A u t u m n A r t A u c t i o n

N o r t h D a k o t a M u s e u m o f A r t

KXJB TV

KVLY TV

Merrill Lynch

Prairie Public

The North Dakota Museum of Artis grateful to the following entities

who have given generously to guarantee that

the arts may flourish.

North Dakota Museum of Art

A U T U M N A r t A u c t i o nS a t u r d a y , O C T O B E R 1 4 , 2 0 0 6

Wine and hors d’oeuvres 6:30 pm

Auction begins at 8 pm

Autumn Art Auction is

Underwritten by

KXJB TV

KVLY TV

Merrill Lynch

Prairie Public

Auction PreviewSeptember 24 until auction time in the Museum galleries

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

Preview PartyTuesday, September 26, 7 pm, Museum Director Laurel Reuter

will lead an informal discussion about the work in the Auction.

patronsCapone’s

Chester Fritz Auditorium

Clear Channel Communications

East Grand Floral

Grand Forks Herald

High Plains Reader

Holiday Inn

Leighton Broadcasting

Office of Academic Affairs, UND

SponsorsCC Plus Interiors, Incorporated

Minnesota Public Radio

Waterfront Gallery, Northern Plumbing

SupportersAltru Health System

Avant

Blue Moose Bar & Grill

Bremer Bank

Bronze Boot

Community Bank of the Red River Valley

Kevin Register & Paula Anderson

Farmers Insurance Group, George Wogaman

Gate City Bank

Gustafson Gluek, PLLC

HB Sound and Light

Lakeview Inn & Suites

Lumber Mart

Ellen McKinnon

Museum Café

North Dakota Ballet Company

North Dakota Quarterly

Reeves Studio

Roadking Inn Columbia Mall

SupportersCancer Research, UND, Don and Mary Sens

Special Olympics

Suite 49

Summit Brewing Company

Dr. Curtis Tanabe, D.D.S.

Valley Bone and Joint

ContributorsAcme Electric

Alerus Financial

Axis Clinic, PC

Brown Corporations

Camrud, Maddock, Olson & Larson, Ltd.

Capital Resource Management

CEO Praxis, Inc.

Columbia Liquors

Fine Print of Grand Forks, Inc.

Frokjer - Petersen, Oral & Facial Surgeons

Gregory J. Norman Funeral Chapel

Happy Harry’s Bottle Shops

Letnes, Marshall, Swanson, & Warcup, Ltd.

James S. McDonald, D.D.S.

North Dakota Eye Clinic

Rite Spot Liquor Store

River City Jewelers, Inc.

Salon Seva

Super One

The Lighting Gallery

UBS Financial Services

Xcel Energy

Zimney Foster P.C.

AdvertisersBrady, Martz & Associates

Browning Arts

Burger King Restaurants of Grand Forks

Chad Caya Painting

Classic Jewelers

David C. Thompson Law Office

Dr. Paul Stadem, D.D.S.

Drees, Riskey & Vallager, Ltd.

Edward Jones, Mark Larsen

Forks Chem-Dry

Greater Grand Forks Symphony Orchestra

Greenberg Realty, Mary Adams

Greenberg Realty, Kelly Thompson

Hovet Roofing Inc.

Meland Architecture

Monarch Travel & Tours

Moosbrugger, Carter & McDonagh, PLLP

Northern Valley Obstetrics & Gynecology

Plaza Jewelers

Earl Pomeroy

Reichert Armstrong Law Office

Robert Vogel Law Office P.C.

Shaft, Reis & Shaft, Ltd.

Super Target

Tanglez, Holly Undlin

Valley Dairy Stores

Vilandre’s

Wall’s Medicine Center, Inc.

Buy local. Read the sponsor pages

to learn about those who

invest in the Museum.

Please return their investment. —John Foster, Chairman, Museum Board of Trustees

The Autumn Art Auction exhibition

is funded in part by

a general operating grant from the

Minnesota State Arts Board.

Burton Onofrio recently retired as Attending Neurosurgeon at the

Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, where he also served as

Professor of Neurosurgery in the Mayo Medical School. His first

job after retirement was as Senior Consultant for Pain Disorders,

Neurosurgical Service, Massachusetts General Hospital in

Boston. His training includes an M.D. degree from the Medical

College of Cornell University (1957); a surgical residency at the

New York Hospital Medical Center (1958); and a fellowship at

the Mayo Clinic in neurosurgery (1964), all of which resulted in

a life-time career at the Mayo Clinic.

As busy as his professional career has been, he has also lived a

wonderful life within the arts. It began when he married Judy

Onofrio, a self-taught potter who has emerged as a sculptor of

national stature. Judy was deeply involved in the Rochester Art

Center, and Burton soon joined the Board of Directors. Most

recently—another retirement job—he co-chaired the Capital

Campaign Building Committee of the Rochester Art Center. The

new building opened in the spring of 2004 with the central

gallery named in honor of Judy and Burton Onofrio—gifted by a

former patient.

In another corner of his life, Onofrio runs art auctions. For

twenty-six years he was the auctioneer of the Rochester Art

Center annual auction, most often organizing it as well. Both the

Northern Clay Center in Minneapolis and the University of

Minnesota Art Department have called upon him to serve as

auctioneer. For twelve years he has been the announcer of the

Rochester Art Center Art Festival. Onofrio’s days, however, are

spent in Judyland, the garden he created with his wife. And

finally, this is a man who loves animals, in particular his

menagerie of cats who have full run of the garden.

Burton Onofrio, Auctioneer Chris and Penny Wolf, Chairs

Chris and Penny Wolf, Chairs

Alan Mulhern

Heather and David Schall

Jill and Mark Sczepanski

Bonnie Sobolik

Holly Undlin

Ken Vein

Devera Warcup

Autumn Art Auction Committee

Penny and Chris Wolf reside in Grand Forks with their

two children. Keaton is in second grade at Kelly Elementary, and

Georgia is 1 year old. Penny is originally from Cavalier, ND. She

has been a cosmetologist for 16 years. The last 3 years, she has

been a salon coordinator. She is currently the salon coordinator

for Salon Seva, which recently opened in September. Chris grew

up in Grand Forks. He is a certified public accountant. He is

currently the Chief Financial Officer for Brown Corporations. He

is on the board of the Community Foundation of Grand Forks,

EGF, and region.

Photograph by Christy Doyea Photography

Rules of Auction

� Each registered guest will receive a bidding card as part of

the price of a ticket. Upon receiving the bidding card, each

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

the Rules of the Auction listed in this catalog.

� Absentee bidders will either leave their bids on an Absentee

Bid Form with Museum personnel in person or by phone, or

bid by phone the night of the auction. Absentee bidders, by

filling out the form, agree to abide by the Rules of the

Auction.

� Each bidder will use his or her own bidding number during

the auction.

� All sales are final.

� In September 2002 the Office of the North Dakota State Tax

Commissioner determined that the gross receipts from the

sales made at the Auction are subject to sales tax. State sales

tax is 5% of the total sale and the Grand Forks city tax is

1.75% of the first $2,500 of the sale. Out-of-state buyers

who have the work shipped to them will not be subject to

North Dakota sales tax.

� In the event of a dispute between bidders, the auctioneer

shall either determine the successful bidder or re-auction

the item in dispute.

� Purchasers may pay for items at any point following the

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

conclusion of the evening—unless other arrangements are in

place. Absentee bidders will be charged on the evening of

the auction or an invoice will be sent the next business day.

� Works of art in the auction have minimum bids placed on

them by the artist. This confidential "reserve" is a price

agreed upon between the artist and the North Dakota

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

As inhabitants of the Northern Great Plains, we struggle to ensure

that the arts are nourished, and that they flourish, because we

know that a vital cultural life is deeply essential to isolated

people. We have concluded that to study the arts is to educate

our minds, for through the arts we learn to make difficult

decisions based upon abstract and ambiguous information. This

is the ultimate goal of education. Furthermore, we have come to

value the arts because they make our hearts wise—the highest of

human goals. Therefore, in the most difficult of times, and in an

environment that might be perceived as alien to the visual arts,

we propose to build a world-class museum for the people of the

Northern Plains.

The North Dakota Museum of Art, by legislative act, serves as the

official art museum of the State of North Dakota. The Museum's

purpose is to foster and nurture the aesthetic life and artistic

expression of the people living on the Northern Plains. The

Museum will provide experiences that please, enlighten and

educate the child, the student and the broad, general public.

Specifically, the Museum will research, collect, conserve and

exhibit works of art. It will also develop programs in such related

arts as performance, media arts and music.

Museum Mission Statement

Each year we open the fall season by publishing

the Autumn Art Auction catalog. Gradually the catalogs are

accumulating into a historical record of art in our time and place.

If it weren’t for our important sponsors whose ads fill the last half

of this book, the catalog would not be published. Please take

your business to these important entities; thank them for their

significant contribution; and note how many of them are locally

owned and operated. Supporting cultural life is not just in the

interest of the “big boxes” but rather it has become the business

of the butcher, the baker and the keeper of bees.

This season we are introducing more artists from Winnipeg, our

closest large city and the center of a thriving art community. I

don’t remember a time when as many young, ambitious,

insouciant, and talented artists have sprung onto the scene at one

time. The late Caroline Dukes used to be my Winnipeg guide.

