens to be very small. It almost
feels like a miniature. The painting is comprised of two
panels, as many of my paintings are, and it went through
all the phases of development that my larger works do. I
flipped and rearranged the panels multiple times while
trying to find the image, and the only real constant, after
its inclusion, was the hummingbird.
For painters like myself who are interested in the history of
the medium, paintings speak to and of each other across
the centuries. If I study Rogier van der Weyden’s painting,
Deposition From the Cross, that I admire (c.1432), it’s not
other depictions of religious devotion I’m inclined to think
of, but the mighty and often bawdy works of Max
Beckmann. Despite the 500 years between them and the
dissimilarity of their narratives, both artists loved the
human figure and made work whose gravitas and formal
ingenuity link them for me. Looking at a Rembrandt,
standing as close as I can and trying to feel what it was like
to place those strokes, I’m liable to begin musing about
Philip Guston. The centuries collapse in the face of shared
sensibilities, and narrative is revealed to be what it has
always been for the great painters: an excuse to make a
painting.
I love what’s involved in painting representationally—the
close observation and concentration required to translate
looking through paint into a record of having seen. But my
first crush as a serious student of painting was Abstract
Expressionism, and for me being a painter is still about that
in-the-moment engagement with the developing image,
with the possibility of upheaval and radical re-envisioning
always near —invited and necessary.
Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, Wall-Romana
moved to Minneapolis eight years ago. She holds a BA
from the University of California, Davis, and an MFA from
the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Lot #32
Dave BrittonGrand Forks, North Dakota
The Cribbing (Rosville, ND,
.5 miles east and 4 miles
south of Portland)
June 30, 2013
Digital medium:
Canon 5D Mark II, with
24-105 mm lens.
Printed by Doug Norby
26.5 x 40 inches
Range: $800 – 1,200
26
Dave Britton: The prolific growth of grain elevators
began in the late 1880s and paralleled the settlement of
the prairies. More and more farmers produced ever-larger
crops of grain that needed to be sold, stored and shipped
to market. That need was satisfied by each town’s local
grain elevators.
Grain was ‘elevated’ to the top of the elevators, and then
redirected by gravity to specific bins. The elevator had to
be strong enough to hold the grain’s pressure pushing out
on the elevator’s bin walls. The cribbed-construction wall
design, in which 2” boards were laid flat on top of each
other, provided this strength. 2 x 8 boards were used at the
lower portion of the walls, where the greatest pressure
occurred. As the walls got higher and less wall pressure
existed, 2 x 6s were used, followed by 2 x 4s for the highest
wall sections. These flat 2 x 8, 2 x 6, 2 x 4 walls were
referred to, in the grain trade, as ‘The Cribbing’.
Grain elevators were usually the tallest structures in town
and could be seen for miles. They were reassuring to
travelers, symbolizing the courage and persistence of the
farmers and small town prairie residents. The elevators
were also an informal gathering place for farmers. The
coffee pot at the elevator office was often the catalyst for
bull sessions, good-natured ribbing, or catching up on how
neighbors and their families were doing.
Over the years, the old cribbed elevators lost their
usefulness. Modern grain economics demand high-
capacity, high-throughput elevators, capable of loading
110-car trains in a single day. Most of the old cribbed
elevators have been idled, abandoned or demolished.
They are a proud, albeit disappearing part of the texture of
our prairie heritage—the source of fond memories.
Dave Britton grew up around old grain elevators owned
and operated by his father, Clarence Britton. These North
Dakota elevators were in Keith—six miles east of Devils
Lake—Kempton, Merrifield, and Northwest Mills Elevator
in Grand Forks—a partnership of Clarence, Earl Kurtz, and
Eugene Ellingrud, which was sold to North Dakota Mill
and Elevator in 1953.
For two summers in 1958 and 1959, Britton traveled with
his dad as he sold Swenko barley shakers to elevators in
eastern North Dakota and western Minnesota. During his
high school years, he drove the Merrifield Grain Co. truck,
picking up grain his dad had bought from various elevators
in the same area. He has fond memories of several of these
old elevators, their managers, and their communities.
Britton, who started Britton Transport in 1980 in the
basement of his home in Grand Forks, has photographed
over 1,000 elevator locations on the plains—often when
driving a truck cross-country— some of which no longer
exist. This may well prove to be one of the significant
systematic records of an important architectural archtype
of early twentieth-century America.
27
Madelyn Camrud: Raised on a farm near Grand
Forks, Camrud is tuned to North Dakota weather and its
effects. She draws from her life on the prairie to make her
paintings. This work images lush trees and shrubs,
products of a summer much like this year (2014) with
generous rains and cooler temperatures.
The work has gone through a metamorphosis since its
beginning in 2012. At first called Barriers, the title has
now changed to simply Fences.
My interest in working a painting like this lies mostly in the
sky, she says. The marks cannot be intended. Paint is
applied over a lightly sculpted surface. In each wet layer of
paint, I write loosely with color pencil anything that comes
to mind. A series of quick splashes of house paint (the
same that’s on my kitchen cupboards) with a large brush
Lot #33
Madelyne CamrudGrand Forks, North Dakota
Fences, 2012
Acrylic on panel
24 x 24 inches
Range: $400 – 600
All proceeds from the sale of The Cribbing are donated to the Museum by Dave Britton
partially conceals the writing. A coat of paint becomes
final only if I have managed to allow the necessary
spontaneity and the writing appears half-clouded.
In addition to making art, Camrud has published two full-
length collections of poems, This House Is Filled with
Cracks and Oddly Beautiful, along with a chapbook titled
The Light We Go After. A broadside, Oddly Beautiful, was
published by The North Dakota Museum of Art in 2014.
Camrud received degrees in visual arts and creative
writing at the University of North Dakota. She spent a
decade employed at the North Dakota Museum of Art and
continues to serve in various positions of volunteer work at
the Museum.
All proceeds from the sale of Fences are donated to
the Museum by Madelyne Camrud
Lot #34
Marlon Davidson & Don KnudsonBemidji, Minnesota
Sparkling Waters Two, 2013
Wood, acrylic, vinyl fabric
39 x 70 x 3 inches
Range: $600 – 1,000
Marlon Davidson & Don Knudson are
collaborative artists who have lived in the Bemidji area for
twenty-four years. They have individual art careers but
have been producing collaborative work for about thirty
years. Their art is in private and public venues and they are
represented in collections across the United States and
Europe. Their collaborative wall work, Great Wave, hangs
in the commons area of the University of Denmark. Both
artists were educated at Bemidji State College (Bemidji
State University), and at the Minneapolis School of Art,
(Minneapolis College of Art and Design).
Marlon has had a long history in the area of art education,
as a teacher in the public schools of West St. Paul and later
as a fixed-term instructor at Bemidji State University. Don
worked for some years as a display artist for the Emporium
Department Store in St. Paul. He is also a furniture maker
and sculptor who makes assembled works for the wall as
well as standing objects. The artists have also owned and
operated a bed-and-breakfast, Meadowgrove, in the
Bemidji area but they now devote full time to art
production. They are life partners who have lived together
for fifty-six years.
The artists feel that their primary inspiration derives from
nature. They attempt to combine natural elements with
contemporary design concepts. They both are perpetual
students of art history. They read and listen, they travel and
they look at art. Marlon says, We are a collection of
influences from our mentors, from other artists, and from
the wide world of fine arts. The artist must absorb and then
select, finding a voice that speaks for him or her, hoping to
achieve some universal truth, seeking perfection through a
lifetime.
According to the artists, We are especially grateful to the
Museum, to the director, and to the community which
offer us an opportunity to have our work seen. We have
gained new friends, and have been thrilled by the warm
reception our collaborations have received among area
people. 28
29
Nancy Friese is a painter-printmaker working in
arboretums, national land trusts, and open-air sites. She divides
her time between her home in Rhode Island and her farmstead in
North Dakota, twenty-five miles south of Grand Forks.
