Autumn Art Auction 2015

Autumn Art Auction Volume 17, 2015

North Dakota Museum of Art

North Dakota Museum of Art

The North Dakota Museum of Art is grateful to our sponsors who have given generously to guarantee that the arts flourish

North Dakota Museum of Art Board of Trustees

Board of Directors

Evan Anderson

Nancy Friese

Ganya Anderson

Bruce Gjovig

Julie Blehm, Chair

Bryan Hoime

W. Jeremy Davis

Laurel Reuter, (ad hoc)

Virginia Lee Dunnigan, Secretary Kristen Eggerling Susan Farkas Bruce Gjovig Darrell Larson Mary Matson Sally Miskavige, Treasurer Laurel Reuter

The 2015 Autumn Art Auction is underwritten by Patrons

Altru Advanced Orthopedics

Lynn Raymond Tammy Sogard Linda Swanston Kelly Thompson, Vice President Lois Wilde

and

Joshua Wynne

North Dakota Museum of Art Staff Matt Anderson Sungyee Joh Greg Jones Laurel Reuter, Director Heather Schneider Gregory Vettel Matthew Wallace, Deputy Director Brad Werner Part-time Staff Sara Anderson

HB Sound & Light Grand Forks, North Dakota

Foundation

Trevor Brandner Corinne Alphson, Emerita

Payton Cole

Kim Holmes, Emeritus

Sheila Dalgliesh

Douglas McPhail, Emeritus

Peter Donkers

Gerald Skogley, Emeritus

Chris Gust

Anthony Thein, Emeritus

Kathy Kendle Wayne Kendle Maggie Mclntyre Brady Niebolte Curtis Longtime Sleeping Sara White and over fifty volunteers

Front cover: Kim Fink, AC/DC, 2009, woodcut, 34 x 36 inches.

Back cover: Arnold Saper, The Dream, 1968, etching, artist proof, 13.5 x12.5 inches.

North Dakota Museum of Art

AUTUMN

Art

Auction

F r i d a y, O c t o b e r 2 , 2 0 1 5 Wine and hors d’oeuvres 6:30 pm Auction begins at 8 pm

Auction Preview Monday, September 28 until auction time in the Museum.

Hours 9 to 5 pm, Friday until auction time All works to be auctioned will be on display.

Autumn Art Auction is

sponsored by the following businesses, not-for-profits, and individuals:

Patrons — $5000 Altru Advanced Orthopedics 59 HB Sound and Light 46

Auction Walk-about Laurel Reuter, Auction Curator, will lead an informal discussion about works in the Auction Tuesday, September 29, 7 pm, in the galleries.

Sponsors — $750 Plains Chiropractic & Acupuncture P.C. 64

Supporters — $500 Premium Sponsors — $1,000 All Seasons 50 C&M Ford 67 Dakota Harvest 60 Hugo’s 63

ACME TOOLS 71 Amazing Grains 71 Ameriprise Financial, Debbie Albert 62 Blue Moose Bar & Grill 61 Bremer Bank 73

Minnesota Public Radio 72

Tanabe–Badger Dental Group 69

William F. Wosick, MD 47

Edgewood Management Group 68 Empire Arts Center 70 First State Bank 70 Grand Forks Country Club 58 Greater Grand Forks Symphony Orchestra 57 Ground Round 57 JLG Architects 65

Auction Supporters continued next page

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Supporters — $500 Museum Café 74 Norby’s Work Perks 69 North Dakota Quarterly 55 Prairie Public 54

Buy local. Read the sponsor pages to learn about those who invest in the Museum.

Almost all are locally owned and operated.

Reichert Armstrong Law Office 54 Rhombus Guys 53 River City Jewelers, Inc. 52 Sadie's Couture & Event Styling 51 Sanny and Jerry Ryan Center for Prevention and Genetics 66 Summit Brewing Company 49 UND Alumni Association 48 Waterfront Kitchen & Bath 48 You Are Here Gallery 56,65

Contributors — $250 Alerus Financial 61 Altru Health System 66 Avant Hair and Skin Care Studio 68 Burtness Theater 52 Browning Arts 73 Capital Resource Management 73 Choice Financial 68 EAPC Architects and Engineers 51 Economy Plumbing 58 Icon Architectural Group 56 Opp Construction 55 Oxford Realty 53 Simonson Station Stores 55 Sterling Carpet One 53 Swanson & Warcup, Ltd. 49 Thrivent Financial 74 Truyu 74 Xcel Energy 49

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Advertisers — $125 Adley Ann’s 58 Atlas Auto 61 Artwise 61 Behl’s Photography 62 Brady, Martz & Associates, P.C. 62 Demers Dental, Chelsea R. Erikson, D.D.S. 64 Garon Construction 64 Grand Forks Montessori Academy 51 GF Holiday Home Tour 62 Kelly Thompson, Oxford Realty 65 Living Sage 62 MayPort Insurance 58 Quotable Kids 56 Sarita Bansal, Coldwell Banker’s Forks Real Estate 51 Shaft Law Office 56 Slate Interior Design 52 Valley Dairy Stores 65 Vilandre Heating & Air Conditioning, Inc. 52

SADIE GARDNER

Ross Rolshoven, Auctioneer

Auction Committee

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

CHILLY GOODMAN

ANUBHA BANSAL

American Indian art and artifacts. He is completing his seventh 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.

MEREDITH COLEMAN APRYL MOLSTAD Anubha Bansal, Chilly Goodman, and Meredith

Coleman

are

full-time

mothers and community volunteers.

In everyday life, however, he is a legal investigator who handles

Sadie Gardner started a business,

high profile cases involving corporate, civil, and criminal

Sadies Couture Floral & Event Styling.

matters. He owns and operates Great Plains Claims, Inc. along

Apryl Molstad works in psychiatry at

with his brother Reid, in Grand Forks, North Dakota. His work

Altru Hospital. Mike Little is Manager

routinely takes him across the Upper Midwest—a boon to his

of Primary Care Programs at Altru

collecting and his need to acquire endless numbers of objects for

Hospital,

making assemblages. This past year Ross donated a South African

Kempenich is a Turtle Mountain artist

Ndebele beaded, married-woman’s fancy apron from the early

working in Grand Forks.

and

Hillary

MIKE LITTLE

Davis

1900s to the Museum’s African collection.

Rolshoven is a Summa Cum Laude University of North Dakota graduate and father of three children.

Hillary Kempenich

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Rules of the Auction

•

Each registered guest will receive a bidding card as part of

Welcome to the eighteenth annual Autumn Art Auction. The

the price of admission. Upon receiving the bidding card,

Museum originally started the auction in order to build a regional

each guest will be asked to sign a statement vowing to abide

support system for the artists who live in our region. Galleries

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.

•

From the Museum Director

Each bidder will use his or her own bidding number during

were few and far between; there wasn’t an established regional market. Thankfully, this has changed radically in North Dakota, especially in Grand Forks and its surrounding communities.

Auctions and sales have become commonplace. Original art is the norm in locally owned restaurants. Young people are filling their homes with art from our own artists.

This Auction set the precedent for paying artists before paying

the Auction.

ourselves. We never ask artists to donate art—although some do.

•

All sales are final.

These are the rules of the game: Artists set a minimum price,

•

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.

•

•

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.

In the event of a dispute between bidders, the auctioneer shall either determine the successful bidder or re-auction

Others in the region have adopted our policy. Instead of always

the item in dispute.

being asked to donate, artists can count on actual income from

Purchasers may pay for items at any point following the

auctions sponsored by art entities. And, bless you buyers for not

sale of a work but must pay for all art work before the

forgetting that this is also a benefit for the Museum. We value

conclusion of the evening unless other arrangements are

your generosity.

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.

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Remember, when you buy through the Auction, the price includes framing. Frames are often custom made by the artists or framed by the Museum staff with 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 North Dakota.

The Artists

The Museum

We could not publish this catalog without the underwriting of

Listed by lot number

our sponsors. Please take your business to these companies and

#1 Jon Offutt

individuals, thank them for their significant contributions, and

#2 Chuck Kimmerle

note how most are locally owned and operated. Sometimes they

#3 Chuck Kimmerle

say, “I don’t care if I get an ad, I just want to give to you guys.”