This year Aganetha Dyck invited artists to bring work by her

studio for me to see. Within several hours I met a dozen new

artists, many of whom I now introduce to you. You will remember

Aganetha’s work with bees that was exhibited in the Museum last

summer. You may also remember the cover of last year’s auction

catalog, a collaboration between Aganetha and her son Richard.

This year Richard has an earlier scan in the auction. To make it

he literally placed the lamb on the scanner bed and “took its

picture.”

We are introducing the photography of Katherine Keck, a new

member of the Museum Foundation Board of Directors who

comes from Los Angeles. Other artists include Guillermo

Guardia, a ceramist from Peru who is working on his second

master’s degree from the University of North Dakota. Guillermo,

or Memo as we know him, worked at the Museum this past

summer. Ewa Tarsia, now of Winnipeg, emigrated from Poland.

Milena Marinov is a Bulgarian who lives in Fargo and paints

traditional icons in the style of the Eastern Orthodox Church. I

included her because her painting is very beautiful and also

because it is exciting to have her in our midst.

Zhimin Guan grew up in China as did Aliana Au. And thrown

into the mix are artists born and raised in our region. For

example, this is the first auction to include the work of Todd

Hebert. He grew up in North Dakota, finished his BFA in art at

UND, and went on for his MFA at the Rhode Island School of

Design where Nancy Friese was his teacher. In 2005 he was

named Emerging Artist of the Year by the Aldrich Contemporary

Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Friese, also an artist with

work in the Auction, serves on the Museum’s Board of Trustees.

Our art community has flourished by welcoming ideas and

people from around the globe. We also need our museum

supporters and art buyers, those who enjoy looking and those

determined to live with art.

You may arrange to place bids in advance or to bid by phone

during the auction. Unashamedly, I invite you to help us make

this event as successful financially as it is historically and

aesthetically. And remember, we never ask our artists to donate.

They receive their minimum bid before the Museum takes a

dime. Only after you have done your fine work as buyers do the

Museum and the artists split the profits 50/50. Once again, thank

you to Burton Onorfio, our auctioneer who has also become our

friend, to our chairs and their committees, to Lois Wilde and

Barbara Hatfield who assisted with the catalog, and to the

wonderful museum staff who make it look so effortless.

Laurel Reuter, DirectorNorth Dakota Museum of Art

From the Museum Director

Tim Schouten’s untitled work comes from the series “In the

Absence of Horses” recently shown at the Ken Segal Gallery in

Winnipeg. Consisting of 100 small encaustic paintings, the series

evolved from a single image of a horse rolling in dirt. According

to Mariianne Mays, the work is based on a poem of the same

name by the late American poet and animal rights philosopher

Vicki Hearne. . . . Schouten’s fascination with horses and his

interest in the “historic relationship between man and horse” are

informed by Hearne’s writings on the inner moral lives of

domestic animals.

The painter grapples happily with the untamed aspects of his

subject matter. As Schouten reminds us in his artist’s statement,

horses—except for their limited, specialized use in rodeos and

ranches—are now more frequently present in legend than in

reality. So a significant aspect of his work lies in honoring the

vitality of these animals that were once domesticated for human

use and then fell out of fashion.

In his encaustic technique, rather than using the wax and pigment

for inlay, Schouten applies a mixture of oils, beeswax, and

microcystalline in thick brush and hot iron work. He also works

back into the pieces with various heating implements and other

tools. The result is lush and ambient, contingent on the play of

light for depth and substance, or fragile translucence.

Schouten continues, The encaustic technique uniquely confers

the strength, vigour and intensity of the horse’s emblematic

movement. Revealing as they are in their energy and presence,

the figures are simultaneously ethereal—as though resisting

seizure, whether literal or imagined. Hooves circle the air,

muscles slacken and contract, spindly, elegant legs never betray

the mass they support. Yet their presence welcomes us to a

physical reality more insistent than memory or philosophy, rife

and rich and wild with the immediacy of life. (Border Crossing,

Vol. 24, No. 1, Issue 97, 2005)

Tim Schouten was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and lives with

his wife and horses on a farm between Winnipeg and Lake

Winnipeg to the north. He studied art in Toronto, first at Arts Sake,

Inc. and in 1990 at the Toronto School of Art.

Lot #1

Tim Schouten

Petersfield, Manitoba

Untitled (In the Absence of Horses)

Encaustic on plywood

12 x 11 inches

2006

Range: $500 - 700

Lot #2

Dave BrittonGrand Forks, North Dakota

McVille, North Dakota

35mm Fujichrome, June 29, 1998

Image 13.75 x 21 inches

Range: $200 – 300

Guillermo Guardia was born in Lima, Peru, in 1975. He

completed a BFA in Industrial Design at the Universidad Católica

del Peru in 1999. As part of his studies he took a ceramics class

and found he loved it. Soon he was applying to graduate

programs in ceramics in the United States. In 2005 he completed

his MFA in Ceramics from the University of North Dakota and is

currently enrolled at UND in a second graduate degree program,

seeking a Master of Science in Industrial Technology.

Guardia comes for an ancient ceramic culture of pre-Columbian

Peru. From the time he was little he was steeped in the images

and materials of those early potters. From his family, his teachers,

television, and classroom visits to museum, he learned to

venerate the early traditions. 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 B.C. to A.D. 600,

known especially for its pottery vessels modeled into naturalistic

human and animal figures.

Guardia intuitively carries the past forward in his ceramics,

preferring narrative work based in the figure, unglazed and

burnished surfaces that allow the clay itself to dominate the

work. The work in the exhibition, Johnnie, breathes with life,

both contemporary and ancient.

Lot #3

Guillermo Guardia

Grand Forks, North Dakota

and Lima, Peru

Johnnie, 2003

High fire ceramics

18.5 high x 7 wide x

11 inches deep

Range: $200 - 250

Dave Britton grew up around old grain elevators owned

and operated by his father Clarence Britton. These North Dakota

elevators were in Keith—six miles east of Devils Lake—Kempton,

Merrifield, and Northwest Mills Elevator in Grand Forks—a

partnership of Clarence, Earl Kurtz, and Eugene Ellingrud, which

was sold to North Dakota Mill and Elevator in 1953.

For two summers in 1958 and 1959, Britton traveled with his dad

as he sold Swenko barley shakers to elevators in eastern North

Dakota and western Minnesota. During his high school years, he

drove the Merrifield Grain Co. truck, picking up grain his dad had

bought from various elevators in the same area. He has fond

memories of several of these old elevators, their managers, and

their communities.

According to Britton, the elevators are a dying symbol of our

prairie heritage. They were an integral part of the economy, an

informal social gathering place for farmers, and reference points

on our flat prairie landscape. The old wooden, cribbed-

construction elevators became inefficient and are being

destroyed rapidly.

Britton, who started Britton Transport in 1980 in the basement of

his home in Grand Forks, has photographed over 1,000 elevator

locations on the plains, some of which no longer exist. This may

well prove to be one of the significant systematic records of an

important architectural archtype of early twentieth-century

Lot #4

Ewa TarsiaWinnipeg, Manitoba

Something Undeniable

1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Mixed media

Each 10 x 10 inches, 2006

Range: $800 – 1,100

Sponsored by Merrill Lynch

Ewa Tarsia is a Polish artist who became a Canadian citizen

in 1995. The success of her artistic career in Canada will be

celebrated in June 2007 when she will be officially inducted

into the Royal Academy of Arts. Whereas she works in diverse

media including painting, sculpture, tapestry, landscape design,

and drawing, she is known internationally as a printmaker. She

has showed in international print biennials in Spain, France,

Poland, Austria, United States, England, Germany, and Korea.

The signature work included in this auction represents the

evolution of her printmaking into personal techniques that meld

the actual printmaking plate into the final work of art.

According to Kristen Pauch-Nolin, Ewa Tarsia suggests that it is

the fundamental elements of her process—the manipulation of

materials and building of textural surfaces—that motivate her

rather than the appearance of her finished pieces.

Tarsia’s position is not entirely unexpected. As a printmaker, she

is part of a tradition of artists who acknowledge that their

plates—the pieces of metal, plastic, wood and linoleum that they

print from—are the true objects of their affection. Covered with

marks, lines and subtle traces of colour, printing plates are often

as interesting as the images pulled from them.

The five-part suite in this auction reflects her current practice of

challenging standard printmaking practices by transforming

hundreds of her Plexiglas plates into three-dimensional

installations. Each plate is visually complex, offering a fully

active and engaged surface that, once transformed into

sculpture, reveals both the artist’s obsessive process and the

beauty that motivates her to continue.

“The memories of every decision, choice and thought are

inscribed on my printing plates, and I seek to share that

dimension with my audience,” says Tarsia. “I will elevate creative

activities to the rank of the finished work to open the energy of

my procedures. Through this revelation, I seek to push my work

beyond the product into a place where it can live.”

Tarsia describes herself not as a typical printmaker, but as an

artist who uses her love of the techniques and processes involved

in printmaking to share her interactions with the ever-changing

environment with her audiences. As an environmentalist, she

sees the irony of using plastic and paper to create images that

celebrate the beauty of the natural world. “It reflects our society,”

she says of the work. “Plastic is everywhere.”