In 2007 Laurel Reuter wrote, Maybe he marveled while
watching the heavens as a toddler in Hedalen, Norway.
Maybe his parents directed his attention to the stars as they
sailed back and forth across the Atlantic. We know for sure
that it was in western Dakota Territory that Ben Huset's
interest in the planets turned to fascination and finally to
devotion. This self-taught man went on to become the
Weatherman of the Great Plains. From 1937 into the
1960s his annual Ben Huset's Forecast served as the
farmer's bible.
Huset's granddaughter, the artist Nancy Friese, inherited a
similar passion for the natural world. Her art springs from
astute observation within the landscape fed by her intense
understanding of the forces of weather. Movement,
brilliant color, slashing lines, and inner tensions spill onto
the canvas and paper and then reappear in woodcuts,
drypoints, and aquatints. Weather never exists as a static
entity. In her work, change is imminent, the landscape is
volatile, hiding great storms and massive cloud buildup,
winds, and movement even in moments of calm. The
earth, the plant world, and the sky—each has an equal
presence just as the whole of her picture plane is potently
alive. She works from both the factual and the intuitive and
therein lies her art.
Lot #35
Nancy FrieseCranston, Rhode Island
and Buxton, North Dakota
Among the Trees, 2014
Multi-plate linocut
Printed by Sue Oehme
Oehme Graphics
Steamboat Springs, Colorado
Image 12 x 17.75 inches
Range: $700 – 900
The artist credits the grandfather Weatherman with her
enduring interest in the landscape. For thirty years this has
been her subject. Not the Fauvists, but the grandfather
taught her to see the colors of weather. Reflecting sundogs.
Northern Lights. Rainbows. Fiery sunsets. Heat mirages.
Swirling snow transformed by sunlight into an
impressionist's palette. For only through light and
movement does color exist as a living entity. This is the
underriding truth of Friese's art. Like the grandfather, the
artist immerses herself into the wilderness of weather, into
its untamable energy, into its patterns, and into its beauty,
an element never absent in Friese's art. Unfashionable?
Perhaps. True to human experience? Certainly.
Friese has received numerous grants and fellowships
including National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships,
the Japan-US Friendship Commission Creative Artist
Fellowship, a Giverny Fellowship, and a Pollock-Krasner
Foundation Grant. She has shown in the United States,
Europe, and China and Japan. Her works are in fifty
corporate and museum collections. She has an MFA from
Yale University School of Art and studied at the University
of California-Berkeley, the Art Academy of Cincinnati, and
Yale University Summer School of Music and Art.
She teaches at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD)
where she is a Mellon Faculty Fellow in the Prints,
Drawings and Photographs Department of the RISD
Museum. Nancy has served on the RISD Museum Board of
Governors, and the North Dakota Museum Foundation,
among others.
All proceeds from the sale of Among the Trees are donated to the Museum by Nancy Friese
30
Brittney Anderson: Born in 1993 in Bismarck,
North Dakota, Anderson is currently obtaining her BFA in
Art Education at Minnesota State University Moorhead.
She is specializing in oil painting.
Regarding the work in the Auction, Anderson wrote, I
wanted to focus on the environment, the deterioration of
land. Today, landscapes are being overlooked by society,
going unnoticed and forgotten. By layering, texturing and
scraping oil paint with rice paper and graphite, Cloud
Series No. 2 evokes an almost tactile and vulnerable
quality, bringing back a soft, yet destructive appearance
that nature portrays.
Over the last few years, before moving to the Fargo-
Moorhead area, she was involved in a local artist
cooperative known as BDAC, (Bismarck Downtown Artist
Co-Op). In the cooperative gallery, Bismarck-Mandan
artists assemble exhibitions to sell. The organization also
gives local artists the opportunity to follow the work of
peer artists from the area. Anderson has also taken part in
gallery exhibitions during her first year at MSUM,
especially in the fall 2013 and spring 2014 semesters.
Currently, I am working on a large sculpture for the West
Fargo Spicy Pie, a pizza shop. In the work, I am combining
metal, wire, and painting. After I complete my
undergraduate degree, I have a keen interest to continue
my studies. More recently, I have developed an interest in
the deterioration of nature and the human form. I want to
capture the truth of what I see and how I see it. My goal is
to create paintings that achieve a supple painterly quality
between representation and abstraction, sense and
nonsense. To captivate the viewers, to disturb them.
Lot #36
Brittney AndersonMinneapolis, Minnesota
Cloud Series No. 2, 2012
Oil on canvas
36 x 36 inches
Range: $600 – 800
31
Jessica Christy: Collective experience is an
alternative expression of the human condition. The
assemblage of happenings, idea, memory, thought and
being accumulate in the creation of individuality. The
works in this series speak to this collection by gathering
the mundane and melancholy, the tactile and tempting,
the sordid and verbose. Remnants of the American
existence are archived and labeled with everything from
nostalgia to fact. These associations aim to suggest that
nothing in our lives stands alone, yet is woven into the
fabric of the human condition.
Christy is a native North Dakotan, born to two artists on
the Sanger Art Farm, located at the northern edge of the
Sheyenne River valley. Raised in the arts, she received her
BA from Valley City State University, and her MFA from the
University of North Dakota. Jessica has shown her work
extensively, both regionally and nationally, winning
numerous awards. She currently teaches at Minot State
University.
Lot #38
Jessica ChristyMinot, North Dakota
The Melancholy of Becoming America, 2014
Each 8.5 x 6.5 x 2.5 inches
Range: $400 – 500 for all three
John Brummel, a library patron and an Air Force
veteran, moved to Grand Forks in 1997. “I’ve always been
an artist,” Brummel explains. On Saturdays, he rides a city
bus to the Grand Cities Mall, then walks over to use the
library’s public computers, not having one at home.
“Sometimes it’s pretty busy,” he observes, “but usually I
can get a seat.”
Brummel opens Microsoft’s Fresh Paint and begins to draw
on the computer. Half-an-hour later he completes a work,
most often a mechanical wonder—war ships, destroyers,
fighters, German bi-planes, frigates, the Nautilus
submarine, trains and more trains, lighthouses and John
Deere tractors. His compositions are impressionistic,
marked by a playful freedom of line.
Once the drawing is complete, he prints out two copies,
showing them to friends around town or occasionally
mailing one to family back in Missouri. Sometimes he
drops in unannounced at Museum Director Laurel Reuter’s
office, always with a gift drawing in hand.
—Quoted in part from the March 2014
Newsletter, Grand Forks Public Library
Left: Lot #37
John BrummelGrand Forks, North Dakota
Chester Fritz Library 2012
Digital drawing with Microsoft’s Fresh Paint
9 x 14.5 inches
Range: $300 – 400
Lithograph sage petri dish
Collageair freshener, gold dust
LithographNorth Dakota crude oil
Lot #39
Timothy Ray (1943 – 2013)
Forest Light, 1991
Acrylic and paper collage
41 x 31 inches
Range: $1,500 – 1,800
Timothy Ray: On Saturday, February 9, 2013, Tim
Ray died of cancer. Eight days later, the North Dakota
Museum of Art opened a retrospective of his work. The
Sunday afternoon event turned into a memorial on that
fiercely stormy afternoon. Despite roads covered by thick,
torturous sheets of ice, a hundred people turned out, many
having driven the still-open Interstate 29 from Fargo. The
funeral was scheduled the next afternoon. Mr. Ray’s son
failed to arrive for the funeral. Then news came:
In a strange twist of fate worthy of a Greek tragedy, his son,
Sean Ray died on the way to his father’s funeral. He and
his partner died in a car accident during a blizzard along
I-94 east of Moorhead. Tim Ray’s grandson was also
injured in the accident and remains in critical condition.
—Jeff Weispfenning
The North Dakota Museum of Art began working with Mr.
Ray a year before on the comprehensive retrospective of
his artwork. Fargo’s ecce gallery joined the team; the
exhibition would move to Fargo after the Museum
showing. This was the work that Mr. Ray turned his mind
to in the last months of his life, betting against time that he
would be at the Grand Forks opening.