#4 Micah Bloom

Supporting cultural life is not in the interest of most chains but

#5 Christopher Atkins

rather has become the business of the butcher, the baker and the

#6 Butch Holden

keeper of bees, that is, those who live among us. Thank you.

#7 Butch Holden #8 Marley Kaul

The Museum’s own collection continues to grow. Above is an Installation shot from the exhibition An Africa Affair (winter 2015) that celebrated Tom McNemar’s gift of African art to the Museum. The figure seen through stool legs is an Ambete, copper-clad shrine figure from Gabon. On pages 75 and 76 are images of recent gifts from an anonymous collector: significant

#9 Mollie Douthit #10 Vivianne Morgan #11 Dan Jones #12 Alexander Hettich #13 Alexander Hettich #14 James Culleton

#34 Arnold Saper #35 Brian Paulsen #36 Barb Hatfield #37 Carl Oltvedt #38 Kim Fink #39 Jessica Matson-Fluto #40 Duane Perkins #41 Duane Perkins #42 Lisa York #43 Dan Sharbono #44 Kelly Thompson #45 Zhimin Guan #46 Ingrid Restemeyar #47 Armando Ramos

#15 William Harbort

photographs by Robert Polidori of Montreal and New York and

#16 Robert Wilson

Minneapolis artist Alex Soth.

$17 Robert Wilson #18 Duane Shoup

—Laurel Reuter, Director

#33 Tim Schouten

#19 Gretchen Bederman #20 Guillermo Guardia #21 Deborah Mae Broad #22 Deborah Mae Broad #23 Adam Kemp

Listed by page number 3 Auctioneer Auction Chairs and Committee 4 Rules of Auction 5 Director’s Introduction Back cover, Trustees and Staff

#24 Albert Belleveau #25 Margaret Wall-Romana #26 Jack Dale #27 Daniel Buettner #28 Marlon Davidson and Don Knudson #29 Marlon Davidson #30 Don Knudson #31 Justin Sorenson #32 Jessica Mongeon

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Lot #1

Jon Offutt Fargo, North Dakota Lakeside, 2015 Blown glass 9.75 high x 6.5 inch diameter Range: $240 – 320

This is a fine example of both surfaces used on my work, the linear elements and the organic textures. I continue to simplify my ‘mark making’ as I depict our ever-changing landscape that becomes more complex as I delve deeper.

Offutt and his Mobile Glassblowing Studio, which was developed as part of an outreach program of North Dakota State University and funded in part by a grant from the Kellogg Foundation, travels around the region as he demonstrates the art of glassblowing. Offutt provides a valuable resource to communities that would otherwise not have access. People also are pleased to live with works of art that they watched come into being.

Jon Offutt plays with fire. At his glassblowing studio in Fargo—named after the Roman god of fire Mulciber— he uses roaring, 2,000-degree heat as a tool to transform molten glass into beautiful, award-winning glass vessels and sculptures. He established his studio in Fargo in 1996; today it boasts two large furnaces, three kilns, and a blowtorch, all of which keep Offutt’s glass heated to workable temperatures.

Jon earned his MA from the University of Minnesota Moorhead and his MFA in glass from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Enjoying the role of teacher, he continues to pass along his knowledge to new students of glass. He also demonstrates his craft for the public and to a new generation as he travels with his Mobile Glassblowing Studio.

His work for the past few years is a response to his travels around the region. The bold horizon line of the prairie provides many nuances of light and perspective, he says, and the vastness of the sky demands a sensitive depiction of atmosphere. Lakeside celebrates the topography of our surroundings: the evolving seasons, the subtle movement 6 of sweeping grasslands, the shifting character of our sky.

Chuck Kimmerle: Despite knowing little about photography at the time, I knew I was destined to make my living as a photographer when I received my first camera, a Canon Canonet QL17 GIII, as a high school graduation present. The entire process mesmerized me. I was hooked.

A prior enlistment in the U.S. Army Infantry, however, put that dream on the back burner for a few years.

Following my discharge, I enrolled in the Photographic Engineering Technology program at St. Cloud State University, thinking it a solid career backup plan should my dream of being a photographer be unrealized. The technically-focused program provided me with a solid background in photographic science, chemistry, processes and sensitometry.

While at the university, I began working at the school paper, which was followed by a photojournalism position at the St. Cloud Times and, subsequently, jobs at newspapers in Pennsylvania and finally Grand Forks—I was part of a four-person staff named as finalists for the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography. In 2000, I left the erratic schedule of photojournalism to become staff photographer at the University of North Dakota, where I remained for the next 10 years.

Lot #2

Chuck Kimmerle Casper, Wyoming Evergreen, Theodore Roosevelt National Park, 2008 Archival ink on fine art paper Range: $500 – 700

Lot #3

Chuck Kimmerle Casper, Wyoming Rain Squall, Burleigh County, North Dakota, 2008 Archival ink on fine art paper Range: $500 – 700

In 2006, I followed my wife, a New York City native, to her new job in the least populated state in the United States, Wyoming, where I now work as an educational and commercial freelance photographer.

Throughout the years I spent a great deal of my free time shooting landscapes, especially at the confluence of, and influenced by, both nature and man. Within that realm, my primary interests lie in the quiet and reticent agricultural landscapes of the plains, particularly the northern plains.

Despite having embraced the digital technologies, I consider myself a landscape photographer in the traditional sense of the word. My style is straightforward,

formal, and balanced with a deep depth-of-field and an unabashed honesty to the subject matter. This is in direct contrast to the contemporary trend of highly conceptualized pictorials. Form and texture are the defining characteristics of my work. I work almost exclusively in black and white. While having almost limitless control over my images, I, as a general rule, let pixels lie where they have fallen, and limit my image enhancements to those available in the traditional darkroom.

Kimmerle has a new Amherst Media book coming in 2016 that deals with how one sees in black and white. 7

Lot #4

Micah Bloom Minot, North Dakota Untitled (Codex Series) 2013 Pigment print on handmade rag paper Artist-designed hanging hardware 25 x 37 x 3 inches Range: $800 – 1,000

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 8 nature, they were 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. He holds an MFA 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. His multi-media project with flooddispersed books, Codex, was seen at the North Dakota Museum of At in 2015. It included film, photography, and installation. Married for fourteen years, Micah and his wife Sara share four daughters and one son, and they all love to make things.

Lot #5

Christopher Atkins Minneapolis, Minnesota Chevron, 2014 Archival pigment print 20 x 20 inches

Christopher Atkins: My research on contemporary fiction and historical memoir has made a strong impact on the connections I see between nature and photography. These works began as creative experiments with transparent and colored Plexiglas squares. They have become composition studies in which nature continues to inspire moments of selfreflection and discovery.

Christopher Atkins is a photographer, curator and writer who holds MRes and MA degrees in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths College, University of London, and a BA, History of Art from the College of Wooster. He currently serves as Exhibition Coordinator for the Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Prior work includes Deputy Director, Franklin Art Works in Minneapolis; Visiting Assistant Professor, Art Department, Macalester College; Adjunct Lecturer in Liberal Arts, Minneapolis College of Art and Design; and Researcher, Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths College, London.

Range: $600 – 800

Atkins is the recipient of a Jerme Foundation Artist Travel and Study Grant (2013); Minneapolis Institute of Arts Roberta Mann Innovation Award (2013); and Oberholzer Foundation Artist Residency (2013, 2015).

His work has been exhibited at the Nemeth Art Center, Park Rapids, Minnesota; Minnesota College of Art and Design; and the Chautauqua Institution with upcoming shows at Minneapolis’s Kolman & Pryor Gallery and 9 Plains Art Museum in Fargo.

Butch Holden: When I garden, I am manipulating all

sorts of variables—location, soil, water—all in hopes of achieving a thriving plant. I monitor the plants, tweaking elements each year. Gardening is an incredibly optimistic activity and for me, pottery is the same. I work the clay with optimism in hopes that the outcome will be what I had planned. Many variables must be successful prior to placing my pieces in the kiln.

As with seedlings coming from the soil in his garden, when Butch’s pottery finally emerges from the kiln, the clay has magically bloomed.