Formally trained in painting and sculpture at the School of Fine

Arts in Poland, she began printmaking when she arrived in

Winnipeg in 1991. For the past 14 years, Tarsia has been working

full time as a printmaker and painter. Her specific area of interest,

monoprinting, involves the creation of a one-of-a-kind image on

a smooth surface such as Plexiglas that is eventually transferred

onto paper.

There is rawness and unbridled energy that comes, regardless of

medium, from her complete preoccupation with process. On her

printing plates the energy is manifested in intensely manipulated

surfaces. She describes building them up, scratching into their

surfaces and then applying layers of colour. “It is a sickness,” she

half-jokes, “an uncontrollable compulsion medicated only by the

production of more art.”

Ewa Tarsia will have a solo exhibition at the North Dakota

Lot #5

Milena marinovFargo, North Dakota

The Last Supper

Egg tempera on oak panel

with glazes

17 x 18.5 inches

Range: $1,600 - 1,800

Milena Marinov was born in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. She

graduated in 1982 from Dupnitza College of Education,

Bulgaria, with a degree in graphic art. Her life direction changed

when she took her first job as an art conservator with the

Bulgarian National Institute of Cultural Heritage and the Gallery

of Old Art and fell in love with orthodox religious art. Milena has

work in collections throughout the world, including North

Dakota. She maintains her studio and lives in Fargo with her

husband, who teaches at North Dakota State University, and their

two sons.

In religious art, an icon is an artistic representation or symbol of

anything considered holy and divine, such as paintings,

sculpture, or mosaics, sometimes quite small in size, generally

regarded by their users as a physical manifestations of the thing

represented. Icons are used particularly in Eastern Orthodox

churches and places of worship.

Orthodox Christians venerate the icons in order to show honor

and respect for the people and events depicted. They do not

worship icons, for the same council that defended their use, the

Second Council of Nicaea, forbade their worship.

Marinov utilizes the antique method of egg tempera painting,

which uses the yolk as a strong, transparent binder, and dry

pigments for color. In her work, she uses such hard woods as

walnut, cherry, or oak. She impregnates the wood with a diluted

glue adhesive containing zinc oxide and titanium oxide,

traditionally rendered from rabbit skin and fish bones. A

completed drawing is transferred from a sheet of paper to the

surface. Areas where 23-karat gold leaf will be applied are

treated with a Pompeii red glue to fix the gold leaf.

The artist adheres to the strict guidelines of the cannon of icon

painting, which can carry very specific instructions. For example,

in painting “Jesus Enters Jerusalem,” Christ must be riding a white

Lot #6

Zhimin GuanMoorhead, Minnesota

Violinist

Acrylic on paper

39 x 25 inches, 2006

Range: $800 - 1,200

Sponsored by

the High Plains Reader

Zhimin Guan was born in China in 1962. He started to

paint when he was nine years old, influenced by his father,

Chintian Guan, a traditional Chinese calligrapher and ink

painter. Zhimin received rigorous training in calligraphy and ink

painting before he was fifteen years old. At the same time, he

developed a strong interest in the Chinese philosophy of Taoism

and in ancient Chinese poetry. During his BFA studies at Fuyang

Teachers College in China, he concentrated on oil painting and

again received rigorous training in drawing and painting in the

Western classical style. From 1985 to 1994, he taught painting,

drawing, and design at Dalian Institute of Industrial Design in

Dalian, China. Besides teaching, Guan devoted himself to his art

practice.

When he lived in the northeastern Chinese city of

Dalian, Guan was only five minutes from the Yellow

Sea. Then in the spring of 1995, Guan came to the

United States, driven by the desire to examine the

complexities of Western contemporary arts. After

three years, he earned his MFA in painting and

drawing at Fort Hays State University, Kansas. Guan

has successfully blended his academic training in

visual art with the aesthetics of Eastern philosophy.

As an artist, he is deeply committed to unifying the

West with the East in his own distinctive manner—a

new synthesis of technique underpinned by a

holistic philosophy. Today Zhimin Guan is an

Associate Professor of Art at Minnesota State

University Moorhead.

Guan's art has been exhibited throughout China and

the United States in such institutions as the China

National Art Gallery in Beijing; China Academy of

Fine Arts Museum, Hangzhou; Singapore Asian Arts

Gallery; the Salmagundi Club, New York; CCC/USA,

Philadelphia; The Minneapolis Institute of Fine Arts;

Dunton Gallery in Chicago; Fraser Gallery,

Washington, DC; Museum of Southwest Texas,

Corpus Christi; Plains Art Museum, Fargo; and the

North Dakota Museum of Art.

Meera Margaret Singh is a Winnipeg photographer

who explores the dynamic that exists between people and their

environment. While looking at the blurred space between fiction

and reality, she tries to blend the narrative flow of cinema and

the stilled moment of a fixed image.

You Left (and then you never left again) is from Meera’s most

recent series of C-prints wherein she creates an atmosphere that

elicits a sense of loss or vulnerability in relationships, be that

between individuals and/or the spaces they occupy.

Working with a large format camera, Meera develops her

narratives using elements of a material culture (the clothing one

wears, the art on one’s walls, the trees in one’s garden) as clues

to interpreting her characters. Notions of tableau, portraiture,

and staged photography are evoked. Acknowledging that we live

in a society that is consumed by reality television and obsessed

with social trespass, Meera creates a mise-en-scene that allows

viewers access into others’ spheres.

Meera Margaret Singh is a native Winnipeger who holds

Bachelors degrees in Anthropology and Fine Arts from the

Lot #7

Meera Margaret SinghMontreal, Quebec

You Left (and then you never left me)

C-print, 2004

30 x 40 inches

Range: $800 - 1,200

University of Manitoba. She was recently involved in a Manitoba

Association of Women Artists mentorship with ceramicist Grace

Nickel. Meera currently resides in Montreal and is attending

Concordia University’s Master of Fine Arts photography program.

She was included in the Winnipeg Art Gallery’s Supernovas

exhibition in 2006, which showcased the work of twenty-nine

K.D. Thornton works with technologies: mechanical,

electronic, biological and any others she might find interesting.

Generally, her work addresses social issues, conditions or

problems (consumerism, pharmaceuticalism, sexism, mortality,

denial, and taxonomies), often targeting these structures through

humour and subversion.

She has a BFA (honors) from the University of Manitoba and an

MFA (Art + Technology) from the School of the Art Institute of

Chicago. Her sculptural and installation works have been

exhibited in Europe, Canada and the United States, as well as

interactive works online, since 1994.

In response to the observation that in nature, cats generally do

not indulge in beef, lamb, tuna, etc., particularly grilled, roasted,

or with rice, the artist created a new line of cat food. The 23

flavors of Fresh Prey catfood are derived from creatures cats

might actually consume, whether in the wild or domestic life.

Lot #8

K.D. Thornton Winnipeg, Manitoba

Fresh Prey

23 cat food cans, provisions intact, with

digital labels, 2004

Range: $1,300 - 1,500

frisky field mouse

tasty gecko

cardinal sin

chipmunk treat

simply sparrow

international mole

plump red robin

cordon blue jay

nevermore raven

roadkill crow

tender tree frog

oriole interrupted

cockroach snack

humble wren

chinchilla dinner

little brown bat

wish upon a starling

escaped lab rat

forbidden budgie

beloved hamster

gerbilicious

glittering goldfish

Lot #9

Bill HarbortMinot, North Dakota

Coming Soon!!

Mixed-media collage

38 x 26 x 3 inches, 2006

Range: $500 - 800

Bill Harbort was born and raised just north of New York

City. After receiving his BFA and MA degrees from Syracuse

University, he pursued a career in commercial design. Over the

years he worked as a package designer for Revlon, as the art

director for a children’s educational software company, and as a

freelance automobile illustrator. During the 1960s and 1970s,

Harbort self-published thirty-one limited edition art prints of

American muscle cars. While working on the East Coast, Harbort

was a member of the New York Society of Illustrators. He became

widely recognized for his automotive airbrush work, which

appeared in over twenty-five different automotive publications.

Tiring of commercial work, he moved to North Dakota in 1996

to teach graphic design and illustration at Minot State University.

Gradually Harbort, the commercial artist, began to explore fine

art. He states, Paint-by-numbers, coupons and clip art are just a

few ingredients often found in our popular culture landfill. Being

a college professor has given me time to explore my painting, still

driven by pop culture words/images and messages. Each collage

is sealed with a yummy coating of poured-on clear-cast plastic.

My paintings may be tragic, comical or simply aesthetically

pleasing.

Melanie Rocan is a member of the Winnipeg artists

collective Two Six. According to Robert Enright (writing about

the Winnipeg artists’ collective Two Six in The Globe and Mail

11/12/03), Melanie Rocan is the only female member of the

group—and the youngest—and she casts a delicate shadow

across the testosterone-sprayed landscape inhabited by her

fellow two-sixers. Her work is mixed in its media: an assortment

of stretched-fabric pieces, luscious oil and acrylic paintings and

darling water colour occupy different parts of the gallery. What

they have in common is a cheeky whimsicality where a dress is

saved from prettiness by solid clothespins that hold it in place,

or where the barest whisper of a wine glass is abused by the

contents of a gorgeous ashtray smeared on the same filmy table

top. And her tiny watercolors—which she considers paintings—

are confections.