Tragedies haunt institutions just as they haunt humans.
Those stormy days in February 2013 will be remembered
in the history of the Museum for years to come.
The obituary gives the facts: Timothy Ray was born and
raised in Indian Head, Saskatchewan. He studied fine arts
at the University of Manitoba from 1958 to 1961 and in
1966. And in 1963 he received his Interim Collegiate
Teaching Certificate from the University of Manitoba.
Upon receiving his teaching certificate, Ray began
teaching at a high school in Manitoba. In 1967, Ray left
teaching to continue his education at the Emma Lake
Artists’ Workshop under Frank Stella. Ray received his
Masters in Fine Arts at the University of Arkansas in 1969.
Young and full of knowledge, Ray began teaching
university-level art at Pikeville College in Kentucky. In
1970, he moved to Moorhead, where he taught at
Minnesota State University Moorhead until his retirement
in 1996.
Although considered an exceptional teacher, it is his art
that will be remembered by the larger community.
For the work in the Auction, Tim Ray combined the raw
texture of Japanese paper with sections of hard-edged,
reverse-painted acrylic monotypes and named the collage
Forest Light. The monotype’s patterns were built with India
ink and layers of acrylic medium. This contemplative piece
mirrors patterns seen in nature and considers how one
point of view changes his or her perception of space.32
drew constantly. He went on to paint and draw horses,
year after year, never wearying of his subject, never
despairing in his quest to create Contemporary Western
Art. This master painter, while continuing to live the
cowboy life, has found the means to visually enter the
sport. In the process he has led droves of artists into a new
arena called Contemporary Western Art—but most don’t
know that this artist from North Dakota charted their
course years ago.
In 2008, Walter Piehl won the Bush Foundation’s first
Enduring Vision Prize worth $100,000. Earlier, he received
the 2005 North Dakota Governor’s Award for the Arts. The
artis has twice served on the Board of the North Dakota
Council on the Arts, for several years on the Board of
Trustees of the North Dakota Museum of Art, and is on the
founding governing board of the North Dakota Cowboy
Hall of Fame in Medora. In 2013, United Limited Art
Editions (ULAE) created an edition print with Walter for the
benefit of the North Dakota Museum of Art. Only a few
remain from the thirty-print edition, the proceeds of which
were given to the Museum for general operating costs.
Walter Piehl is a painter who makes drawings and
also incorporates drawing into his acrylic paintings. He
does not use drawing to make studies for paintings but as
a primary medium, either embedded into paintings or as
separate works of art. Ultimately, however, Piehl is most
widely known as a painter. His goal is to make his surfaces
dance with subtle variations. Drips, feathered edges,
scumbled paint, and the judicious use of glazes all
contribute to his rich surfaces. His fractured spaces,
transparency, multiple images and their afterimages cause
his works to sing with movement.
The Minotaur in the Auction harks back to an earlier time
when blues and lavenders dominated his paintings. It
came before the artist began to split his space with strong
diagonals as he does today. Thus, Son of Hurt’n is coveted
by collectors wanting to own Piehl’s early as well as late
work, his works on paper as well as canvas.
Unlike most artists, Walter Piehl was quite young when he
decided to make art from his own life. Born into a family
that raised rodeo stock, Walter rode horses as a matter of
course. Likewise, in a household without television, he
Lot #40
Walter PiehlMinot, North Dakota
Son of Hurt’n:
“American Minotaur
Series”
2009 – 2013
Mixed media and
acrylic on paper
19.5 x 27.5 inches
Range: $2,200 – 2,500
33
34
Lot #41
Les SKoropatPelican Rapids, Minnesota
Good Night, 2011
Quad-tone pigment inks on cotton
archival paper
14 x 20 inches framed
Range: $200 – 300
Les SKoropat: Like entering a mirror and
experiencing a different version of the world, my
photographs explore reflections of familiar environments.
This distinctive perspective is presented so that others
might step into my personal looking glass.
A classic automobile can be photographed as a subject; it
also provides reflecting surfaces. While most observers see
the gleaming, restored vehicle, at the same time its
surfaces reflect the viewer’s present surroundings.
Distorted and shaped by the curves and planes of the
surface, the reflected image might also be perceived as
something that could be. The qualities of shape, texture
and color contribute to a synthesis worthy of exhibition
and contemplation.
The photograph in the Auction reflects the power of
personal symbols. The car, a 1950 Chevrolet, is owned by
a retired history teacher. “Goodnight, Irene” was a popular
song in 1950 when he was courting his wife. The car and
the song remind him of a happy time in his life.
According to Skoropat, discovering this song title
juxtaposed with the reflection of the clouds reminded me
of my mother Irene's passing.
Les Skoropat is a Fargo artist, photographer, and graphic
designer whose work has also included modern and tap
dance, music, printmaking, painting, fiber art, combined
media, calligraphy and the book arts.
Born in 1952 on Flag Day in Bismarck, North Dakota, he
first learned about taking photos from his mother, the
unofficial family photographer. She could chronicle an
entire year of family events with twelve pictures taken with
an Ansco 620, which was stored in the kitchen cupboard
with a blue flashbulb in place, ready for the next birthday
or holiday.
Skoropat worked as a school photographer at St. Mary's
Central High in Bismarck, where he developed a fondness
for the simplicity of the black-and-white image, and where
he began his camera collection, which includes his
mother's Ansco and his first camera, a Polaroid Swinger.
The artist has been employed as Art Director for Prairie
Public Broadcasting since 1975. His photographs were
recently displayed at the Minnesota Pelican Rapids Library.
35
Lot #42
Armando RamosValley City, North Dakota
Model 2514, 2014
Slip-cast clay, enamel
31 x 14 x 12 inches
Range: $700 – 900
Armando Ramos has been a generous and vibrant
force in the North Dakota art scene since moving to the state in
2009 to teach at Valley City State University, according to
Museum Director Laurel Reuter. He grew up in Texas but left the
state for college. He completed his undergraduate studies at the
Kansas City Art Institute and graduate studies at Montana State
University. In the years following graduate school he lived and
maintained a studio in San Francisco.
He says, Through portraiture and caricature, I create comically
irreverent images drawn from my jumbled youth. Pop culture,
mass media, religious iconography, and quotidian observations
are civilly canonized as high-relief sculptures, minimalist
interventions, and absurd juxtapositions that question the
largeness of these larger-than-life embodiments. In examining my
own history, I deny the authenticity of the past memories and the
invincibility of adulthood. Instead, I seek to create an existence
of complicated iconography that gives odd relevance to
sculptures and paintings.
Ramos has been an artist in residence at The Richard Cartier
Studios (Napa, California), Vermont Studio Center at Johnson,
and at California State University at Long Beach. He is currently
a Professor of Art at Valley City State University and was awarded
a 2012 Individual Artist Grant from the North Dakota Council on
the Arts.
His work has been exhibited at the Virginia Brier Gallery (San
Francisco), The Oakland Museum (Oakland, California), The
Dairy Art Center (Boulder, Colorado), Elmhurst Art Museum
(Elmhurst, Illinois), Studio Couture (Detroit) and the North
Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks.
36
Lot #43
Brian PaulsenGrand Forks, North Dakota
Untitled Arrangement, 2014
Color pencil
13.5 x 9 inches
Range: $500 – 600
Brian Paulsen:
—Since Brian’s earliest memories, he was always keenly
aware of his living spaces, people’s differences, their
odors. His grandfather was a sign painter and a muralist.
His father was an inventor and builder of houses, cabinets
and boats. Because his studio was in the same space as his
fathers’ wood and tools for many years, he lived with those
smells and noise. His early years became the stocked
cabinet of memories that feeds his art.