Lot #6 Butch Holden Bemidji, Minnesota Erin Lake, 2001 Acrylic on wood panel

The artist holds a BA in two-dimensional art from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and an MFA in ceramics from Indiana University, Bloomington. Today he serves as department chair for the Visual Arts Department at Bemidji State University where he has been on staff since 1983 and teaches various levels of ceramic classes and drawing. In addition to his frequent service as an exhibition juror and art grant panelist, the artist has shown his work in local, regional, and national competitions, including several solo exhibitions. He says, My inclination toward sculpture and painting find form in clay and glaze.

I studied painting early on. This work, Erin Lake, came about one day when I took a group of students into the landscape to paint. I told them to find a square in nature for your subject, a hard thing to come upon. Then I saw one myself and this painting resulted.

40 x 30 inches Range: $500 – 800

Lot #7 Butch Holden Bemidji, Minnesota Encounter Clay and acrylic paint 13 x 8 x 15 inches Range: $400 – 600

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Marley Kaul’s painting is sponsored by All Seasons Lot #8

marley kaul Bemidji, Minnesota Spring Breaks the Morning Sky, 2013 Egg tempera on board 20 x 16 inches with commissioned cherry frame Range: $2,800 – 3,200

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.

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, 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 his 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.

He describes his approach to art these days as meditative —one stroke after another, one layer on top of another.

(It's another reason the egg tempera discipline suits him.)

Egyptians and others discovered egg tempera mixed paints really stick. Egg yolk-based paints have been found on Egyptian sarcophagi. If you've ever left an egg on a plate and then tried to get it off, well, people 11 discover that in their own kitchen, I'm sure.

Lot #9

mollie douthit Grand Forks, North Dakota The Great Scott, 2015 Oil on canvas 8 x 11 inches Range: $900 – 1,200

mollie douthit: I am a perceptual still-life painter, and paint to gain a stronger sense of being present in the world. I intuitively select objects. Often a color or shape is a reminder of a person or specific memory, such as blueberries in the painting above, and is the reason I am drawn to a subject. My process involves a lot of trial and error from setting up a still life to color mixing. When painting I am in a constant state of alertness, maintaining patience to a point of feeling a shape or presence between the image and the object. The resulting images are views of being present with seeing and taking the ephemeral nature of seeing into the stability of a painting. I align my work with literary sources ranging from poetry to fiction, as simple narratives can become catalysts for larger concepts.

In general, artists take their pasts with them, 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 12 that sense of support from home, even at a distance.

Born in 1986 in Grand Forks, Douthit is a painter who currently resides in Ireland. She 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.

In 2015, she had a solo exhibition at RHA Ashford Gallery, book cover image for The Gallery Press, invited Artist for National Drawing Day at Ireland’s National Gallery, and the Tony O’Malley artist in residence. Forthcoming, Douthit has a fully funded residency at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in Co. Mayo, and will be a resident teaching fellow at the Burren College of Art, both in Ireland.

Douthit’s work has been published or reviewed in The Irish Arts Review, Irish Independent, Irish Times, and Sunday Times Culture. Douthit has work in both public and private collections. Her art was included in the 2013 MFA edition of New American Paintings at the Boston 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 for a year-long Tony O’Malley Residency. Forthcoming in January 2016, she will have a solo exhibition in the Ashford gallery space at the RHA, Dublin, Ireland.

Lot #10

Vivienne Morgan Bemidji, Minnesota Hyperopia. 8/14 at 6:00:43:09 and 6:00:54 am From “20/20 Vision Series,” 2014 Archival digital print Image 16 x 34.5 inches (framed in white) Range: $1,100 – 1,500

Vivienne Morgan: Many of my photographs are matched pairs, often two or three views of the same place just feet and minutes apart, though some are similar places though countries apart. The gap of time and place between the paired images is important to me: whatever seen or not seen, the gap is the nexus. In comparing place to place, and time and place, I am making an effort to see and interpret personal life events more clearly. Hyperopia 8/14 at 6:00:43:09 and 6:00:54 am is part of an ongoing series called 20/20 Vision.

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, Kentucky. 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 photographs: “A Sense of Place.”

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Lot #11

Dan Jones Fargo, North Dakota Summer Bales, 2015 Charcoal on paper Image 21.75 x 29.75 inches Range: $600 – $900

Dan Jones is best known as a painter of landscape in western Minnesota and southeastern North Dakota. This landscape of the Red River basin provides the artist with endless subjects. A native of Fargo, where he currently resides, the artist has long practiced plein air painting.

While best known for his paintings, Jones is a master at making monumental charcoal drawings on paper, pulling from this simple material the essence of light and of blackness, or twilight—that time after sunset and before dark. His light is mostly ambiguous. It might be the full light of day casting deep shadows in the underbrush. Only the presence of the artist’s gesture is solid, real.

I was still a student at NDSU and one bitter cold winter, I flew out to see a friend living in Redondo Beach, California. A week later I returned to –30 degree temperatures. Oh, no, not again. . . . This time I gathered up all my drawing supplies, canceled everything except Catherine Mulligan’s drawing class, and holed up in my apartment for six weeks to teach myself how to draw, again by copying Old Masters Jacques-Louis David, Nicolas Poussin. That is when I started using charcoal.

I am a realist but I also like to improvise. I start by toning a piece of paper and then begin picking out images. This is when I really enjoy the work. I might have a photograph or sketch in front of me but when I let it go, or just set it aside, and respond to the suggested images on paper, I am happy. The sooner I get away from the model the quicker 14 it goes and the more successful the drawing becomes. I am

fascinated with Tonalism, a late nineteenth century art movement that grew out of the Barbizon School. Like those painters, I make outdoor sketches and finish the landscapes indoors. By laying down blocks and shapes of muted colors or soft blacks and grays, the paintings don’t suggest subject as much as mood, timelessness, mists and shadow. I use charcoal to achieve a similar soft result.

Making things, finish carpentry, knowing how to stretch a canvas, frame it, etc. Process, how something is made. It’s all part of what makes me. I was always fascinated by Norman Rockwell’s drawing ability. He could illustrate things almost photographically. It’s kind of like golf, a game you can never win. All you can do is play. Draw and draw and draw. The French painter Jacque-Louis David said, “in order to learn to draw you have to do 10,000 drawings” but they are never good enough. I haven’t completely shaken off the yoke of realism but it concerns me less. Milton Avery showed me the way. A big black shape on a canvas can be read as a big plowed field. So ultimately, my drawings are about creating shapes and the viewers form them into their own something.

The artist’s paintings are included in many museum’s, corporate, and private collections including the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2013, the North Dakota Museum of Art mounted an exhibition “Dan Jones: Charcoal” and published an accompanying catalog.

Lot #12

Aleksander Hettich Grand Forks, North Dakota Trees, 2015

Aleksander 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.

Oil on canvas 17.5 x 23.5 inches Range: $700 – 900

Lot #13

Aleksander Hettich Grand Forks, North Dakota Untitled, 2015 Oil on canvas 15.75 x 11.75 inches

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 Language Centers (English as a Second Language). Importantly, he continues to paint.

Range: $400 – 600

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Lot #14

James Culleton Winnipeg, Manitoba Tree, (detail below), 2015 Waterjet cut steel and shadows 35 x 54 inches Range: $2,500 – 3,300

James Culleton’s wall relief is sponsored by C&M Ford

James Culleton: The father of two children, he invited his eight-year-old son to accompany him during his tenure in 2013 and 2014 at McCanna House, the North Dakota Museum of Art’s Artist-in-Residence Compound.

During this time, the artist dug back into the history of McCanna, McCanna Farms, and its pioneer family. This became the beginning of what will evolve into a multimedia performance and exhibition at McCanna House and in the Museum during the summer of 2016. He has composed songs, made many drawings, and recently embarked upon a collaboration with a Winnipeg puppetry group, all about Margery McCanna and her historic home and farm. In addition to an exhibition, Culleton will produce a vinyl record and art book combo, hoping to underwrite the costs with a Kickstart-like campaign.

While at McCanna, his accompanying son Drew 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.

Culleton developed the process for creating Tree, the work in this auction, while making his musical instrument series. He elaborates, first I sketched the instrument as a 16 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 in 1997 he received his BFA with Honors. In 2006 while living in Montréal, 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.

Lot #15

William Charles Harbort aka Billy chuck Minot, North Dakota Soul Mates / Twin Flame, 2015 Mixed media collage 29 x 41 inches Range: $800 – 1,000

William Charles harbort is also known as Billy chuck, a pseudonym that is taken from his first and middle names, William Charles.