Born in 1980, this bilingual Franco-Manitoban graduated from

the University of Manitoba with a Bachelor of Fine Arts Honors

Degree with a thesis in painting. She has recently been

nominated as a semi-finalist in the 8th annual RBC Canadian

Painting Competition. Her work is included in a group

exhibition traveling to the following galleries: the Museum of

Contemporary Art (Toronto), Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery

(Kitchener, ON), Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal

Lot #10

Melanie RocanWinnipeg, Manitoba

I’m so cold

Watercolor on Stonehenge paper

9.25 x 7.5 inches, 2006

Range: $400 - 600

(Montreal), Art Gallery of Calgary (Calgary), Contemporary Art

Gallery (Vancouver). In 2006 she was part of a group exhibition

at the Winnipeg Art Gallery titled Supernova, and a Too-Sicks

exhibition at gallery 1.1.1., at the University of Manitoba. In

2005, she was part of an exchange program with the Glasgow

School of Art in Scotland, and in 2004-2005 she completed her

first year in the Master in Fine Arts program at Concordia

University. In 2004, Melanie had an exhibition titled Familiar

Places at the Paul Petro Art Contemporary Art Gallery, in Toronto.

In 2003 she was part of the Young Winnipeg Artists group

exhibition at Plug-In Institute of Contemporary Art and has

shown work in the Too-Sicks collective show À La Planche, at

the Annex Gallery in Winnipeg. In 2001-2002 she was the artist-

in-residence for the Franco-Manitoban Cultural Center, in Saint-

Boniface, and in the beginning of her thesis year she had a solo

show entitled Little Dream at the Center which completed her

residency. In 2007 she will be part of a Too-Sicks group show at

the Harvey Levine Gallery, in Los Angeles.

Lot #11

Jessie PalczewskiSpearfish, South Dakota

Past to Present, 2006

Digital photographs, Japanese paper, thread

63 x 68 and hangs 10 inches off the wall,

Range: $2,500 - 3,000

Sponsored by Chester Fritz Auditorium

Jessie Palczewski, an enrolled member of the Cheyenne

River Sioux Tribe of South Dakota, was born in Eagle Butte, South

Dakota, and raised in Reeder, North Dakota. She received her BS

in Fine Arts in 2003 from Black Hills State University and her

MFA from the University of North Dakota in 2006.

According to the artist, While holding on to the tradition of fine

art, I wanted to explore the sentimental qualities that exist in the

craft of quilting. Consequently, I decided to investigate this idea

further by using an unlikely material, paper. I wanted to

communicate a level of fragility that relates to my feelings by

drawing upon the transparent-look of the paper. The paper makes

the quilts completely non-utilitarian, but functional as a

communicator of emotion. Furthermore, the medium that I have

chosen allows me to work in the areas of painting and

printmaking, which are the foundations of my artistic identity.

My quilts express personal experiences from both my American

Indian and European backgrounds. They tell stories that words

alone cannot accurately depict. Quilts are narrations that

transform over time carrying a legacy of the past and adapting to

the present, which gives them a timeless quality. As an artist in

search for personal growth, quilts have been my outlet for life

occurrences that are otherwise hard to communicate.

Lot #13

Duane PerkinsWinnipeg, Manitoba

Untitled

Porcelain

14.5 x 16.5 inches, 2006

Range: $1,400 – 1,800 pair

Marley Kaul maintains his studio in Bemidji, Minnesota.

His paintings continue to explore his surroundings including the

lush farmlands of southern Minnesota, the pinelands and prairies

of northern Minnesota and the Dakotas, and images from his

travels. Kaul blends personal symbols with social and political

issues, transforming simple images into complex metaphorical

statements. This work is at once autobiographical and a social

commentary on daily life.

"China Song: Generations Uncounted" is one of several new

paintings that relate to the prairie. The ring-necked pheasant was

brought to the West Coast at the close of the 18th century. It

made its way to the Dakotas where it thrives like many other

immigrants. The prairie embodies birth and rebirth, a place to

meditate on our relationships to the earth, a symbol of faith, time

and acceptance of hardship.

Marley’s wife Sandy serves on the North Dakota Museum of Art

Board of Trustees. One day in the deep of winter Sandy came to

a late afternoon meeting, and Marley drove over from Bemidji

with her. While waiting, he looked at the exhibitions, browsed in

the campus bookstore, and then drove northwest of Grand Forks

to sketch. When Museum Director Laurel Reuter saw this

painting, she deemed it the best capturing of light streaming

through sleet and frost she had ever seen. “Magnificent!”

Lot #12

Marley KaulBemidji, Minnesota

China Song: Generations Uncounted

Egg tempera / acrylic wash on birch panel

20 x 60 inches, 2006

Range: $2,900 - 3,900

Sponsored by Clear Channel

Lot #14

Duane PerkinsWinnipeg, Manitoba

Untitled

Porcelain

14.5 x 13.5 inches, 2006

Range: $700 - 900

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.

He has looked carefully over the years, citing John Glick and

Don Reitz as influences along with Ralph Bacerra and Luckman

Glasgow. Perkins sees his work as visual rather than idea-based.

His goal is to make a beautiful object, preferably in one firing.

For example, to decorate the surface of the magnificent

porcelain urns in this auction, the artist begins with slips that

are then glazed. He then paints on the decoration using slips,

glazes, and oxides that he has formulated. A final coat of glaze

prepares the object for firing.

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

London in the Essex countryside. From age fourteen through

nineteen, Adam sketched with watercolors because I could take

them anywhere. At about sixteen, I noticed there were a lot of

things that could be painted on—and I did. He graduated from

Newcastle upon Tyne with a BFA in 1986 but not before studying

for a year at a wood restoration school in Florence, Italy, and

working with a Newcastle blacksmith for six months.

While in college he realized he was a failed watercolor painter. I

put too much paint on so I would have to give my pictures a bath

in the tub. Finally the Department of Painting asked him to leave

just as the Department of Sculpture accepted him. The Sculpture

Department was grounded in the tradition of the British Modern

School—Sir Anthony Caro, Henry Moore, and most importantly,

Barbara Hepworth, whom his parents had taken him to visit

when he was a child. Her studio in Cornwall looked like my

bedroom so I figured there was hope.

Kemp earned an MFA degree from the University of North

Dakota where he learned to cast bronze in the new foundry. In

addition to paintings, Kemp’s work includes a commissioned

wall mosaic at the Hotel Donaldson in Fargo (summer 2003);

murals at the International Center at the University of North

Dakota (2002); School of Fish created by Kemp and thirty-one

six-through twelve-year-old children enrolled in the 2002

Museum of Art Summer Arts Camp; a set for a play, Flood of

Memories by Francis Ford, based on the North Dakota Museum

of Art Oral History Project following the 1997 flood; and Café

Kosmos, a meeting place for high school students which Kemp

took on as a personal mission after the flood. He and the high

school students turned the two-floor building into a work of art.

Kemp continues to teach popular week-long sessions in the

Lot #15

Adam KempGrand Forks, North Dakota

Dog in Snowfall

Oil on wood panel

41 x 46 inches, 2005

Range: $500 - 700

Sponsored by KVLY TV

Lot # 16

Adam KempGrand Forks, North Dakota

Snowfall

Oil on oval wood panel

31 x 66 inches, 2005

Range: $500 - 700

Sponsored by KVLY TV

Barbara Hatfield: How to write about drawing? It’s

visual. It’s kinesthetic. It’s immediate and, when one is fortunate,

fully engaging. The everyday filters fall away. Liveliness and

immediacy blossom. There is no separation between drawer and

drawing. One is simply drawing. The ‘…ing’ is important, that

motion. When tired, we often seek stillness, but the motion in

drawing is in concert with stillness and can be remarkably

refreshing. I hope the work produces a similar experience for

the viewer: a moment of recognition, a willingness to give a bit

of time and allow oneself to be in the drawing.

Raised on a farm near Thompson, North Dakota, Hatfield has

also lived in Minnesota, New Mexico, Colorado and New York.

She is active in numerous facets of art with experience in

teaching, curating, and administration. Hatfield earned a

Bachelor’s degree from Minnesota State University in Moorhead

and a Master of Fine Arts in Painting from Parsons School of

Design, New York. Her work is in collections in Japan, France,

Switzerland and the United States.

Lot #17

Barbara HatfieldThompson, North Dakota

In the circle with Hokusai

Ink on paper

30 x 22inches, 2006

Range: $1,600 – 1,800

Lot # 18

Vance GellertMinneapolis, Minnesota

Cloud, Lake of the Isles, 1998/2005

Image: 30 x 30 inches on 34 x 34 sheet

Range: $1,000 - 1,800

Sponsored by Holiday Inn

Vance Gellert is both a photographer and a curator.

Whereas the Lake of the Isles photograph in this auction

represents his black and white work, both his color photography

and his curatorial work were recently showcased in the North

Dakota Museum of Art.