—I was raised with geometry all around me especially in
the materials of carpentry, building, repairing, making, and
all those other useful occupations. My grandfather was a
sign painter and a muralist. My father was an inventor and
builder of houses, cabinets, and boats. The realm of
Popular Mechanics—a service magazine founded in 1902
that offers written technical material to the average
American man—schooled my imagination.
—The hard edges are an outgrowth of his sign painting and
graphic design interests, coupled with early copying of
cartoons and illustrations.
—This is an artist who delights in visual games, in word
games, in whimsy. He is well-schooled in the principles
of design, in art history, in color theory and formalism, all
of which he freely puns. The surreal coupling of images
remains, the whimsy and make-believe as well.
—I came to know illustration as practiced by
professionals, a world given form and order through signs
and symbols and hand lettering.
Still today, Paulsen hand letters the exhibition titles on the
walls of the North Dakota Museum of Art—maybe the last
museum in America to be thus graced.
—Quotes from Laurel Reuter, Brian Paulsen,
North Dakota Museum of Art, 2008
Brian Paulsen earned his BA at the University of
Washington in 1963 and his MFA in 1996 from
Washington State University. His teaching career began at
Chico State College in California, continued at the
University of Calgary, and in 1973 moved to the University
of North Dakota where he retired in 2007. Paulsen, one of
North Dakota’s important painters, was named Chester
Fritz Distinguished Professor, UND’s highest honor, in
2007. The North Dakota Museum of Art mounted a solo
exhibition, which resulted in a book about Paulsen’s work
(2008). He has been a visiting artist at dozens of colleges
and universities. His work has been shown in more than
100 juried exhibitions, eighty solo shows, and 200 North
American invitational exhibitions.
37
Lot #44
Todd HebertGrand Forks, North Dakota
Windmill with Glacier, 2012
Color pencil with pastel on paper
12 x 12 inches
Range: $800 – 1,000
Todd Hebert: Windmill with Glacier was one of the
first things I made after returning to North Dakota in 2012.
It resonates with me because it seems to be a reflection of
the moment both globally and locally: a suspension
between a potential future and an understood past.
Born in Valley City in 1972, Todd Hebert spent his early
years in McHenry, North Dakota. His father moved the
family to Dickinson in 1980 to accept the job at Dickinson
High School coaching basketball and teaching social
studies.
Hebert played football, basketball, and baseball. He also
drew and painted and took art classes from Michael Dunn,
a wildlife watercolorist. According to Hebert, Dunn made
watercolors by carefully observing the outdoor world. He
taught me to observe and work with great precision,
something that is still important in my art making.
He was fortunate in high school as well, studying under
teachers such as Lilly Stewart. Next came the University of
North Dakota and painting and drawing instructor Brian
Paulsen, sculptor Pat Luber, and printmaker Ron Schaefer.
The aspiring artist continued to develop his techniques,
especially what seemed to be his innate ability to render
the objects of everyday life. Above all, he saw that Paulsen
and Luber were always working, always making art. Their
work method was important to me. I observed that the
intellectual side of art and the material side of making art
had to be married in order for the art to succeed.
After graduating with a BFA in painting and drawing from
UND, I applied to the Rhode Island School of Design. I
saw that North Dakota artist Nancy Friese was teaching
there and thought I might get in. And he did. He graduated
with his MFA in 1998, the same year he accepted a year-
long fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in
Provincetown, Massachusets. A second invitation followed
from the prestigious Core Residency Program at Houston’s
Glassell School of Art where he spent two years in a
postgraduate residency for art critics and visual artists.
His career took off with invitations to show in solo and
group exhibitions, both nationally and internationally. In
2005, Connecticut’s Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art
gave him its prestigious Emerging Artist Award. Today, he is
represented by Devin Borden Gallery in Houston and
Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe Gallery in New York City. His
art, however, stays grounded in the mundane, the ordinary
existence of North Dakotans. According to Los Angeles art
critic David Pagel, writing in the brochure that
accompanied his solo exhibition at the North Dakota
Museum of Art in 2012, Hebert’s art is worlds away from
the elitist esoterica that holds so much contemporary art in
its thrall.
Among the numerous private and public collections that
have acquired his work are the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art; the The Neuberger Berman Collection,
New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego;
and the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los
Angeles. Hebert has been an Assistant Professor of Art &
Design at the University of North Dakota since 2012.
Chris Pancoe is a multi-media artist with a profound
interest in clay. He often fires his work using atmospheric firing
techniques such as wood, salt, and soda because of the unique
surface qualities they provide.
When asked about his art, he says, I am influenced by a type of
urban landscape, mostly in the run-down and decaying industrial
edges of Winnipeg. I am fascinated by the areas once occupied
by immigrant workers of busy garment factories, foundries and
steel mills which line the train tracks and the pot-holed service
roads as I meander along.
Within the nooks and crannies of these industrial carcasses is
where I have taken up this urban landscape as subject. I seek to
emulate the rusty, weathered elements and ruins of the
containers, hoppers, water towers, and storage receptacles put to
rest for the elements to reclaim. My intention is to unite sculpture
and utility, and impart a sense of place while bringing the
aesthetic of a weathered, well-used utilitarian object to the home
and bring it back to use for the everyday.
Chris received his Masters of Fine Art at the University of
Lot #45
Chris Pancoe
Winnipeg, Manitoba
Lidded Jar, 2013
Wood-fired stoneware
12.25 x 9.5 x 9.5 inches
Range: $300 – 500
38
Minnesota. He attended a yearlong residency at Pueblo Espanol
in Barcelona, Spain and has taught ceramics in Winnipeg,
Manitoba and Minneapolis and Inver Hills, Minnesota. He has
exhibited his work both nationally and internationally. Currently,
he is the Studio Technician for the Ceramics and Sculpture area
at the University of Manitoba. He lives in the West End
neighborhood of Winnipeg with his daughter Lucie, his dog Sipi,
and his wife Jennie O—an artist also represented in this Auction.
39
Lot #46
Jessica MongeonRice Lake, Wisconsin
Geothermal, 2014
Acrylic, photo transfer on
wood panel
16 x 20 inches
Range: $400 – 600
J ess ica Mongeon: My work exposes and
explores structures that are found in the natural world, as well as
the world of imagination. Rather than depict a specific
landscape, I aggregate my feelings from multiple experiences.
Sketching and journaling as I travel by foot through various types
of terrain, I collect data for my paintings. I approach my
environment as an artist, seeking to communicate experiences
through painting.
The paintings are left structurally open in order to invite multiple
interpretations and places of entry. An otherworldly element is
added as I contort and manipulate the space, intuitively working
in layers. The process of painting mediates and translates spatial
experiences and awareness. Without providing mediation and by
obstructing the act of naming, viewers are free to construct their
own interpretations.
Disorder and the inevitable breaking down of systems are part of
the cyclical properties of nature that lead to growth. My
processes allow for spontaneity and chance to play a role. This
involves laying down fluid acrylic with string, spraying, dripping,
and applying color with wide hake brushes onto an absorbent
panel. An otherworldly element is added as I contort and
manipulate the illusion of space on the painted surface,
intuitively working in layers. The process of painting mediates
and translates spatial experiences and awareness. Pours, drips
and blooms of pigment speak to gravity and help to create an
illusion of deep space or surface tension.
Jessica grew up on a family farm in Rolette, North Dakota. A
recent MFA graduate from Montana State University in Bozeman,
she first completed a BFA from the University of North Dakota.
Her work has been exhibited regionally and nationally, including
a juried exhibition at the Painting Center in New York City, called
“Natural/Constructed Spaces.” In September 2013, Jessica
participated in an Artist Residency at the Anderson Center in Red
Wing, Minnesota. From October through mid-November she
took part in a month long Sam and Adele Golden Foundation
Artist Residency in Columbus, New York, sponsored in part by
the Montana Arts Council. Currently she teaches at the University
of Wisconsin –Barron County.