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 has long exhibited at lowbrow art galleries. However, his success in the North Dakota Museum of Art auctions forced him to raise his also lowbrow prices.

Paint-by-numbers, coupons, clip art, photographs, the shiny surfaces of plastics and resin are just a few of the ingredients often found in our popular culture landfill, according to the artist. 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.

Love, true-love, lust, temptation, luck, loss, and life and death are recurring subject matters in my work. Harbort brings good humor, wit, flexibility, an egalitarian spirit, energy, and joy to his teaching, collaborating, and art making. And the art he makes is of and for the people.

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 coorganizer 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 muses, my commercial art background taught me the importance of marketing, sales and hustle; my time in North Dakota taught me to live in a new culture.

Harbort simply adores his life of teaching, his family and his greyhounds, living and working in North Dakota, and constantly making art.

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 art 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 this collaborative project, Harbort has returned to Spirit Lake for long blocks of time to create another body of work. The results will be seen in an exhibition at the Museum in 2016. This last venture is funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Andy Warhol Foundation.

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railroad where he worked on engine heat shields among other things. Privately, 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. This year he has made a companion bowl for the auction.

Lot #16

Robert Wilson

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 was working in Winnipeg on the movie Shall We Dance. Wilson’s work is in the collection of Great West Life & Annuity Insurance Company and numberous private collections.

Winnipeg, Manitoba Covered Vessel, 2014 Turned pine and mahogany,

Lot #17

turquoise aniline dye, Tung oil 14.5 x 7 inch diameter Range: $900 – 1,100

Robert Wilson Winnipeg, Manitoba Bowl, 2014

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 twothirds 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.

18 Before retiring, Robert Wilson was a sheet metalist for the

Turned pine, turquoise aniline dye, Tung oil 3 x 10 inch diameter Range: $400 – 600

Duane Shoup’s table is sponsored by Minnesota Public Radio

Lot #18

Duane Shoup Shevlin, Minnesota Table, 2015 Walnut, cherry, oak 17 high x 44 long x 23 inches deep Range: $1,100 – 1,500

Duane Shoup, grandson of a carpenter, grew up in Maryville, Indiana, which lies 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. Today, in his wooded near-wilderness he lives in a hand-made house with a small shop, both filled with whimsical, allwood chairs, benches, lamps, tables, all models of individuality. Each and every piece is custom-made by Duane who describes himself as a skilled craftsman inspired by rustic furniture designs and techniques from the past. Shoup embedded himself in Northern Minnesota’s deep woods where could find the hardwoods he needed to establish his studio, Wildwood Rustic Furnishings.

Shoup sees beyond the basic functions wood can provide, sees the potential for something greater. 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. I also thin growth areas to aid larger trees.

Inspiration for my work flows from the natural world around me in 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. Each knot and every

curve is an opportunity to create timeless, artistic furniture.

He incorporates the natural shapes and bends of the hardwoods into his creative furnishings, as the wood’s natural shapes dictate the design. Parts of trees are joined as in nature; knots and bark remain, adding beauty and rustic charm to the pieces. Finished pieces preserve the force of nature 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. Shoup, as his own master, does what he wishes, challenges his already-formidable skills, uses beautiful woods, and makes a living in the process.

The walnut coffee table in this auction features a bookmatched walnut top with cherry butterfly keys. The curved walnut leg structure is adorned with white oak feet.

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.

—Quoted in part from Wood-Mizer Planet (10/4/2010). 19

Lot #19 Gretchen Bederman Glendive, Montana, and Mandan, North Dakota Black Horse, 2015 Oil on canvas 48 x 72 inches Range: $900 – 1,500

Gretchen Bederman was born and raised in Houston, Texas. At the age of eighteen she took off to explore the world. She moved around frequently, spending time in Santa Fe, Chicago, and San Francisco, and even studying abroad in Florence and Milan. But in 1980 Bederman took a trip that would change her life. She visited North Dakota, fell in love with the state and has lived here since. In 2006, she began to split her time in Glendive, Montana, to teach art at Dawson Community College. She and her husband Wade Stanton continue to make their home in both Mandan and Glendive.

Women and horses, water and bowls, birds and fire, trees and earth, wax and paint, story and soul, these are all part of Gretchen Bederman’s artistic life. Horses reappear again and again having entered her image bank some years ago when she chose the horse to symbolize the earth as it is in the I Ching and for the horse-headed earth goddess Demeter of Greek mythology. Of course, horses are simply what they are to an artist who rides and has often owned 20 horses over the years. Still, as Gretchen creates her images

she thinks of them as symbols that animate the elemental forces of nature. Birds too have a part in the play.

Gretchen received her BA from Minnesota State University Moorhead in 1993 and her MFA from the University of North Dakota in 1997. Gretchen has continuously exhibited her artwork since seventh grade with her first student group show at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts Houston. She has often participated in the North Dakota Museum of Art auctions and exhibitions.

Over the years, Bederman has worked as a teacher, a graphic designer, an illustrator, a lithographic printmaker, a set designer and more. As an artist, she works in multiple media, focusing primarily on painting, sculpting and drawing. Bederman likens her art to poetry. I weave my images with representation and abstraction, she explains.

As poetry releases our imagination from limitation and reaches for our emotional essence, I am exploring the possibilities of joining the outer world with inner experiences. My search is for images that resonate with the viewer on the unspoken landscape.

According to Museum Director Laurel Reuter, “like all of her best paintings, the viewer is given the essence but left to wonder. What is this painting? What is it about? What was the artist’s intention?”

—Quoted in part from various artist statements and writings.

Guillermo Guardia’s sculpture is sponsored by the North Dakota Museum of Art

Lot #20

Guillermo Guardia Grand Forks, North Dakota Mama Quilla, 2015 Ceramic 22.5 x 13 x 8 inches Range: $2,500 – 3,500

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, one of many cultures that developed before Spaniards arrived in the New World. It was known especially for its pottery vessels modeled into naturalistic human and animal figures.

Mama Quilla (Mother Moon), continues his “Puzzle Series.” In Inca tradition the Moon appeared as the female consort to the Sun. As in many cultures, the Moon was related intimately to the earth and its fertility in the form of Pacamama or Mother Earth. Mama Quilla was most prominent at the time of Southern Hemisphere planting in August when through ceremonies she nurtured the welfare of young seedlings throughout the Inca Empire.

According to the artist, as a child he was mesmerized by the puzzles his older sister put together with great ease while he never could figure them out. Not surprisingly, he finds working on the puzzled pieces was and is a collection of personal and social emotions. All of us have been through that feeling of emptiness or missing something in our lives that we cannot describe. It might be a person, personal goals, places, or the search for an answer to an unknown question. This body of work started with a human body filled with jigsaw pieces holding with his hand just one single piece. His whole body is completed, no single space is empty, but he is holding one

and wonders where it goes. Also I think that puzzle piece can represent how one can or cannot fit into a particular group of people, or what we wanted or want to be. Mama Quilla remains a puzzle no longer clearly understood.

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. He then joined the staff of the North Dakota Museum of Art as the artist-in-residence which sponsored him for his Green Card, a permit issued by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services that allows individuals to live and work in the United States on a permanent basis. It came through late in 2014, thus allowing him to resign to become a full-time independent studio artist. He maintains his studio at Muddy Waters Clay Center in Grand Forks. He is also appreciated as a popular teacher of North Dakota youngsters through short workshops and visiting artist stints, especially in schools.

Memo has been included in many important juried art 21 exhibitions throughout the United States.

Lot #21

Deborah Mae Broad Hawley, Minnesota Waking Up Stronger, 2015 Etching, #20 from edition of 30 18 x 24 inches Range: $600 – 900

Deborah Mae Broad: My work started with a love for animals, which has been a constant influence throughout my life. I am grateful to now live among the animals I draw and have the luxury of time to observe them. I appreciate the way an animal can be used to represent any one of us, young or old, man or woman. My images are also about human life.

Some subjects have continued to interest me over the years. Many times my animals do simple things in daily life, which give me ideas. Every animal is an important individual to me. I believe that they have emotions and abilities beyond our imagination. I like the idea that the animals who live here on my farmstead with me give me a way to do my work full time and I am able to give them a good home because of my work.