For nearly three years Gellert traveled through Minnesota and

North Dakota in search of self-taught artists who are compelled

to practice their craft. His photographs of the artists and the

landscapes in which they live, accompanied by a piece of each

artists’ work, came together in the exhibition Real: Artists and

Landscape which closed on September 19, 2006.

Vance Gellert earned a BA in physiology and a PhD in

pharmacology, both at the University of Minnesota, before

realizing that he really wanted to be a photographer. He

returned to school at Virginia Commonwealth University in

Richmond and finished an MFA in photography in 1984. In 1989

he became co-founder and director of the Minnesota Center for

Photography, a position he held until 2003. He resigned to

become a full-time photographer.

He is currently working on a project in Bolivia. According to

Gellert, a licensed pharmacologist, his goal is to foster

understanding of the contributions of shamanic ritual and belief

systems to medicinal plant efficacy that may hopefully lead to

novel new research protocols. The actual product would be a

photographic book containing conceptually created portraits of

Lot #19

Dan JonesFargo, North Dakota

Murder of Crows

Oil on canvas

48 x 48 inches, 2006

Range: $2,600 - 3,600

Sponsored by

Office of Academic Affairs, UND

Dan Jones, who lives and works in Fargo, is among North

Dakota's few artists able to make a living from their art. He has

long practiced plein aire painting, gathering with a group of

fellow artists and going to the countryside to sketch and paint.

The landscape of the Red River basin provides him with endless

subjects. According to Museum Director Laurel Reuter, “this

wonderful painting is a departure for Dan. He has moved closer

into the landscape, focusing upon living creatures instead of

taking the long view of the region’s idyllic landscape with its

rolling hills and running streams. The crows in the painting take

on individual personalities. They are of this world but also not of

this world, suggesting an almost Asian approach to landscape.”

The artist’s paintings are included in many museum, corporate

and private collections including the National Endowment for the

Arts, the Plains Art Museum in Fargo, and the Rourke Art

Madelyn Camrud has donated all proceeds from the sale of this painting to the Museum of Art

Madelyn Camrud says, Most of my landscape paintings

are about climate and weather, the drama of which I learned to

know while growing up in rural North Dakota. I think the most

successful pieces offer the viewer more sky than ground as if to

draw the eye upward from the horizon line. This reminds me of

the way we, while living on the farm, looked at the sky to try and

figure out what the day's weather would be. In this piece I

believe 'the weather' is already taking place. I'm not exactly

sure what it is, though there seems to be a strong presence of

wind.

In her current landscape series, Madelyn begins with a

photograph of the land, focusing on the horizon line which

holds the most interest for her—a flat land with few trees and a

great view of the sky. From the horizon line and its trees, she

builds up and down with paper collage, scraping the edges with

ceramic paste, while attempting to make the borders of the

photograph disappear on the board. The first paint layers are

acrylic; an umber glaze makes the final coat. Intermingled are

images of words, for Madelyn Camrud is also a practicing poet.

Lot # 20

Madelyn CamrudGrand Forks, North Dakota

Early Summer, 2005

Acrylic, graphite, oil paint and

varnish on paper

29 x 24 inches

Range: $600 - 800

Sponsored by Prairie Public

A North Dakota native, Camrud was born in Grand Forks, and

received degrees in visual arts and creative writing from the

University of North Dakota. She first practiced visual art, then

studied it, and finally worked, surrounded by it, at the North

Dakota Museum of Art. She, in fact, founded this live auction in

order to celebrate the artists in our region while helping the

museum survive financially. Camrud also inaugurated the

Museum Benefit Dinner and Silent Auction, the Membership

Program, and the Docent Program. Meanwhile, she was

introduced to poetry, and spent two decades working on poems.

This House is Filled with Cracks was published by New Rivers

Press, Minneapolis, in 1994. She has a second chapbook of

poems forthcoming from Dacotah Territory Press, Moorhead

Gretchen Bederman’s art is dominated by horses and

women. According to the artist, these images symbolize and

visually animate the elements of earth and its relationship to fire,

air, and water. She combines memories of actual places with a

mixture of reality, myth, and dream. She uses the figure in both

human and animal form to tell the story. Bederman grew up in

Houston, Texas, and settled in North Dakota after a 1980 visit.

She completed her undergraduate work at Minnesota State

University Moorhead and received an MFA in painting from the

University of North Dakota in 1996. While in Grand Forks, she

served as a docent for the North Dakota Museum of Art and

worked as an Artist-in-Residence at Lake Agassiz Elementary

School.

Since 1992, Bederman has been in twenty-nine group shows and

twenty-two solo exhibitions in North Dakota and Minnesota.

Over the course of the last year she had a solo exhibition at

Fargo’s North Dakota State University, a two-person show at the

Spirit Room in Fargo, and a joint exhibition with Walter Piehl in

Miles City, Montana. She was a visiting artist at NDSU and taught

at the North Dakota Museum of Art Children’s Summer Camp. In

September 2006 Bederman moved to Glendive, Montana, where

she will head up the art department at Dawson Community

College.

Lot #21

Gretchen BedermanBismarck, North Dakota

Horse

Oil on canvas

48 x 72 inches, 2002

Range: $1,500 – 1,800

Sponsored byGrand Forks Herald

Lot #22

Brent BrannifMinot, North Dakota

Tiger Beat

Color pencil and photo transfer

30 x 40 inches, 2006

Range: $500 - 700

Lot #23

Cyrus SwannPine River, Minnesota

Inverted Invested

Salt and soda-fired stoneware

26 x 9 x 3 inches, 2006

Brent Brannif makes colored pencil drawings and pop

music. Tiger Beat, the work in the auction, draws from both.

Tiger Beat magazine debuted in September of 1965 as a bubble

gum rag consulted by 12-year-old girls interested in seeing

pictures of their music heroes, finding out what was cool to

wear, what to think, how to handle the hip scene.

Brannif, who grew up in Devils Lake, North Dakota, credits his

first art teacher, Central High School’s Bob Moore, with teaching

him “that an artist should always be truthful to himself in his art.”

In this work he looks back at himself in childhood, cocooned in

the sleeping bag he “absolutely loved.”

He began music about the same time he discovered art, that is,

he picked up a guitar and began to play. Soon Brent was in

college at Minot Sate University; Walter Piehl was teaching

drawing and painting; and he was exploring electronic music on

the side.

Today Brannif continues to live in Minot where he works as

technician at the local television station. For seven years he

tuned away from colored pencils, replacing them with oil and

canvas. Gradually he migrated back and continues today making

his strongest work in that medium. He also continues as a

rhythm guitarist but acknowledges that it difficult to find other

musicians interested in creating their own music. Most want to

play cover in bars as a way of making a living.

Art is the glue that holdsmusic together.

Cyrus Swann is a multi-media artist who focuses on three-

dimensional ceramics, moving from pottery, to sculpture, to

installation. According to the artist, my work explores the depths

of form and surface available in the medium but also addresses

issues of mass production, consumer waste, and the

comparative value of objects. I am also interested in pushing my

technical ability. I have a commitment to tradition and craft

although I don't feel bound by rigid definitions or parameters.

Swann, now 27, received a BFA from Bemidji State University in

2002 after which he moved back to Pine River, Minnesota, to

establish his studio. He had a solo exhibition at the North

Dakota Museum of Art in the summer of 2006, at which time his

functional work was featured in the Museum Shop.

Inverted Invested is part of an ongoing series exploring the idea

of the bowl as shape, and as a starting point for sculptural forms.

In this piece the forms are both opened in and closed out,

inviting and shut in at the same time. This work, while

suggesting human behavior, can also be viewed as abstract form

and surface. According to the artist, I want the ceramic material

to speak and am interested in drawing attention to pottery’s

ability to communicate beyond function.

Lot #24

katie McCleeryTravis City, Michigan

Untitled

Raku with gold leaf

18.5 x 15 x 5 inches, 2005

Range: $300 - 500

Katie McCleery retired from the University of North

Dakota at the end of the 2004-05 academic year, having taught

ceramics since 1973. She spent fourteen of those years carving

architectural murals in brick, working closely with the Hebron

Brick company, North Dakota's oldest and only functioning

brickyard. Two years ago she retired from carving brick because

of the wear and tear on my body. It's very heavy work and

although I enjoyed it and was proud to have had the opportunity

to do a good number of carvings, it became clear that, if I wanted

to continue to work as an artist, I would have to make some

changes. I've always done other works as well as the carved

murals. I've done a fair amount of work in raku since it is fast and

fun and have explored slip casting as well as continued working

in stoneware. Recently I took on an architectural restoration job

and got some experience with flexible mold systems and a new

casting material. I like learning new things and having choices

about how I work and what kind of work I do. McCleery’s next

project is to build her own house in Michigan.

Lot #25

Jon SolingerMoorhead, Minnesota

Shelterbelts, Suite of eight prints

Digital and film

Each 11 x 8.5 sheet , 2000 - 2004

Range: $700 - 1,000

Sponsored by KXJB TV

Jon Slinger of Moorhead began photographing tree claims

and shelterbelts around the turn of the century, commissioned by

the North Dakota Museum of Art and funded by Nodak Electric

Foundation. He headed out with his black and white, square-

format camera to capture fully mature shelterbelts, originally

planted after the Dust Bowl era. Even as he recorded their history,

rows of old trees were becoming obsolete. Planted for an earlier

time, they stood in the way of the massive machinery of

contemporary agriculture. More and more were dug up and

burned. If replaced at all, it would be with single rows of trees.