40
Lot #47
Ned Krouse
Haslette, Michigan
Prairie Butterfly Vase, 2014
Wheel-thrown, slip-decorated and raku-fired
9 x 8 inch diameter
Range: $400 – 500
Ned Krouse: I raku to produce colors that cannot be
achieved in other types of firing. When the clay is leather
hard, I brush on multiple layers of colored slip and carve
designs that reveal the colors underneath. Next, the pieces
are bisque fired and covered with a clear glaze. When the
kiln reaches temperature to melt the glaze, pieces are
removed with tongs and placed in straw which catches fire
and blackens the clay.
Ned Krouse received his MFA in ceramics from Tyler
School of Art, Temple University in Philadelphia. He has
been producing slip-decorated raku fired work for over
thirty years. He has taught at numerous colleges and art
centers around the country, including undergraduate and
graduate ceramics and design courses at Indiana
University–Purdue University, Fort Wayne; Minot State
University; and Rochester Institute of Technology.
Krouse’s primary interest in teaching has been community
education, thus, he has been an instructor at the Memorial
Art Gallery in Rochester, New York, and the Ann Arbor
Potters Guild. Since 2002, he has been at the Greater
Lansing Potters Guild in Michigan. He has presented
numerous workshops and demonstrations for colleges,
universities, art centers and public schools throughout the
country. His work is represented by Milward Ferrell Fine
Arts in Madison, Wisconsin; Mostly Clay in Pittsford, New
York; and Button Gallery in Douglas, Michigan.
Krouse says, I built my studio on my property so I can
move easily to landscaping and gardening. I completed
the Michigan Master Gardner Program in 2003 and am
still an avid gardner today. Many of my designs come from
that experience. Also. for years I’ve participated in weekly
figure drawing sessions where I find similarities to working
with colored slips.
Raku Process
Raku ware is a type of Japanese pottery that is traditionally
used in the Japanese Tea Ceremony, most often in the form
of tea bowls. It is usually shaped by hand rather than
thrown. The vessels are fairly porous, which results from
low firing temperatures. The glazes are lead based. Finally,
the pieces are removed from the kiln while still glowing
hot. In the traditional Japanese process, after removal raku
pots are allowed to cool in the open air. The familiar
technique of placing the ware in a container filled with
combustible material, introduced by American Paul
Soldner, is not a traditional Raku practice. Raku
techniques have been modified by contemporary potters
worldwide.
When most potters in the West think of raku firing, they
think of what should technically be referred to as
“American” or “Western” raku: a process in which work is
removed from the kiln at its maximum temperature, thus
exposing it to thermal shock or rapid cooling which is
stressful on the pottery. The pots don’t shatter because they
are made from an open or porus clay body, which acts like
a shock absorber, preventing the body from immediately
exploding when the pot is removed from the kiln.
Subsequently, pots are subjected to post-firing reduction(or smoking) by being placed in containers of combustiblematerials, which blackens clay and causes fracturing orcrazing in the glaze surface.
These crackle glazes are enhanced in the post-firing
smoking as carbon becomes embedded into the cracks in
the glaze. This Western raku-firing process attracts many
potters because of its excitement and unpredictability.
41
Pirjo Berg: The stripes in my paintings are inspired by
Finnish traditional rag rugs and wall hangings, which fill
the floors and walls at the homes in my family. When I was
a child my mother, grandmothers, and aunts were busy
designing and making them. They were always anchored
in beautiful stripes. Even today those striped designs
remind me of my home and childhood.
My paintings are based on color, texture, and shape. The
stripes, repetition, and texture are found not only in the
familiar textiles, but also in geological formations. Over
the years, I have traveled with my geologist husband all
over the world (Nepal, Greenland, Arctic Spitsbergen, Baja
California, Alaska, United States, Southwest Canyon
Lands, Sierra Nevada, and so on) as his field assistant. The
landscape, the sedimentary rocks and layers or beds (as
geologist call them) are elements which have became
familiar to me.
In geological formations, such as canyon walls, I see
familiar striped patterns, but on an enormous scale
representing much longer periods of time. The Core
Sample Series was inspired by my experiences in pristine
nature. I became interested in the possibilities of capturing
the essence of the geological time, a length of time that is
difficult to comprehend. The real core samples collected
by geologists reveal variations in climate, life forms, and
sedimentary composition during geologic history.
My paintings have layers (or beds) of landscapes which are
squeezed by time and “flattened”. Some of the pigments I
use in painting come from the rocks. The way pigments
mix with water imitates the geological processes. In my
Core Sample Series I paint these landscapes flat and then
force them into a cylindrical form. The work in the Auction
is an example. As I am painting stripes, they turn into inner
emotional landscapes. One can recognize the landscape
in them, but they are in motion all the time as if one were
watching a movie, and can slide backward and forward in
time and space.
Born in Helsinki, Finland, and now residing in Grand
Forks, North Dakota, Pirjo Berg completed her MA in
Regional Planning (1991) at the University of Tampere,
Finland; her BFA in Painting (2000) at the School of Art and
Media, Tampere, Finland; and earned the 2005 EDGE–
Program, Artist Trust in Seattle, Washington.
Berg has had solo exhibitions in Washington, North
Dakota, and Helsinki, Finland. In addition to numerous
group exhibits in Finland and the United States, Berg
created a 1997 installation for Finland’s eightieth
independence celebration, Kiasm, in the Contemporary
Art Museum of Finland, Helsinki.
Her work is in public collections in the North Dakota
Museum of Art in Grand Forks; Valley Medical Center in
Renton, Washington; Sacred Heart Medical Center in
Springfield, Oregon; Max-Hotel in Seattle, Washington;
and the Labor Museum in Tampere, Finland.
Berg has completed residencies at the Vermont Studio
Center in Johnson (2013); McCanna House, North
Dakota Museum of Art (2013); at Willapa Bay Air,
Oysterville, Washington (2014); and in Berlin, Germany
(2014).
Lot #48
Pirjo BergGrand Forks, North Dakota
Beds #3, Core Sample Series
Watercolor, ink and gouache
on Yupo watercolor paper
Sealed with Krylon UV
Resistant clear protective coat
24 x 48 inches
Range: $700 – 1,100
Pirjo Berg’s painting is sponsored by
Dakota Harvest
42
Lot #49
Jessica Matson-FlutoHorace, North Dakota
Detachment, 2012
Oil on canvas
14 x 11 inches
Range: $400 – 500
Jessica Matson-Fluto: The work in the Auction,
Detachment, is from a body of work that represents the essence
of the human figure which is created primarily from my
subconscious mind. These figures are developed by internal
dialogues. A particular thought or emotion will impact choices of
brushwork and color palette. Through this process, composition
will begin to take form, often in a more abstracted manner. At
times, such ruminations may form into a figure in my mind
specifically to express an emotional quality in the painting. The
end results, however, may be a figure of a completely different
body type, position, or gender. Creating, struggling, destructing,
and reworking are a constant in this process.
Detachment was created while I was pregnant with my identical
twins. After having surgery for Twin to Twin Transfusion
Syndrome, I was placed on bed rest for four-and-a-half months.
During this period, I had copious amounts of time to think about
my unborn children and the surgery which helped correct their
sharing of unequal amounts of nutrients and blood. Detachment
represents a monochromatic silhouette of twins. This piece
alludes to the disconnect between the mother and the twins, and
the Twins from each other. Like the Twins, the landscape has
become abstract as well.
Jessica Matson-Fluto was born in Spokane, Washington in 1980.
She received her BFA from Minnesota State University Moorhead
in 2006 and her MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine
Arts in 2008. Matson-Fluto currently teaches at Minnesota State
University Moorhead and makes work in her studio in Horace,
North Dakota. She exhibits regionally and is included in public
and private collections throughout the United States. Matson-
Fluto also continues her education by partaking in workshops
and master classes with various artists nationwide. She lives in
Horace with her husband and twin sons.