I am a printmaker. My work is large-scale wood engravings with screen-printed colors, copper plate etchings, and stone lithographs. I retired from teaching printmaking at the University of Minnesota Moorhead in 2003 after twenty-six years of teaching. I now show my work at carefully selected art fairs across the country.

Exquisite Sisters Celebrate Spring is really about people. In my mind, the sheep are two sisters who live together in an old house full of antiques and a vintage car in the garage 22 with 15,00 original miles on it. They get carried away with

Lot #22

Deborah Mae Broad Hawley, Minnesota Exquisite Sisters Celebrate Spring, 2002 Etching, #48 from edition of 50 28 x 22 inches Range: $600 – 900

everything they do because they are a little out of touch with modern society. The sisters go together to all social events in town. They especially like art openings, and they often say to each other, ‘Oh isn’t this exquisite.’

She was born in Newport News, Virginia, in 1954. After graduating from Southern Seminary Junior College in Buena Vista, Virginia in 1975 with an Equestrian Studies certificate, she received a BA degree from Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia. in 1977 and then a MFA in Printmaking from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville in 1980. Today she is recognized as a rare, master wood engraver, in addition to being a superb allaround printmaker. She lives on her farmstead in Hawley, Minnesota, with her husband Byron, BarFly the mule, Hog the quarter horse, Stella and Weasel the dogs, and nineteen rescued cats

Lot #23

Adam Kemp

Adam Kemp’s painting is sponsored by Altru Advanced Orthopedics

Grand Forks, North Dakota Sunday Cow Picinic, 1990 – 2015 Acrylic and drawing

materials on two canvases 90 x 60 inches Range: $1,200 – 2,000

Adam Kemp’s paintings are highly biographical. He paints cows because he regularly goes to the Matejcek farm north of Grand Forks to paint. Oil rigs as he often travels to Western North Dakota to work. The landscape because he is out-of-doors much of the time. Buildings and parks and bridges in Grand Forks because that is where he lives. Swimming because he and Hanna swim all summer long. Hanna is the little girl he latched onto when she was tiny and in need of him. He says, I find myself reaching out as well as reaching in. You don’t want to be a total clown but I can still enjoy wearing clown’s shoes.

I primarily paint straight from the tube rather than mixing paint. Or I will mix on the canvas. It is a fair criticism to say I could be a more accomplished painter if I went back to mixing paint on the pallet. I like the elasticity and urgency of painting direct from the tube with acrylic paint.

If I make a mistake, I can paint over it in fifteen minutes. I like painting fast and painting messy.

According to Museum Director Laurel Reuter, When kids enroll in Adam’s workshops they are covered in paint the first day, just as Adam is when he paints. Adam exudes joy and heightened energy both when and in his paintings.

Simply put, he is a natural painter with rigorous European schooling under his belt. He is also Grand Fork’s unofficial painter-in-residence: teaching workshops and passersby, working with special needs kids, talking about their art with younger artists, giving paintings away, fighting with the powers that be whenever he finds too many rules and regulations for his version of a proper life, selling a painting whenever he can, and turning friends and strangers into collectors. Our region is blessed to have such a force living among us.

The upper canvas of the painting in the auction is filled with dazzling sun dogs, the natural phenomenon found on

cold, clear days in winter. The bottom switches into summer with the cows grazing on green grass. Truly a North Dakota painting, the seasons run into each other and are defined by change and the unexpected.

Kemp was born in Ugley, Essex, England. In 1986, he received a BFA from Newcastle-upon-Tyne where his studies were based in the intense study 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 University of North Dakota 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. 23

Right: Lot #24

Albert Belleveau Puposky, Minnesota Unicorn, 2002 Welded found steel and rock 56 x 46 x 48 inches Range: $700 – 900

Albert Belleveau: Unicorn started its life in a pile of scrap iron at an art fair in Bemidji, Minnesota, as a public sculpture demonstration. It has traveled extensively and has been loved by many, according to the artist.

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 at seventeen as a welder, 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. For the last ten years I’ve worked vigorously 24 developing Rock Iron Art. Note the Unicorn’s horn.

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. 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 or animal 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.

Along the river and throughout downtown Bemidji, a sculpture walk has become a permanent fixture in the community. Belleveau has been a generous and key volunteer in creating this popular public art event that reflects the regional art community and many aspects of Minnesota life.

Lot #25

Margaret Wall-Romana: This piece is from 2003, when I ran across the work of the 16th century Flemish artist Joris

Margaret Wall-Romana

Hoefnagel, a precursor of the earliest Dutch still-life painters.

Golden Valley, Minnesota

Hoefnagel made botanical paintings on vellum, exquisitely

Summer Diptych, 2003

arranged and highly detailed studies of flora and insects. There

Oil and acrylic on Plexiglas

was something about the background/not background of that

Two panels at 24 x 19 inches each

vellum, a milky thing seemingly both space and surface, that

Range: $1,400 – 2,000

really interested me. Around the same time and quite by accident I found that Plexiglas, when finely sanded, acquires characteristics reminiscent of vellum . . . and that got me thinking. So I took a break from my usual studio practice (making large oil paintings on wood panels) to explore working on an entirely new kind of surface with very different problems to solve. This Plexiglas work opened up issues of space and surface which are cycling back through my work again, manifesting in new ways and practices.

This piece can be hung on the wall, or leaned against a low-light window to enjoy how it changes with the light.

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 painters: an excuse to make a painting.

Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, the artist moved to Minneapolis nine years ago. She holds a BA from the University of California, Davis, and an MFA from the School of the Art

For painters like myself who are interested in the history of the

Institute of Chicago. In 2006, she had a solo exhibition at the

medium, paintings speak to and of each other across the

North Dakota Museum of Art and in 2014 was in residence at the

centuries. If I study Rogier van der Weyden’s painting, Deposition

North Dakota Museum of Art’s McCanna house.

From the Cross (c.1432), that I admire , 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

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Jack Dale’s painting is sponsored by Hugo’s

Lot #26

Jack Dale Falcon Heights, Minnesota

Child’s Play, 2014 Oil on canvas 40 x 40 inches Range: $1,200 – 1,900

Jack Dale: Jocks can paint too. I have been a painter for forty years. Yet to this day, I believe friends and acquaintances often relate to me as the athlete I once was and not the artist that I have been the majority of my life.

I believe there is a connection with my past life as a hockey player and my present life as an artist. This became more real when I embraced the idea of “calmness within chaos.”

A hockey player wants to get to this psychological state as soon as possible during a game. Then you stop worrying about what you want to do on the ice, what opposing players have on their agenda for you. You forgot about the crowd, the possibility of making mistakes, and the significance of the game. Removed from these distractions, you are able to play in a completely spontaneous and reactive way. Your talents are manifested.

I have painted the same way I played hockey, with spontaneity, intuition and disregard. I approach painting from an aesthetic point of view and have always wanted the public to remember my work for the feelings that it evokes rather than the content it may reflect. My process is reactionary as one line leads to the next line, one color leads to the next color, one painting leads to the next painting and one exhibition leads to the next exhibition.

26 Painting, for me, is all about texture, color, composition,

line, movement, positive/negative space, etc. All the elements that go into making a painting that “works” whatever your style might be. It’s not about landmarks, narrative, or recognizable imagery. It’s about creating something that viewers can relate to on an emotional level through their visual experiences. I want the viewers to remember my paintings for the feelings that they evoke rather than for what they might represent.

The chaos that I experience while painting is like being in the painting. Being surrounded by paint, brush strokes, scrapings, and layers in an environment that is ever changing. I have learned to exist calmly within this chaos that allows me to interact with the painting as it pulls and pushes me along a path to completion.

Jack Dale attended the University of Minnesota on a hockey scholarship and graduated with a BA, emphasis in studio art. He played on the 1968 U.S. Olympic Hockey Team followed by three years as a professional before an injury ended his career. The good fortune is that he turned to his art and has been painting ever since. He shows extensively throughout the Twin Cities region including with the Rosalux Gallery in Minneapolis. Upon seeing his work in North Dakota Museum of Art auctions, he was invited to show with the ecce gallery in Fargo.