By 2005 Solinger broadened his story with digital cameras and

Photoshop. Using core samples of the soil, satellite images,

investigations into the evolution of machinery for tilling and

planting, global positioning systems to identify soil

characteristics, commodity charts, and other such tools of

twenty-first century farming, Solinger enriches his newest color

photographs with layers of information. His themes incorporate

ideas of land usage along with the history of the life of trees in

the Red River Valley.

During the summer of 2005, the North Dakota Museum of Art

unveiled Solinger's work, some eighty photographs winnowed

out of dozens more. Variations of that exhibition are touring

through the Museum's Rural School Initiative and the book

documenting Solinger’s work will be published in 2007. This

suite of eight photographs, printed as miniatures, celebrate Jon

Jon Solinger has taken hundreds

of images of trees in the Red

River Valley of the North. These

are among the most important

works of art about this time and

place to be produced during our

era. And they are so beautiful.

Laurel Reuter, DirectorNorth Dakota Museum of Art

“Maybe he marveled while watching the heavens as a toddler in

Hedalen, Norway. Maybe his parents directed his attention to the

stars as they sailed back and forth across the Atlantic. We know

for sure that it was in western Dakota Territory that Ben Huset’s

interest in the planets turned to fascination and finally to

devotion.”*

This self-taught man went on to become the Weatherman of the

Great Plains. From 1937 into the 1960s his annual Ben Huset’s

Forecast served as the farmer’s bible.

Nancy Friese, Huset’s granddaughter, inherited a similar passion

for the natural world. Her prints and paintings spring from astute

observation within the landscape. And they are fed by her intense

understanding of the forces of weather. Movement, brilliant

color, slashing lines and inner tensions spill onto canvas and

paper and then reappear in woodcuts, drypoints, and aquatints.

Weather never exists as a static entity. In her work, change is

imminent; the landscape is volatile, hiding great storms and

massive cloud buildup, winds, and movement even in moments

of calm. The earth, the plant world, and the sky, each have an

equal presence, just as the whole of her picture plane is potently

alive. She works from both the factual and the intuitive and

therein lies her art.

The artist credits the Weatherman with her enduring interest in

the landscape. For thirty years this has been her subject. Not the

Fauvists but the grandfather taught her to see the colors of

weather. Reflecting sundogs. Northern lights. Rainbows. Fiery

sunsets. Heat mirages. Swirling snow transformed by sunlight

into an impressionist’s palette. For only through light and

movement does color exist as a living entity. This is the

underriding truth of Friese’s art. Like the grandfather, the artist

immerses herself into the wildness of weather, into its untamable

energy, into its patterns, and into its beauty, an element never

absent in Friese’s art. Unfashionable? Perhaps. True to human

experience? Certainly.

One wonders if the temperament derived from the fierce weather

of Friese’s ancestors didn’t form her artistic bedrock. Had she

been the child of more benign climates would she have made an

altogether different kind of art? Recently Friese purchased her

grandmother’s family homestead in North Dakota, searching not

only for home but also a place to paint.

Laurel Reuter, Nancy Friese, Paintings and Prints,

Boston: Pepper Gallery, 2006.

*Hoffman, S. (2006). Ben Huset’s forecasts. Unpublished manuscript.

Lot #26

nancy FrieseCranston, Rhode Island

Four-color woodcut,

8.5 x 31.5 inches, 2005

Range: $600 - 900

enhance that surface. It seemed natural to include them; they

related to an earlier city series—urban stuff, the stuff of our

environment. The decay and waste products of “life” seemed to

relate well to what I was doing and thinking.

I don’t want to give my work individual titles, because it narrows

the focus. . . . When I have a coffee cup in my painting, it’s not

just a coffee cup. It’s a symbol. Once I heard a comment about

Giorgio Morandi and his “society of objects.” That’s the way I

think of the objects in my still life series—as symbols for people

in the society that I’m a part of.

Some of the objects can have multiple meanings. A chair can be

stability or rest, it can be stagnation or isolation, security or lack

of adventure. I might be thinking about it one way for one image

and use it to mean something totally different in another. I do

look at the objects as having some character suggestions. I use

the coffee cup because it’s such a common drinking vessel, and

you know, your average “cup of Joe” sort of thing. The contours

and forms say a lot too. I think a brandy snifter has a kind of

feminine quality. A coffee cup makes less money than a teacup.

These sorts of things guide my selection of objects for my work.

Mike marth was born in 1962 in St. Paul Minnesota. He

received an MFA in painting from Southern Illinois State

University in 1991. Marth currently lives in Moorhead, MN

where he maintains his studio. Over the years he has taught in

the design department of North Dakota State University. He also

worked as curator at the Donaldson Hotel in Fargo during the

first years of its reincarnation in the 21st century. In 2000 the

exhibition “Mike Marth, A Decade of Still Life” was shown

simultaneously in six sites in Fargo/Moorhead. At that time Sally

Jeppson, Curator at the Plains Art Museum in Fargo, interviewed

Marth for the High Plains Reader. The following quotes are taken

from that interview:

Over time I edit or refine my imagery to better suit my needs. I

have always worked in series. I never feel satisfied exploring an

idea with one or two works, they seem to generate more

questions than they answer. So I repeat things, like a coffee cup,

to more fully explore what it can do for me in my work.

My techniques used to be more traditional. As my palette evolved

and objects became more stylized, I started to enjoy the surfaces

of the paintings more. I would find and incorporate stuff to

Lot #27

Mike MarthMoorhead, Minnesota

Untitled

Oil and mixed media on canvas

24 x 24 inches, 1999

Range: $300 - 500

Gift from David and Julie Blehm.

Lot # 28

Katherine Keck

Los Angeles, California

Art of Net Throwing

(Taken on the Niger River,

Mali, French West Africa)

Digital print on watercolor paper

Limited edition #2 of 7

30 x 40 inches, February 2005

Range: $500 -700

Katherine Keck travels the world “in search of the essence

of the emotion of the moment.” She began her formal study of

photography at the Cortona School of Photography in Cortona,

Italy, under Alan Matthews. She later attended the Speos School

of Photography in Paris, France. Most recently she studied in

Rome through the Venice School of Photography.

Through her work, she seeks “to capture images that stand as

symbols of humanity with the goal of revealing what is often the

underlying emotion or hidden sentiment of the moment.” Her

mirror-like compositions utilize reflection to offer the viewer a

hidden glance into the spiritual side or essence of our existence—

the vibrating energy of nature that is often hidden to the viewer.

Her photographic travel has taken her to such places as Italy, the

cottages of England; a river trip along the Yukon River, 150 miles

south of the Arctic Circle to study life in the Athabascan villages,

to Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand; and to North Dakota to

photograph grain elevators. Keck recently traveled to French West

Africa and has completed a photographic essay chronicling this

trip called Timbuktu and Beyond.

Katherine Keck has donated theproceeds from the sale of this

photograph to the Museum of Art

Lot #29

Todd HebertLos Angeles, California

Bubble and Snowman #12

Acrylic on paper, 2006

13 x 42.5 inches

Range: $1,000 - 1,500

Occasionally a work of art is too ethereal to be

reproduced. Todd Hebert’s Bubble and Snowman

is such a work. But then, those who live among

bubbles and snowmen know that certain skies

and weather conditions can mask anything. Visit

the Museum to see this work of art.

Todd hebert was born in Valley City, ND in 1972. He

received a BFA from the University of North Dakota in 1996, and

in 1998 he earned an MFA from the Rhode Island School of

Design. He has been a fellow at both the Fine Arts Work Center

in Provincetown, and at the Core Program, Glassell School of Art

in Houston. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles and is

represented by Mark Moore Gallery in Santa Monica.

Hebert won the prestigious 2005 Emerging Artist Award from The

Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT. Upon Hebert

receiving the award, Jessica Hough, Curatorial Director, wrote:

Viewers of his work may be surprised to learn that Todd Hebert

produces his paintings in a small, grungy, windowless one-car

garage. This environment seems to have little to do with Hebert’s

ethereal paintings which lead us to imagine him working in a

much more idyllic setting. . . . Particle-filled air is a good place

to start when considering Hebert’s work. His hazy, seemingly

out-of-focus compositions have us thinking we are looking

through an atmosphere of water or dust. This effect, achieved by

the artist through airbrushing, is hard to get used to at first. We

naturally want to bring the image into sharp focus so that we can

see all of what we think is there. But then we realize that the

beauty and appeal of the paintings is in part due to this gossamer

fog that cloaks the landscape.

Last year Hebert was interviewed by Lupe Nunez-Fernandez for

ArtReview Magazine, and said:

[In my early work} there were always things in transmutation, in

curious cycles of change: a raccoon into a basketball or a

snowman into a scarecrow. I started thinking that just having the

snowman or a basketball in a painting, exhibited within the

commercial fine art context was a gesture, a transformation: one

that was not illustrated, but embodied. That seemed to be a

bigger, better idea. "Narrative" eventually fluttered off my radar.

