Almost American premieres at the Madison Art Center December 3, 2000 through February 11, 2001. The artist's first solo museum exhibition features eight large-scale color-saturated paintings, several drawings and a sculpture installation. Kahlhamer's Midwest debut includes a new suite of drawings created in response to historical sites in Wisconsin visited during a fall residency. The artist describes his art as a third place, an imaginary zone that fuses the past and present, the dreamt and real of his first place of Native American ethnicity and his second place of a conventional middle-class upbringing. From his unique perspective, he seeks to understand the social position of Native Americans in the mainstream culture of the United States.

Brad Kahlhamer's expansive universe churns with an unrestrained rhythmic energy that is as indebted to punk as it is the prairie. Fusing exuberant expressionism with the visionary tradition of Native American art, he draws from a wide range of visual sources, including cinema, comics, rock music, urban street culture and the American West. The resulting landscape, populated by an unruly cast of characters, dead or alive, blends representations of the real into what the artist calls an imaginary "third place" that exists beyond the "first place" of his conventional American upbringing and the "second place" of his Native American heritage-a kind of ecstatic glitter-and-doom-meets- Deadwood by way of downtown NYC. This volume, the first comprehensive monograph on Kahlhamer's work to date, surveys more than 10 years of drawings, paintings and sculptures.

Brad Kahlhamer's Friendly Frontier

Brad Kahlhamer: Almost Arcadian

Ecstacy Americana

Works

List of Works

Appendix