Lot #27

Daniel Buettner Minneapolis, Minnesota That’s Butter, 2012 Acrylic and collage on board 24 x 24 inches Range: $400 – 600

Dan Buettner: This work represents who I am as a person rather than who I am as an artist. My work has become more realistic and detailed, yet is simpler than works I have done in the past. I have always been interested in collage-type imagery, spending time pushing the materials in new directions, and reworking compositions sometimes two or three times before considering a painting done. My latest work has very limited compositional thought. What has become more important to me is the act of centering myself on the single brushstroke. I think this transformation occurred because working a composition in a painting has always taken me large chunks of time—something I don’t seem to have much of anymore. Concentrating on small detailed images as opposed to larger compositions has not only given me focus in a life where many things are happening at once, but also lends itself nicely to small amounts of studio time.

The objects in my paintings are chosen on aesthetic value and arranged to invite personal interpretation.

Daniel Buettner is an artist and educator from Minneapolis, Minnesota. He has been exhibiting his artwork in the Twin Cities area for more than ten years at various galleries and art centers. As an artist, elementary art teacher and father, his goal is to create paintings that are interesting to children and invite them to construct

Detail

their own meanings, without focusing singularly on childhood themes. The detailed realistic elements incorporated in his acrylic paintings create the feeling that the paintings are collages, showing magazine-type images painted on sparse backgrounds. Daniel Buettner has been a member of the Minneapolis art collective, Rosalux, for 27 more than seven years.

Lot #28

Marlon Davidson & Don Knudson Bemidji, Minnesota Blue Lagoon, 2013 Wood, acrylic, ink 39 x 39 x 2 inches Range: $600 – 900

Marlon Davidson & Don Knudson are collaborative artists who have lived in the Bemidji area for

Bemidji area but they now devote full time to art production. They are life partners who have lived together

twenty-five years. They have individual art careers but have been producing collaborative work for about thirty years akin to the collaborative sculptural collage in this auction. 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 (now Bemidji State University), and at the Minneapolis School of Art, (Minneapolis College of Art and Design).

for fifty-six years.

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 once owned and 28 operated a bed-and-breakfast, Meadowgrove, in the

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 North Dakota Museum of Art, 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.

Lot #30

Don Knudson Bemidji, Minnesota Reconfigured Honeysuckle 2014 Wood and acrylic 74 x 32 x 30 inches Range: $400 – 500

Lot #29

Marlon Davidson Bemidji, Minnesota Greening, 2014 Acrylic and calk on board 17 x 21 x 2 inches Range: $200 - 400

Marlon Davidson: The life of the artist and the writer joined forces in Davidson’s life. He journalled daily since his twenties. While he and his partner Don Knudson made their home in Bemidji, they also had a cabin on Hand Lake in northern Minnesota. That life has as been recorded in Davidson’s memoir The Pig Barn published by Loonfeather Press in 1997. This little book has become a collector’s item.

Don Knudson: As his St. Paul neighborhood declined, homes—predominately sleeping houses—were torn down. Before the bulldozers arrived, Knudson would salvage spindles and hinges. According to the artist, The reason I did this kind of art (architectural fragments) when I lived in St. Paul, was that I could find this kind of stuff and it became my art materials. When we moved here to Bemidji, about thirty-five years ago, what was vailable was wood out of the forest. This piece is a collaborative piece 29 with a squirrel that stripped the bark for Knudson.

Lot #31

Justin Sorenson Williston, North Dakota My Brother’s Face, 2014 Graphite on gessoed paper 14.6 x 17.5 inches Range: $300 – 450

Justin Sorenson: My Brother’s Face is a work exploring time’s effect on how memory works. Part drawing and performance, the piece is an attempt to reconcile what I think I know versus what actually is. To create the work I purchased a pad of tracing paper, tore out a sheet, and wrote "my brother's face" in cursive. I then took the rest of the paper and proceeded to do the same thing. I laid down each sheet on top of the one proceeding, and attempted to align my writing perfectly with my last effort.

Justin Sorensen is an artist based in the Bakken region of North Dakota. He grew up in Northwestern Pennsylvania, receiving his BFA from Kutztown University in Kutztown, Pennsylvania. He did graduate work at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, before moving on to complete 30 his MFA with honors at the Rhode Island School of Design.

His art has been included in numerous exhibitions throughout the United States, most notably at David Krut Projects in New York City and the Granoff Center at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Additionally, his work was featured in the exhibition Global Vision at Kyoto Seika University in Iwakura, Kyoto, Japan. Before moving to Williston, Sorensen was based in northeastern Iowa where he served as a visiting instructor in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at Luther College. His expanded studio practice explores perceptions of time, religion, history, and nature at the intersection and overlap of performance, sculpture, photography, and drawing.

Lot #32

Jessica Mongeon: I explore geographic formations, organisms, and natural phenomena through the medium of acrylic paint. My painting process allows for spontaneity and chaos to play a role, as a way to connect to disorder and entropy. This involves 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. Pours, drips and blooms of pigment speak to gravity and help to create an illusion of deep space or surface tension.

The ambiguous nature of a vortex fascinates me. A polar vortex is a circular wind that surrounds an arctic region, or a vortex could refer to a hurricane, or the action of water over a kitchen drain. Perhaps most relevant to this painting is the image of leaves swirling in an eddy, with a nod to British artist Andy Goldsworthy. Formally, the circular pattern moves the viewer’s eye to the center of the composition, creating a sense of space and movement.

Jessica grew up in Rolette, North Dakota, and earned a BFA in Visual Arts and a BA in Communication and

Jessica Mongeon Rice Lake, Wisconsin Vortex, 2015 Acrylic on wood panel 28 x 38 inches Range: $700 – 900

Honors from the University of North Dakota. She went on to complete an MFA in painting from Montana State University. Mongeon resides in Rice Lake, Wisconsin, where she is a Lecturer of Art at the University of Wisconsin–Barron County. She has exhibited her paintings regionally and nationally from coast to coast. Recent exhibitions include “Intrinsic Terrain,” Fort Bragg, California; “North of the 45th” at The Devos Art Museum, Marquette Milwaukee; “Of the Earth” at Eau Claire, Wisconsin; and the Governor’s Island Art Fair, New York City. Artist residencies include Vermont Studio Center in Johnson; the Anderson Center at Tower View, Red Wing, Minnesota; and the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation, New Berlin, New York.

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Lot #33

Tim Schouten Winnipeg, Manitoba

the social and economic inequities that we are all too familiar with today.

Tracks, 2013 Oil on canvas 36.5 x 54.5 inches Range: $2,500 – $3,500

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.

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, 32 ownership rights and set the terms which have led to all of

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 Spirit Lake, and finally the North Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks. Part II of “Songs for Spirit Lake” will open at the North Dakota Museum of Art in February 2016. 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).

Lot #34

Arnold Saper The Dream, c. 1986 Etching 13.5 x 12.5 inches Range: $400 – 800

Arnold Saper: According to his son James Saper, My father spent most of his career in Winnipeg, a Prairie city marked by harsh weather and a ‘have-not’ reputation— unglamorous and away from the spotlight. I remember an exhibit we attended in a more temperate city.

Unimpressed by the lightweight nature of what he saw, Father commented on the lack of emotional content in the art. From his point of view, there is something to be gained from challenge and struggle, from living in a place like Winnipeg.

I have an earlier memory of sitting for a portrait as a young child. I recall watching his gaze as it alternated from me to the page. His concentration was combined with sensitivity as he gauged the drawing’s accuracy of emotion as well as likeness. Watching and being a part of the process drew me in. Likewise with his audience, the viewer becomes an active participant, often uncomfortably.

Arnold Saper was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, in 1933. He attended the University of Manitoba and received his BA degree in 1961. After earning a Certificate in Education, Mr. Saper taught for several years in high schools in rural Manitoba and Winnipeg. In 1963, he received a Pre-Masters grant from the Canada Council to study with the American artist Mauricio Lasansky at the University of Iowa. He held a Graduate Assistantship with

Lasansky for two years and graduated with an MA in 1966.

Arnold Saper taught printmaking and drawing at the University of Manitoba from 1966 to 1996 and was appointed full professor in 1979. He received a Canada Council Grant to purchase a printing press in 1969. In 1996, he retired from teaching but continues to live in Winnipeg. Regarding his years after retirement he says, I usually describe myself as an artist/printmaker. But for some time now I have spent all my time drawing. Drawing is relatively immediate and as I grow older, time has become more precious.