The snowman is just an absurd, ridiculous image of a "man"

(three round balls of snow…a man?) crudely, and whimsically

built from the immediate surroundings. This started as a

culture/nature thing, and for some people that is interesting. But,

I like that the snowman is a personage and an object at the same

time. I hope that the smile is a welcoming gesture: a parallel to

what I want the viewer to bring in seeing it. But the smile can

either be scary or warm. It is an image of ambiguity and

projection. I like that so many ideas and associations can be

plugged into the image. I think coolers are similar: they keep

things hot or cold.

Ambiguity is an important thing in picture making and can give

an image a power and resonance. People have to remember

what they saw. With this in mind, I've lowered the detail, upped

the precision. I think I have enough detail for duration while

Vivienne Morgan: I came from England twenty-seven

years ago, and now I often think about what it means to migrate

and immigrate, what it means to be rooted. I heard about trees

that walk across England: they slowly migrate by falling, sending

out roots, sending up new trees, falling. The time scale of their

movement is imperceptible to us, but their remains leave the

trace of their paths. Walking through a slate quarry on a spring

morning in England, I saw this pair of trees in an intimate

embrace, hanging onto the edge of a cliff. It occurred to me

that they might have walked there on purpose.

The photograph is printed on aluminum because I like the way it

kicks back the light. The work glows the way light glows through

trees in the natural world.

I am a multi-media artist out of necessity: in the winter I work

indoors in the warmth of my studio, often at my computer. In the

summer I work outdoors whenever I can: I garden, build, and

Lot #30

Vivienne MorganBemidji, Minnesota

Final Embrace, 2006

Archival digital print on aluminum

50 x 40 inches

Range: $1,500 - 1,800

Sponsored by Leighton Broadcasting

photograph, often my own garden and local landscapes. Back in

winter at the computer, the photographs change and, like shifting

memories, become akin to meditations on life.

I'm English—not a snow lover—but the weather here fills me

with nostalgia for England in winter. I've lived in the United

States for all these years and I've never taken American

citizenship. Sooner or later I must make a choice. I've been

thinking about what it means to migrate and immigrate. What it

means to fly, to change, to slow down or grow ill, perhaps grow

better or stronger, but to inevitably grow old, and to finally stop

in one place. This meditation on acceptance has led me to look

locally for places that remind me of England, of Europe, to find

solace or perhaps as a point of compromise.

Vivienne Morgan was born in England in 1958. In 1979 she

moved to the United States and earned her MFA from Bowling

Green State University. She now lives in Bemidji, Minnesota.

Lot #31

Richard dyckWinnipeg, Manitoba

Lamb

C-print of a flatbed scan

30 x 24 inches, 2005

Range: $500 - 800

Richard Dyck is a Winnipeg-based artist whose work

includes audio, installations, photographs, and computer-based

interactive digital games and applications. His has exhibited

across Canada, in France and Serbia, and in the United States.

In the summer of 2005 he showed his Hive Scans in the North

Dakota Museum of Art.

In the fall of 2006 he will mount a solo exhibition titled "The End

of Scanning by Richard Dyck with flower and leaf arrangements

by Susie Rempel", a three-part grid installation of 2000+ flatbed

scans for Platform: Centre for Photographic and Digital Arts, in

Winnipeg. The work in the auction, reproduced in his book

Species, was created by placing a lamb on a scanning bed.

According to Dyck, the print is soft, not pixilated, but soft. This

is because the original image is scanned at 72 dpi (dots per

inch), out of kindness to the animals because higher resolution

scans take much longer and the animals would start to frighten

after too much time.

We study the arts because they make

our hearts wise, the highest of human goals.

Museum Mission

Walter Piehl was born into a family that raised rodeo stock

so he rode horses as a matter of course. When he arrived at

graduate school at the University of Minnesota in 1969, Bill

Goldstein, now the Director of Universal Limited Art Editions but

then a fellow student, commented that from the beginning

Walter drew with great confidence and skill. We were beginning

students and he arrived full-blown. He put his hand to paper

and the lines flowed. And he drew horses.

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

world outside of Marion, North Dakota, Walter went to

Concordia, a small Lutheran college in Moorhead, Minnesota,

enrolling in 1960. Cy Running was his teacher. Walter was the

skittish colt. I was so used to calendar art, to illustration, to

cowboy art as it appeared in the magazines, I had a hard time.

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

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

Lot #32

Walter PiehlMinot, North Dakota

spotted pup:

Sweetheart of the Rodeo

Acrylic on canvas

48 x 36 inches, 2005-06

Range: $3,500 – 3,900

Sponsored by Capone’s

contemporary Western art. By drawing, overdrawing, and re-

drawing, Piehl could leave the traces of movement on the paper.

He worked and reworked the surface, always leaving enough

description for the viewer to follow the motion of a falling hat, a

rider flying backward, the gesture of a flinging hand, a boot

following the body into a somersault as the rider is tossed.

When I finished this painting the colors reminded me of the

cowboys’ favorite dessert. We call it “spotted pup.” Rice pudding

spotted with raisins—and cinnamon if one is lucky.

Today Piehl is widely recognized as one of North Dakota’s senior

painters and as the artist who singularly pioneered the

contemporary cowboy art movement. In 2003 the Plains Art

Museum mounted a retrospective of his paintings and drawings.

In 2004 he was honored with the Governor’s Award for the Arts

and in 2005 he was appointed to the North Dakota Council on

the Arts as a member at large.

Aliana Au first exhibited this painting at the Winnipeg Art

Gallery in 1981. At that time she said, My family lived in the city

of Canton (Guangzhou) in China for a number of years. It was a

city of very few lights at night, and the summer seasons were very

hot. We spent a lot of nights lying on a canvas bed outside, with

our mother sitting on a chair fanning the mosquitoes away. The

sky was always blue with stars, a crescent or full moon; and I

remember very well my thoughts as a young child at that time.

Winters were cold there, our clothes were those from our father’s

childhood. He was always far away from home yet I felt a strange

kind of closeness to him, perhaps from the clothes we both wore.

In my grandfather’s house, I remembered observing the remnants

of his existence, possessions once loved which now were left in

such a way that the life force still appeared to exist in their form.

To me, a chair is a vehicle where one’s mental being expands and

travels in time and space while one’s physical being remains in

Lot #33

Aliana AuWinnipeg, Manitoba

Sheepskin Cat on a Red Chair

Oil on Linen

24 x 21.5 inches, 2004

Range: $1,600 – 2,000

reality. The chair series is an expression of fantasies and personal

experiences, a mosaic of different elements in my life that reach

out to me.

Au’s interest in art started early. She studied Chinese brush

painting with Professor Au Ho-Nien in Hong Kong and then

came to Canada to further her art study, graduating from the

School of Art at the University of Manitoba. A Canadian citizen,

Au resides in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Au’s work has been exhibited in numerous galleries including

the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Moose Jaw Art Museum, the Art

Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba in Brandon, and the John

Michael Kohler Art Center in Sheboygan, Michigan. Her works

are housed in various private collections in Sweden, Greece,

England, the United States, and Canada. In Canada Au’s work is

in collections of the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Province of

Manitoba, Canada Council Art Bank, Toronto Dominion Bank,

Lot #34

Barton Benes

New York, New York

Pencil Dance

Mixed media on paper

10.5 x 8.5 inches

Range: $400 - 600

Barton Benes’s works are highly idiosyncratic, sometimes

humorous, more than a little impish, and always a fresh lens

through which to view the world. Much has been made of this

artist’s fascination with celebrity—that, in today’s world, a scrap

from a movie star is valued with the same fervor once reserved

for a piece of the true cross. But Benes’ work strikes more than

one note, and comments on the complexity of what we, as a

society, preserve, revere, treasure, or discard. It’s a vexation

known to museum professionals charged with caring for ever-

growing collections; it’s a puzzle in most individual’s lives where

the revolving door of consumerism endlessly circulates “stuff.” At

least, while viewing Benes’ assemblages, one pauses for a

moment to muse over the rubbish of experience.

Linda Tesner, 18 July 2006

The North Dakota Museum of Art and Barton Benes have had a

long friendship that began when Barton designed the Museum

Shop. Then, because he made museums in his own work, the

Museum staff asked him to create the Museum’s Donor Wall. In

1989 Barton had his first exhibition in conjunction with the

grand opening of the newly-renovated Museum. Later he

showed Lethal Weapons, his work about AIDS. And following

the 1997 flood, the Museum commissioned Barton to make a

Flood Museum from fragments of memory-laden objects

contributed by people in the community who had gone through

the flood. When Barton dies, he is leaving the contents of his

apartment to the North Dakota Museum of Art. The apartment

contains many museums within it including African and Egyptian

sculpture, work by contemporary artists, stuffed animals, an

African voodoo altar, etc. etc. etc. It will become the Museum's

Craig Love

Winnipeg, Manitoba

Untitled from series

Along the Red Carpet

Watercolor and ink on paper

5 x 5 inches, 2005

Range: $150 - 200 each

Lot #35

Lot #36

Lot #37

Lot #38

Craig Love was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1975. He

graduated from the University of Manitoba in 1999 with a BFA

with Honors in Painting. In 2004 he received his MFA from

Parsons School of Design, New School University, New York. He

returned to Winnipeg to take up life as a painter. He is already

amassing an impressive exhibition record which includes a

three-person show with Cliff Eyland and Krisjanis Kaktins-

Gorsline at Winnipeg’s Cream Gallery in 2005; a group

exhibition, Life and Limb, at Feigen Contemporary Gallery in

New York in 2004; Things They Carried, Arnold and Sheila

Aronson Gallery, New School University, New York, 2004; and

Newton’s Prism: Layer Painting, Gallery One One One,

University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, 2003.