43
Lot #50
Tim SchoutenWinnipeg, Manitoba
Pay list – Treaty 4 (Boy Born), 2012
Oil, dry pigment, beeswax, microcrystalline wax,
dammar resin on canvas
9 x 12 inches
Range: $450 – 600
Tim Schouten has been engaged in The Treaty Suites
project for over ten years. This body of work examines the
eleven “numbered treaties” which were signed between
the Government of Canada and First Nations in Central
Canada between 1871 and 1956.
Schouten's perspective is that of a non-Aboriginal treaty
participant descended from Scottish, Belgian, and Dutch
settlers in the Red River region of Manitoba.
Most of the paintings in this project are based on
photographs that Schouten has taken at the exact physical
locations of the signings of each of the eleven treaties. This
particular work however, Pay list – Treaty 4 (Boy Born), is
one of six small text paintings that were made after
Schouten discovered a copy of an early hand-written
“annuity pay list” for the Fort Qu’Appelle Band of Indians
who for some reason had received Treaty Annuity
payments at Fort Walsh that particular year. The list
included notations on the number of people in each family
receiving payment, and changes in the family since
payments were made the previous year. In this family, it
was noted that there had been a “boy born” during the
previous year and thus the family would receive an
additional $5 for the new member.
The works in this series reflect on the ways in which the
treaty making process, the written treaty itself and related
documents, created the reserve (reservation) system that
we know today. The work asks us to look at the ways in
which the treaty process has defined land divisions,
ownership rights and set the terms which have led to all of
the social and economic inequities that we are all too
familiar with today.
Schouten’s process in creating this work involved
scanning, enlarging and cropping the original document,
and then making a stencil of words, including all of the ink
smears and splotches from the quill pen used to record the
annuity. The canvas was then painted with varied
pigmented wax layers up to a thickness of about one-
eighth inch. Using a stencil, the words are then transferred
to the wax, the lettering carved out with a sharp tool, the
excavation filled with molten-pigmented wax. Once
cooled, the surface worked with scraping tools and irons
to achieve the finished effect.
A Canadian artist based in Winnipeg, he studied at Art
Sake Inc. in Toronto from 1978-1980. He is also a curator,
writer, and art educator. He has exhibited his work across
Canada and in the United States, and his paintings reside
in private and public art collections including the
collections of the Winnipeg Art Gallery, North Dakota
Museum of Art and Cankdeska Cikana Community
College in Fort Totten on the Spirit Lake Reservation.
Schouten was one of six artists commissioned by the North
Dakota Museum of Art to work with the people of North
Dakota’s Spirit Lake Reservation to create a body of
artwork about contemporary life on the Reservation. An
exhibition from the first year was shown at the Robert
Rauschenberg Foundation Project Space in New York’s
prestigious Chelsea Art District in June 2013, followed by
shows at Fort Totten on Spirit Lake, and finally the North
Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks. Prior to this
collaboration, Schouten received a $20,000 commission
from the Museum to begin painting on Spirit Lake (funded
by the National Endowment for the Arts).
44
Lot #51
Lisa YorkGaithersburg, Maryland
Wood Shelf with Cups, 2014
Oak shelf with ceramic cups
Shelf 29 x 16 x 12 inches
Range: $400 – 800
Lisa York is a ceramic artist from the Washington, D.C.
area. She is also delves into wood, glass and book making. She
received her BA in 2008 from Houghton College, a Master’s
Certificate in the Ceramic Arts in 2010 from Hood College in
Fredericks Maryland, and a MFA in 2014 from the University of
North Dakota. She has worked internationally with ceramic co-
ops in Tanzania and Guatemala. Lisa York has also been a
resident artist at the Sanbao Ceramic Art Institute, Jingdezhen,
China, and at the International Ceramics Studio, Kecskemet,
Hungary. She has shown nationally and internationally in China,
Canada, Russia, and Hungary. She is currently an instructor,
ceramic technician, and gallery director at Hood College.
I was exposed to indigenous textiles and ceramics through
international travel, which increased my appreciation of raw,
simplified forms. In my own work, I record similar shapes,
patterns, and ideas I find interesting by drawing on the surface of
the vessel. I leave some ceramic pieces unadorned. Others I
decorate with lines and abstracted flowers, which contribute to
an overall sense of earthiness. My ceramics are organic and
individualistic, with rims that wobble and surfaces that are
asymmetrical. These qualities reinforce the ideas of landscape,
and expand the possibilities of how the pieces are seen and
experienced.
The utilitarian pieces not only promote social gathering, but are
also meant to become cherished objects. The work invites the
user to touch and interact, to feel the materials. She is driven by
her own curiosity about materials and by the challenge of
working with surface, form and function. From the malleability of
clay, to the rigidity of wood, these materials contrast and
complement each other, both in their material characteristics and
human interactions with the finished pieces. Bold lines, circle
designs, and the varied surface of the ceramic vessels invite the
viewer to enjoy the cup, bowl, or plate from every angle.
45
Lot #52
Shawn O’ConnorMinot, Maine
Large Vase, 2014
Stoneware
24 x 18 inch diameter
Range: $900 – 1,400
Shawn O’Connor: My desire is to create useful
objects for service in the home. Growing up, my home life
was strongly focused around the family. Family dinners
were important and rarely missed. My extended family
often gathered for social events such as birthdays and
holidays which always revolved around food. I would like
to extend this sense of comfort and warmth through my
work to others who use it.
Firing with wood also came with my upbringing. I was
raised in a rural Maine home that was heated with a wood
stove during the cold winter months. This meant that the
fire was constantly being fed in order to heat the house.
This required a lot of work and attentiveness to the fire.
Preparing wood for the winter required many days of
hauling, splitting, and stacking. From an early age, I found
the physical labor, the rhythm, and the sense of
accomplishment enjoyable.
My artwork is tailored for the process of wood firing.
During the making, I leave the surfaces of the work quiet
and relatively unmarked to allow the flame to create the
modulated surface that I desire. As a child in Maine, I
became interested in worn river rocks, the erosion of land,
the old weathered farmhouse and the rich colors of leaves
as they change in the Fall. These are all records of time,
change and decay, much like the surface of my work
produced in the wood kiln.
The pieces are marked by the flame, colored by the kiln
atmosphere, christened by ash deposit, and freckled by
erupting impurities. No two pieces are exactly the same,
as the path of the flame records distinct marks on each
piece. The wood-fired surface resembles the way wind and
water erode rock and earth. The flame moves through the
kiln wrapping in and around the work, leaving a mark
dependant on what is next to, touching above or below
that particular piece. The path of the flame can be
controlled when stacking the kiln. Care is spent on each
piece as it is loaded, as this will dictate the way the flame
moves over and marks the surface of the piece.
Shawn O’Connor was born and raised in Minot, Maine
and completed his BFA at the University of Southern
Maine in 2005. After undergraduate studies, O’Connor
became a resident and staff member at Watershed Center
for Ceramic Arts in Newcastle, Maine. He also completed
a six-week residency at the Robert M. MacNamara
Foundation on Westport Island, Maine. In May 2010,
Shawn received his MFA in Ceramics from Syracuse
University. The main focus of his research in graduate
school revolved around wood firing. While at Syracuse,
Shawn designed and constructed a train-style wood kiln.
He published his first article about his kiln in Log Book, an
international journal devoted to wood firing. O’Connor
completed a year long artist-in-residence at Arrowmont
School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg, Tennessee in 2011.
In 2012. he traveled to China as a visiting artist for
West Virginia University. Most recently, O’Connor was a
visiting artist and adjunct professor at the University of
North Dakota.
Kelly Thompson’s recent works in charcoal follow the
aesthetic for which he is most known in his paintings: dramatic
and sweeping depictions of North Dakota landscapes with strong
horizon lines as focal points, dividing his pieces into earth and
sky. This moody new piece shows a fast-moving storm front
blowing across a newly-planted spring field. Both the fertile soil
and the brightening sky hint of hope and better things to come.