In 2014, the North Dakota Museum of Art organized a fifty-year retrospective of Arnold Saper’s work, from his early days teaching at the University of Manitoba to current works seventeen years after retirement. It was his first show in an American museum. Obsessively drawing portraits, he seeks to reveal what it means to be human.

The work in the Auction is a portrait of his wife Pat who has Japanese blood flowing through her veins. Much of Saper’s art springs from the dark side of humans; Saper’s portraits of his family are always loving.

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Lot #35

Brian Paulsen Grand Forks, North Dakota Seattle, 2014 Acrylic on paper 9 x 13.5 inches Range: $500 – 600

Brian Paulsen: —Since Brian’s earliest memories, he was always keenly aware of his living spaces, peoples 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 father’s 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—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, 34 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.

Lot #36

Barbara Hatfield New York, New York Blue Tablet, 2015 Watercolor, gauche, linen string 19 x 12 inches Range: $300 - 800

Barbara Hatfield has a long history with the North Dakota Museum of Art. A solo exhibition of her work entitled “Essential Marks” was presented at the Museum in 1996. Her work was also in a two-person exhibition in 2003 and has been included in numerous Autumn and Winter Art Auctions over the years. It has found a place in many homes in the area as well as in the Museum’s permanent collection. Hatfield has had several solo exhibitions in New York City and has participated in various group exhibitions. In 2014 a large exhibition was presented at the Rourke Art Museum in Moorhead and area residents and collectors have commissioned her to create works for them.

Barbara approaches her work with particular attention to the inherent qualities of the materials she uses. The works are always conceptually rich and often visually spare and meditative. She is strongly influenced by the fields and skies of North Dakota’s Red River Valley where she was

born and raised and by her love of poetry and literature.

The works point to both intimacy and immensity and invite questioning and wonder.

Barbara holds a BA from Minnesota State University Moorhead and a MFA from Parsons The New School for Design in New York City.

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Lot #37 Carl Oltvedt Minneapolis, Minnesota Evening Light, Lake Superior 2008 Oil on ragboard 6 x 8.5 inches unframed Range: $450 – 700

Carl Oltvedt: A significant portion of my creative work is done in direct response to the landscape. I do use my own photographs as supplementary reference material when issues of bad weather or the scale of a particular work come into play. The landscape of Minnesota— particularly near Mantrap Lake, Sugar Lake, the North Shore of Lake Superior, and some of the urban parks in the Twin Cities—has been the principal focus of my visual work during the past five years. Perhaps it is my northern European heritage, as I feel deeply connected to the light, textures, colors and contrasts of open and confined spaces experienced in those landscapes.

Ultimately, I strive to create a work that reflects my most intimate feelings about the experience of being in that place.

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Oltvedt taught at Minnesota State University Moorhead

from 1983 until retirement in 2015. He has worked as a guest artist in regional schools as well as abroad at the Glasgow School of Art and Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Scotland. His work has been exhibited at Groveland Gallery (Minneapolis) since 1978. Oltvedt’s paintings and drawings are included in the permanent collections of the Rourke Art Museum, Plains Art Museum, Honolulu Academy of Arts, North Dakota Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and the Minnesota Historical Society. He received a Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Fellowship in 1991, a Lake Region Arts Council/McKnight Fellowship in 2002, and a Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant for fiscal year 2014. His next solo exhibition will be at Groveland Gallery in March of 2016.

His paintings evolve from close observation, extraordinary draftsmanship, and small, painterly brush strokes.

Lot #38

Kim Fink Grand Forks, North Dakota AC/DC, 2009 Woodcut diptych 34 x 36 inches Range: $450 – 700

Kim Fink’s art explores issues of comparative culture and what is termed, “cultural memory,” implicit as well as explicit. He attempts to create a fusion of cultural realities that examine objective verses, subjective visions, and a synthesis between image and meaning, all of which define qualities that form us as individuals, as a group, and ultimately as a nation. The print AC/DC amply illustrates this. Born and raised in the American West, Fink is fascinated with its truly postmodern expressions of popular culture. Fink likes to quote the poet Richard Hugo’s observations of the West’s ancient newness: “. . . Out West . . . the only thing is neon . . . .”

Kim Fink has taught printmaking at the University of North Dakota since 1999. In 2000, Fink started Sundog Multiples as a means of augmenting teaching at UND for his printmaking students. The students are offered real and meaningful work experience with professional artists. To date, Sundog Multiples has editioned prints for such artists as Art Speigelman, Barton Lidice Benes, Dan Attoe, Mark Amerika, Daniel Heyman, Peter Kupe, Audrey Flack, Kim Abeles, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and Arturo Sangodval.

In the summer of 2015, Fink traveled throughout North Dakota with Philadelphia artist Daniel Heyman who is making portraits with image and words of American Indians. The drawings will be editioned by Sundog Multiples. The project is funded by a research grant from the University of North Dakota He received his BFA in Painting from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon, and his MFA in Printmaking at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. As part of his MFA work he spent several months studying in Italy. His recent credits include participating as Artist-in-Residence at the Center for Contemporary Printmaking in Norwalk, Connecticut, and the KALA Art Institute in Berkeley, California.

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Lot #39

Jessica Matson-Fluto Horace, North Dakota Interchange, 2014 Oil on canvas 18 x 10 inches Range: $400 – 600

Jessica Matson-Fluto: The work in the Auction,

Interchange, 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’s eye 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.

I began this series of paintings while I was pregnant with my identical twins. After having surgery for Twin-to-Twin Transfusion Syndrome, I was placed on bed rest for fourand-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. For example, the painting Interchange represents monochromatic silhouettes that alude to the disconnect between what appears to be male 38 and female figures and the landscape around them. The

artist leaves the viewer to imagine the rest of the story, or emotion, or hapenstance.

Jessica Matson-Fluto was born in Spokane, Washington, in 1980. She received her BFA from Minnesota State University Moorhead in 2006 after first taking an MA in painting, also from Moorhead. In 2008, she earned her MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, founded in 1805 as the first art school in the United States. It remains known for the figurative or representational work of its graduates. While there, Matson-Fluto studied with Bruce Samuelson, Dan Miller, William Scott Noel, Sydney Goodman, and Vincent Desiderio, among others. MatsonFluto occasionally teaches on the college level in the Fargo-Moorhead area. 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 keeps her studio and lives in Horace with her husband and twin sons.

Lot #40

Duane Perkins Winnipeg, Manitoba Vessel, 2015 Porcelain 13 by 7 inch diameter Range: $400 - 550

Lot #41

Duane Perkins has been working as a full-time studio artist for thirty years. Born in 1947 in Chicago, he lived there until he moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, to attend Bethel College where he majored in art and philosophy.

During his last year he needed another credit so enrolled in his first ceramic class. A few months later he graduated and moved to Winnipeg with his future wife and immediately set up his ceramic studio. In the summer of 2007, the Winnipeg Art Gallery celebrated Perkins’ sixtieth birthday with a large exhibition about which they wrote: The vessel form is a constant within Perkins’ production.

Wheel-thrown and then reduction-fired, the works are beautifully composed both formally and decoratively. The firing technique leads to muted and subtle color variations within the glazes, skillfully worked into abstracted designs recalling vegetation such as scattered leaves, twisting vines, and unopened buds. In other instances . . . the rich colors and patterns of oriental fabrics are suggested. Over

Duane Perkins Winnipeg, Manitoba Vessel, 2015 Porcelain 10 x 10 inch diameter Range: $400 - 550

the last decade, the dimensions of Perkins work have increased as he creates broad-rimmed platters, flared bowls and vases of soaring heights. In contrast to their considerable sizes, the vessels’ decoration mirrors the delicacy of the porcelain body, prompting one writer to characterize his work as noble vessel forms decorated with lush surfaces.

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Lot #42

Lisa York Gaithersburg, Maryland Ewers with glass and wooden shelf, 2014 Ceramic, glass, wood Shelf 20 x 25 x 9 inches Range: $400 – 800

Lisa York is a ceramic artist from the Washington, D.C. area. She also delves into wood, glass and bookmaking.

She received her BA in 2008 from Houghton College in Houghton, New York; a Master’s Certificate in the Ceramic Arts in 2010 from Hood College in Frederick, 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 40 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.

Lot #43

Dan Sharbono Minot, North Dakota Croquet, 2015 Found materials 26 x 21 x 7 inches Range: $300 – 400

Dan Sharbono is a Minot artist, designer, and free-

lance graphic designer. He is known for his threedimensional 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 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 northern plains town. It keeps us busy, makes us nuts, and 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 whole group.

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Lot #44

Kelly Thompson Grand Forks, North Dakota The Elements, 2015 Acrylic on canvas 48 x 36 inches Range: $800 – 1,300

Kelly Thompson’s rural landscapes of the northern plains straddle the lines of abstraction and realism, thus appealing to both modern and traditional collectors. Stark horizons, scattered with familiar colors and shapes and often depicted in trailing brushstrokes and iconic farm forms, boldly slice his canvases into segments of earth and sky, dominated by coal-black fertile fields beneath the endless, sweeping skies of the upper Red River Valley.

In his new painting, The Elements, Kelly Thompson leans even deeper into abstraction, showing blocks of iconic rural form and color, first giving viewers a pleasing 42 juxtaposition of elements—balanced and steadfast—while

leading them to a familiar and pleasing pastoral setting.

Thompson is a frequent exhibitor in North Dakota Museum of Art auctions. He has shown his work in group shows at the Dacia Gallery in New York City and at the Rourke Museum of Art in Moorhead. His solo exhibitions include the Third Street Gallery of Grand Forks and ecce Gallery of Fargo. He is a graduate of the University of North Dakota, is the father of three, and runs several businesses in Grand Fork, where he resides.

My artwork is never detail-oriented. My preference is to relate to all things—life and art—in broader strokes.

Zhimin Guan’s painting is sponsored by Dakota Harvest

Lot #45 Zhimin Guan Fargo, North Dakota Alley Near Home, China, 2012 Oil on canvas 40.5 x 39 inches 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 the expressionism, conceptualism and the aesthetics of Oriental philosophy. Each summer I return to China, where most recently I began to paint the streets and traditional houses of my childhood home in Anhui. The Province of Anhui is situated in the northwest of East China across the basins of the Yangtze River and the Huaihe River.

The houses depicted in the auction painting were built during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) in what has become known as the Anhui style, reflecting a combination of scholarly impulse and business. Six hundred years ago, Anhui was a wealthy center of shipping. Still today, this narrow, walking street is paved with maroon flagstones.

Two- or three-story buildings flank the street built in the local Anhui style of stone base, brick construction, and black tile roof. The thick walls are made of durable brick shingles coated with an earthen paste, not unlike adobe, but painted white. The layout of these buildings commonly is configured with shops in front while residences and workshops are to the rear.

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 in 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. Besides teaching, Guan devoted himself to his art practice. 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, while acting as 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.

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Ingrid Restemayer: I am a fiber artist and printmaker originally from North Dakota but now based in Minneapolis. My work is made up of recognizable imagery in the form of intricate etchings on handmade papers, successively collaged with fine printmaking papers and punctuated by hand-embroidery. The etching in Nature Scroll is an intimate study of eggs in a nest.

At times the work has a hint of storytelling with the use of my intaglio images as pseudo-illustrations for a kind of narrative when paired with code-like paragraph shapes formed from the hand-embroidery. My highly ordered, hand-stitched marks were born out of inspiration from my childhood in North Dakota where the landscape is a neverending steady horizon. In such an environment one learns to find excitement and inquiry in the slightest variation.

Though fiber is not typically a minimalist medium, my work emulates this peaceful beauty in its monotony while also conveying calmness through repetition. And yet, since the French knots are sewn by hand, the intrinsic variations in the stitches give evidence of humanity. This is one reason I stitch by hand, using needle and thread rather than by machine.

In this age of instant electronic communication, the age of getting anything instantly via internet downloads to your phone—sustainable tactics in art creation—things made by the human hand often have the power to promote further human interaction. I want my work to remind society that non-mechanized art and imagery is still achievable and still experiential.

Lot #46

Ingrid Restemayer Minneapolis, Minnesota Nature Scroll, 2011 Etching and hand-embroidery on paper 31 x 14 x 12 inches 44 Range: $2,800 – 3,200

Ingrid Restemayer’s painting is sponsored by William F. Wosick, MD Detail

Armando Ramos’s painting is sponsored by HB Sound & Light

Lot #47

Armando Ramos Valley City, North Dakota Glen Cose, 2013 Paper on wood 35 inch diameter, 2 inches deep Range: $700 - 1,200

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.

Ramos 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 highrelief sculptures, minimalist interventions, and absurd juxtapositions that question the largeness of these largerthan-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.

at Johnson, and at California State University at Long Beach. He is currently a Professor of Art and Chairman of the Department at Valley City State University. He 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 where he had a solo exhibition in the summer of 2015. It was part of the Art Makers Series funded by Dr. William Wosick which allows the Museum to support two artists a year and add a significant work from each to its permanent collection.

Ramos has been an artist in residence at The Richard Cartier Studios (Napa, California), Vermont Studio Center 45

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THE A R T S in s pire u s all .

The power of creativit y can do great things in a communit y.

That’s why Xcel Energy is proud to suppor t the Nor th Dakota Museum of A r t’s Autumn A r t Auction.

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A New Roof and Skylight For the Museum Dear Museum Friends, Galleries at the North Dakota Museum of Art were closed August 21 - September 21, 2015, to tackle deferred maintenance. The skylight was replaced as well as the original, 1907 ceramic roof tiles.

The Museum has struggled with protecting valuable art under a leaking roof for over two decades. State Senator Ray Holmberg of Grand Forks helped secure money for the Museum's roof repair, $190,000 in the 2013 Biennium and $760,000 in the recent legislative session.

Holmberg chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Long a friend of the Museum and a retired High School Counselor, he nurtured the development of the Museum's Rural Arts Initiative, which allows the Museum staff to take exhibitions and programs into communities throughout North Dakota. State funding from the recent legislative session awarded $430,000 for Rural Arts in the next biennium.

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The Museum’s Collection Continues to Grow

Alex Soth Kameron and Joseph, Houston, Texas, 2013 Photograph, Edition 8/9 50” x 40” Gift from Anonymous Donor

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The Museum’s Collection Continues to Grow

Robert Polidori View of Central Park and Trump Tower from the Time Warner Building, 2003 Photograph, Edition 1/10 60” x 50” 76

Gift from Anonymous Donor

North Dakota Museum of Art

The North Dakota Museum of Art is grateful to our sponsors who have given generously to guarantee that the arts flourish

North Dakota Museum of Art Board of Trustees

Board of Directors

Evan Anderson

Nancy Friese

Ganya Anderson

Bruce Gjovig

Julie Blehm, Chair

Bryan Hoime

W. Jeremy Davis

Laurel Reuter, (ad hoc)

Virginia Lee Dunnigan, Secretary Kristen Eggerling Susan Farkas Bruce Gjovig Darrell Larson Mary Matson Sally Miskavige, Treasurer Laurel Reuter

The 2015 Autumn Art Auction is underwritten by Patrons

Altru Advanced Orthopedics

Lynn Raymond Tammy Sogard Linda Swanston Kelly Thompson, Vice President Lois Wilde

and

Joshua Wynne

North Dakota Museum of Art Staff Matt Anderson Sungyee Joh Greg Jones Laurel Reuter, Director Heather Schneider Gregory Vettel Matthew Wallace, Deputy Director Brad Werner Part-time Staff Sara Anderson

HB Sound & Light Grand Forks, North Dakota

Foundation

Trevor Brandner Corinne Alphson, Emerita

Payton Cole

Kim Holmes, Emeritus

Sheila Dalgliesh

Douglas McPhail, Emeritus

Peter Donkers

Gerald Skogley, Emeritus

Chris Gust

Anthony Thein, Emeritus

Kathy Kendle Wayne Kendle Maggie Mclntyre Brady Niebolte Curtis Longtime Sleeping Sara White and over fifty volunteers

Front cover: Kim Fink, AC/DC, 2009, woodcut, 34 x 36 inches.

Back cover: Arnold Saper, The Dream, 1968, etching, artist proof, 13.5 x12.5 inches.

Autumn Art Auction Volume 17, 2015

North Dakota Museum of Art