Kelly says, Working in charcoal, an artist is challenged to rely
more heavily on composition, form, contrast and texture in the
absence of color. It’s a technique I have cultivated over the years
as a long-time graphic designer with an emphasis in logo design,
where minimalism and editing to essential elements is
paramount. My artwork is never detail-oriented. My preference
is to relate to all things—life and art—in broader strokes.
From Grand Forks, Kelly Thompson resides there and in Bemidji,
Minnesota. He is a local entrepreneur and purveyor of coffee,
screen printing, and real estate. A graduate of the University of
North Dakota, he is the father of three and a member of the
Board of Trustees of the North Dakota Museum of Art. 46
Mariah Masilko: Room With A View is based on a
photograph taken in 2008 on the fourth floor of Weston
State Hospital, a now-abandoned mental institution in
Weston, West Virginia. The asylum was built on the
teachings of Dr. Thomas Kirkbride, an advocate for the
humane treatment of mental illness in the mid 1800s, who
thought the architecture and landscaping could have
curative properties. Every patient deserved a window, so
the light could help with their recovery. The resulting
buildings had long, tiered wards on either side of a central
administration building. Unfortunately, despite good
intentions, many of the patients spent the rest of their lives
institutionalized, particularly women who could only be
released by a male relative.
This scene struck me, because here’s this tiny window
with nothing to see outside but more and more windows,
each one with some other soul behind it, each person in
their own tiny room, with only this to see day after day.
When patients lived here, the plaster would probably not
have been crumbling, and there wouldn’t have been
cracks in the windows. But underneath it all, there always
have been, and unfortunately may always be, cracks and
crumbling spots in the treatment of the mentally ill.
Born and raised in Grand Forks, North Dakota, Mariah
went on to study architecture for a short time at the
University of Oklahoma, then transferred to the University
of Minnesota where she earned her BA in Studio Arts in
1997. She currently lives in St. Paul with her family.
Lot #53
Mariah MasilkoSt. Paul, Minnesota
Room With a View, 2013
Watercolor,
9.5 x 11 inches
Range: $250 – 400
47
Ryan Stander: Land matters. This simple, two-word
sentence sums up much of my artistic practice. As a play on
words, it suggests both the importance of land but also the
particular physical manifestations of it. For years, I have been
drawn to ideas and imagery of the landscape and its cultural
formation. In essence, humanity shapes the land to fit its needs,
and, in turn, the landscape reinforces humanity’s basic beliefs.
This complex social relationship between people and the land
flourishes in both individual and corporate memory, imagination,
and identities. My own photographic work then ranges from
objective topographical surveys to the more romantic ideals
often tied to landscape.
This particular piece is a toned, digital print of an unpaved
parking lot in Minot. A streetlamp casts its light in a shape that
mirrors the neighboring tree and highlights the recent movement
of heavy machinery in the area. The light also makes clear the
boundary cut between the partially cultivated dirt before it
recedes in grassy darkness up the hill behind it.
Originally from the farmlands of northwest Iowa, Ryan is a fairly
recent transplant to central North Dakota. He has alternated his
education between art and religion. An MFA from the University
of North Dakota, an MA in Theology from Sioux Falls Seminary,
South Dakota, and a BA in Art from Northwestern College,
Orange, Iowa. Drawing upon his theological background, the
themes of memory, identity, and place often rise to the fore in his
work. His artistic practice mirror his interdisciplinary education,
spanning photography, printmaking, and book arts.
His work has been exhibited internationally in South Africa,
Central and South America; nationally in New York, New Jersey
and Texas; and across the Upper-Midwest. Stander is in his third
year as an Assistant Professor of Art at Minot State University
where he teaches photography and directs Flat Tail Press, a small
art publishing endeavor.
Note: The work is a deep golden brown that comes alive when
seen up close but which is impossible to photograph, according
to Museum Director, Laurel Reuter.
Lot #55
Ryan StanderMinot, North Dakota
Untitled, 2014
Photograph
11.75 x 12 inches
Range: $250 – 400
Left, Lot #54
Kelly ThompsonGrand Forks, North Dakota
Cloud Break Over Field, 2014
Charcoal on paper
76 x 38 inches
Range: $1,100 – 1,300
48
Jay Pfeifer’s art is defined more by his materials and his long
familiarity with them than by any preconceived themes or
designs. From the building sites and construction zones of his
everyday work life, he gathers the raw components—lath, sand,
joint compound, roofing paper, even coffee grounds and motor
oil—to meld and transform into the rich forms and vistas of his
“paintings,” the term he prefers.
It should be noted that the image in the catalog doesn’t come
close to the actual work, which it is painted on a reflected steel
sheet. As one moves around the piece, the color shifts
continuously.
His methods provide a protean means of addressing the scene. A
fretwork of glazed sand might suggest a distant fence line or, at
second glance, an enormous grid of cropland as seen from the
air. A stroke of rust—residue from a soaking trowel—might be
seen as a dry creek bed, an autumn thicket, or the redness of the
evening sky. Having begun under the economy of thrift, using
only the supplies he could salvage, and thus afford, Pfeifer now
instills in his paintings an economy of statement and purpose, the
golden mean of the accomplished artist. There is warmth here,
and stirrings of loss, of home, of slightly remembered ideals, as if
these primal textures and earthen tones might portend the
presence of some broader landscape, the shared memory of
some larger world.
In this, Pfeifer partakes of the creation of myth—from water to
wine, from lead to purest ore—common to the wider range of
painters and sculptors. The singular alchemy of a Pfeifer work is
how his roughest of scavengings, the sticks and the pastes, the
scraps of the waste, have been so effectively recast as an artifact
—as an art—of an idyllic, iconic realm.
Raised in the bread-basket country of Buffalo, North Dakota,
Pfeifer now resides in nearby Fargo, in the heart of the Red River
Valley, 10,000 square miles of bountiful, flat-as-a-tabletop
farmland. After earning an associate’s degree in commercial art
from Consumers River College in Sacramento, California in
1982, Pfeifer spent the next decade attending schools in
California and Utah, and working for contractors throughout the
Midwest and western United States.
Pfeifer returned to the Red River Valley in the fall of 1992. “I
never felt connected to a place other than the Red River Valley,”
Pfeifer says of his decision to return. “This is a place that is
psychologically comfortable for me.” His art reflects this comfort.
A 1995 graduate of North Dakota State University with a BS in
Fine Art, Pfeifer works as a foreman for Roers Construction, a
Fargo commercial contractor, and exhibits his art at various
exhibitions and competitions throughout the region.
Lot #56
Jay PfeiferFargo, North Dakota
Scape III, 2014
Steel sheet, polyurethane, and elbow grease
50 x 34 inches
Range: $2,200 – 2,800
Jay Pfeifer’s painting
is sponsored by
Minnesota Public Radio
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Lot #57
Jenny OWinnipeg, Manitoba
Harriet, from the series “Arctic Delirium”
2011
Mixed media
11 x 3.5 x 2 inches
Range: $400 – 600
Jenny O makes dolls, wonderful dolls, haunting dolls.
A truly original, self-determining, mature artist. One asks,
Why dolls?
According to the May 2004 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, numerous
pairs of scissors, 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.
Jenny O is a self-taught, interdisciplinary artist from
Winnipeg, Manitoba. Best known for her sculptural
narratives, Jennie O aims to draw her viewers into a
subversive yet honest world of biographical experience,
myth and fairytale.
The mixed-media sculptural dolls that she creates are
independent characters of different realms, which connect
to form a broader mythological narrative that alludes to a
specific dream, event or life experience. Beginning with
herself as the protagonist of each endless dream-like story,
she becomes surrounded by family, friends, and foes in the
forms of animal/human, fruit/human or inanimate
object/human hybrids. Tongue-in-cheek at first glance, her
dolls invite the viewer to explore deeper and critically
respond to gender and social roles, the human vs. the
animal, the environment, politics and/or identity.
She holds a BA with a major in Anthropology. Despite
Forbes magazine’s declaration that Anthropology is the
number one worst college major, Jennie O uses her
education to inform her practice. She has orchestrated
large and small community art projects in Winnipeg, in
Canadian First Nation Reserves, and in the United States.
When the North Dakota Museum of Art staff first met her,
she was making art with kids at Art City, a Winnipeg inner-
city drop-in center founded by the international artist
Wanda Koop.
She has received many awards and has exhibited locally,
nationally and internationally. And now she and her
husband, Chris Panceo, have a living doll of their own, a
daughter Lucie Rae O’Keefe.
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Lot #58
Yamin GuanAnhui, China
Chinese Opera II, 2013
27.5 x 27.5 inches
Range: $600 – 1,000
Yamin Guan was born in 1959 in Anhui, China,
where he continues to live. He earned his BA in painting
from Anhui Drama Institute in 1981. Many years after he
graduated from college, Guan was hired as a theater set
designer. Later he became a folk art researcher. Both are
resources that feed into his own artworks, which are
included in regional and national shows. Guan also
organizes community exhibitions of folk art, paper cutting,
brush painting, etc. For such professional work he is paid
by the government for seven to eight hours a day, five days
a week.
His paintings draw inspiration from theater art, Chinese
folk art, and paper cutting. He also finds inspiration from
Western art, especially by the impressionists—Monet,
Picasso, Matisse, and the abstract expressionists. His
works have been featured in many significant national
exhibitions across China. He also won numerous awards
in Anhui Fine Art Exhibitions including a Gold Medal in
2001, Excellent Award in 2004, and Third Place 2006.
His paintings have appeared in countless magazines and
are collected by many private and public institutions
throughout China and abroad.
Yamin Guan’s younger brother is Zhimin Guan who lives
in Fargo and teaches at the University of Minnesota
Moorhead. Every Summer, when Zhimin travels to China,
he gets together Yamin Guan, to discuss art, attend
regional artist residencies, and offer art workshops in many
cities, especially in northeast China.
Zhimin and Yamin Guans’
paintings are sponsored by
JLG Architects
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Lot #59
Zhimin GuanFargo, North Dakota
Tide of the Divine III, 2014
Acrylic, ink and watercolor on
mounted paper
38 x 45 inches image
46.5 x 53 inches framed
Range: $1,800 – 2,500
Zhimin Guan: For the last few years, I have been
experimenting with creating landscape paintings on
various surfaces and scales. My intention has been to
blend traditional landscape painting with expressionism,
conceptualism, and the aesthetics of Oriental philosophy.
Most summers I return to China. In the summer of 2012, I
participated as an artist-in-residence in Xichang City near
the southwest corner of China, between Yunan and
Sichuan provinces, the Lugu Lake areas. I had never been
there before. This region, 9,800 feet above sea level, is
covered by a series of huge mountains (about 900 square
miles of forests and mountains). One must drive ten hours
to reach another city about 300 miles away on circling
mountain roads. It is very beautiful, breath-taking, and
seems dangerous when riding on the charter bus. There
were thirty-five artists from China and the United States
painting every day. It was co-organized by Dantang
Museum in Xichang and Blue Roof Gallery in Sichuan
Province. Temperatures were 50-65 degrees. For me it was
the greatest learning, painting, and travelling experience
ever.
Inspired by that residency, Guan created twenty large-
scale, abstract paintings in various media. These paintings
draw upon his deep respect and affinity for Chinese
calligraphy and abstract expressionism. They also reveal
the influence Chinese landscape painting has on him.
With a minimalistic use of brush strokes, Guan suggests
the spiritual presence of mountains, water, and sky.
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. Guan received rigorous training in calligraphy and
traditional ink painting before he was fifteen years old. At
the same time, he developed a strong interest in the
Chinese philosophy of Taoism and ancient Chinese poetry.
During his BFA studies at Fuyang Teachers College in
China, he concentrated on oil painting and again received
intensive 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. Then in the spring of 1995, Guan moved
to the United States. Since 1998, he has been a professor
of art and design at Minnesota State University Moorhead;
visiting professor at China Dalian University of
Technology, School of Art and Architecture, Anhui Normal
University; School of Art in Wuhu, Anhui Province; and
the Dalian International Institute of Art and Design, among
others. He exhibits widely throughout the United States,
especially in Upper Midwest, and in China.
The proceeds from the
sale of Tide of the Divine III
are donated to the Museum
by Zhimin Guan.
52
Lot #60
Greg EdmondsonSt. Louis, Missouri
Mastodon, 2013
Pencil and gouache on paper
11 x 23 inches framed
Range: $600 – 1,000
Greg Edmondson received his MFA from
Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and his BFA
from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where he
originally enrolled to study biology and philosophy. His
change of focus transitioned his life from the library and
the laboratory to the studio, but these two initial interests
have remained intact.
His current work takes biological nexus as a launching
point from which to explore the patterns and codes that
run throughout the natural world. Based in simple systems
of organic growth, (repetition, sequence and dispersal),
these works can be viewed as both schematic and
topographical. His drawings themselves are the products
of generative processes, as they toggle and shift between
microscopic and macroscopic perspectives. This exposes
our relationship to both an incalculable substrate and an
inconceivable expanse, illustrating our connection with
the invisible, he says.
Edmondson’s art has been shown widely throughout the
United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom. He
holds both Fulbright and DAAD fellowships to Germany,
and has received numerous artist residency grants
including ArtPark, Kunst Haus Munich, Black Mountain
College, Colorado College, Virginia Center for the Creative
Arts, Santa Fe Art Institute, and STARCO.
His most recent solo projects include Broken Line, a 14 x
48 foot billboard installed in St. Louis and Detroit (2013),
and “DIS-ORGANISM,” an exhibition of objects, drawings
and video at Wayne State University in Detroit (2013). This
spring, Greg will spend two months at the Osage Arts
Community in Belle, Missouri.
Greg Edmondson’s painting
is sponsored by
Plains Chiropractic & Acupuncture P.C.
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Photograph by Matthew Borgerson
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Autumn Art Auction
is held in memory of
Long-time Museum Supporters
Robert Lewis
and Ellen McKinnon North Dakota Museum of ArtBoard of Trustees
North Dakota Museum of ArtFoundation
Board of Directors
Evan Anderson
Ganya Anderson
Julie Blehm, President
W. Jeremy Davis
Virginia Lee Dunnigan, Secretary
Kristen Eggerling
Susan Farkas
Bruce Gjovig
Darrell Larson, Chairman
Mary Matson
Sally Miskavige, Treasurer
Laurel Reuter
Lynn Raymond
Tammy Sogard
Linda Swanston
Kelly Thompson, Vice President
Lois Wilde
Joshua Wynne
Corinne Alphson, Emerita
Kim Holmes, Emeritus
Douglas McPhail, Emeritus
Gerald Skogley, Emeritus
Anthony Thein, Emeritus
W. Jeremy Davis
Nancy Friese
Bruce Gjovig
Darrell Larson
Laurel Reuter
North Dakota Museum of Art Staff
Matt Anderson
Guillermo Guardia
Sungyee Joh
Danielle Masters
Todd Pate
Laurel Reuter, Director
Gregory Vettel
Matthew Wallace, Associate Director
Justin Welsh
Brad Werner
Part-time StaffSara Anderson
Curtis Longtime Sleeping
Sheila Dalgliesh
Erika Gallaway
Nathan Guillemette
Chris Gust
Greg Jones
Kathy Kendle
Wayne Kendle
Leanna Niebeling
Sanghyeon Park
Ben Schreiner
Evan Sprecher
Emily Stenberg
and over fifty volunteersFront Cover: Margaret Wall-Romana, 2014. Oil on wood panel, 24 x 16 x 2 inches
Robert W. Lewis (December 15, 1930 – August 26, 2013)
A u t u m n A r t A u c t i o nV o l u m e 1 6 , 2 0 1 4
N o r t h D a k o t a M u s e u m o f A r t
Ellen McKinnon (September 25, 1915 – May 20, 2014)