These small paintings on paper represent only one aspect of the

artist’s work. In addition he creates larger, more abstract paintings

on canvas and board. But over the course of eighteen months,

Craig Love worked intensely, ultimately creating several hundred

such miniatures.

Tim Schouten has a second encaustic in the Autumn Art

Auction, Lot #1. Wall and Turret, however, is part of a different

and on-going series of paintings made on the sites of treaty

signings between Canada and its native people. The treaties gave

rights of land usage and economic support to the native

inhabitants in exchange for land ownership, both above and

Lot #39

Tim SchoutenPetersfield, Manitoba

Wall and Turret (Treaty I)

Encaustic on canvas

32 x 42 inches,

Range: $2,000 - 2,500

Sponsored by East Grand Floral

below the surface. Still today, as in the United States, legal

wrangling continues between the Canadian government and its

native citizens.

The lyrical landscapes of the treaty series are visually gorgeous,

luminous and shimmering, and all the while underpinned by

troubling questions of land ownership in North America. The

artist researches each treaty site, photographing the landscape,

digging through historical files in search of the records of treaty

enactment, intent upon understanding the layers of conflict and

beauty associated with each specific place. For Schouten

landscape is visual place. Landscape is also the dumping ground

of human grief. As the critic Mariianne Mays summarizes,

political questions of property and Aboriginal

Fred Thomas: That combination of aesthetic tough love is

evident in the work of Fred Thomas, the oldest member of Two

Six and the collective's most experienced graffiti artist. He has

retired from the street but continues to make his arresting art.

His subjects are invariably disenfranchised street people

observed in the street, while his surfaces are found on the

street—crushed oil cans, pieces of wood and cardboard,

discarded street signs. Thomas's ability to seamlessly match

surface with image is remarkable, as is his technique. He uses a

can of spray paint with more finesse and skill than a lot of artists

use their hands.

Fred thomasWinnipeg, Manitoba

Untitled (both works), 2005

Mixed Media on Found Objects

Range: $200 - 350 each

Lot #42

John WiddelGrand Forks, North Dakota

Paddles, 2006

Various woods and sizes

Sold in groups of three

Range: $500 - 700

Lot # 40

14 x 8 inches

Lot # 41

12-inch diameter

Two Six, has hit the street running. I should say hit the street

pedaling. Two Six (as in the size of a bottle of whisky) is a core

association of seven artists, most of whom have been into graffiti,

and continue to participate in what they call "party-bike nail-

bombing." On these excursions, weather permitting, the

members of Two Six pack art pieces, beer, hammers and nails,

and go riding off to find congenial outdoor locations where they

can "install" their art. Those favored locations aren't galleries, but

telephone poles, signs, fences and corners of urban buildings.

Their interventions are most often subtle, and always an

improvement on what they find. (Robert Enright writing in The

Globe and Mail, 11/03)

Lot #43

William EakinWinnipeg, Manitoba

Ink jet print

8.5 x 11 inches, 2005

Range: $300 - 400

William Eakin is among Canada’s most significant

photographers. Through his photographs of photographs he has

explored contemporary society’s obsession with UFOs, aliens,

and extraterrestrials. Over the years he has collected and

photographed all manner of mass-produced and common

objects, transforming pop culture artifacts into poetic icons.

Trinkets and decorative commercial junk, old and new, amateur

art, folk art, and craft objects: He calls these sorts of things

"ordinary art." His subject is often the cast aside and the

mundane—except when he is photographing gardens. Driven by

his subject, the work becomes exquisite as in this modest

photograph of an orchid.

Educated at the Vancouver School of Art and the School of the

Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, Eakin has been a

practicing artist for thirty years. His photographs have been

exhibited across Canada and in the United States, The

Netherlands, France, Japan and Taiwan. A recipient of numerous

awards from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Manitoba

Arts Council, including the Duke and Duchess of York Prize in

Photography, Eakin has taught in the Department of Visual Arts at

the University of Victoria and at the School of Art at the

University of Manitoba. His photographs are in many public

collections such as the Canadian Museum of Contemporary

Photography, Canada Council Art Bank, Winnipeg Art Gallery

and Edmonton Art Gallery, among many others.

John Widdel, a Grand Forks native, hand crafts canoe

paddles - sculpture to be used. The winner of the bid will choose

a group of three. Widdel designs and builds each paddle. In

order to achieve the greatest contrast, he personally selects the

reddest mahogany, the darkest walnut, the blondest aspen and

the wildest cherry. The blades are as different as fingerprints but

still retain the unmistakable style of the hands that made them.

The blade tips are made of fiberglass resin, mechanically bonded

to the blade.The handles are constructed from laminated,

straight-grained wood, giving them needed strength while

allowing them to flex.

Widdel attended the University of North Dakota for two years

before becoming sidetracked by his own small construction

company. All he wants to do is build things: to have a grand shop

exhibiting every metal tool and every wood tool that exists.

Lot #44

Albert BelleveauPuposky, Minnesota

Woman of Mettle

Welded steel

28 x 29.25 inches, 2005

Range: $1,500 - 1,8000

Albert Belleveau: To escape from a life of partying and

drinking, a young Albert Belleveau moved from the Twin Cities

of Minneapolis/St. Paul to live on his grandparent’s farm in the

country north of Bemidji, Minnesota. There he found two things

that laid the foundation for his artistic vision: a buzz box AC

welder and a pile of iron scrap.

He inherited his grandfather’s ability to value junk and save it,

not that he knows exactly what he’ll do with it at the time he

finds it. First, the stuff must go into his creative thinking

cauldron. There, guns are transformed into gun racks and tools

into a tool shed. Al’s playful dolphins (endorphins) are also

excited by the rock and steel rod he brings together with fire and

brute force into objects that address physics’ primordial

quantum dilemma: Is it particle or is it wave? His work reflects

Heisenberg’s answer: not certain, depends on how you look at

it. It’s something to look at and ponder while sitting in the

outhouse.

Al’s current series gently celebrates the sensual female form.

Although not formally trained, Al has had numerous shows. His

work sells well and he is often called upon to do residencies and

workshops. He particularly likes working with kindergarten kids.

He fires their creative juices by teaching them to weld with that

same old AC buzz box.

Note: The full figure of Woman of Mettle is shown above along

with a close-up of the torso.

Explore . . . Endure . . . Evolve . . .

North Dakota Quarterly, Merrifield Hall Room 110, 276 Centennial Drive Stop 7209, Grand Forks ND 58202-7209, (701) 777-3322 e-mail: ndq@und.edu www.und.nodak.edu/org/ndq

North Dakota Quarterly isproud to support the

North Dakota Museum ofArt’s Autumn Art Auction,

continuing our ongoing promotion of art and artists inthe upper midwest. We regularly feature artwork

from the region and beyond on our covers. For exam-ple, an oil pastel by Jim Parks, University of Minnesota

Moorhead, is on the cover of our most recent issue,Hemingway: Places and People,

available for $12 each in the museum shop.

Bring this ad to Room 15 in Merrifield Hall to receive a free regular issueor a $10.00 discount on a subscription.

Jim Parks, The Peanut Steps of Freeport

North Dakota Museum of ArtFoundation

Board of DirectorsNorth Dakota Museum of Art

Board of Trustees

David Blehm

Julie Blehm

Ann Brown

John Foster, Chair

Cheryl Gaddie, Vice Chair

David Hasbargen, Vice President

Jean Holland

Sandy Kaul

Gretchen Kottke, Treasurer

Darrell Larson

Judi Paukert

Alex Reichert

Laurel Reuter, President

Pat Ryan

Gerald Skogley

Wayne Zimmerman

Corinne Alphson, Emerita

Virginia Dunnigan, Emerita

Bruce Gjovig, Emeritus

Barb Lander, Emerita

Robert Lewis, Emeritus

Ellen McKinnon, Emerita

Douglas McPhail, Emeritus

Sanny Ryan, Emerita

Anthony Thein, Emeritus

Kevin Fickenscher, Chair

Nancy Friese

Daniel E. Gustafson, Vice Chair

Kitty Keck

Darrell Larson

Margery McCanna

Betty Monkman, Secretary

Laurel Reuter

Gerald Skogley

North Dakota Museum of Art Staff

Justin Dalzell

Suzanne Fink

Pene Hargreaves

Barbara Hatfield

Amy Hovde

Connie Hulst

Kathy Kendle

Brian Lofthus

Laurel Reuter

Gregory Vettel

Matthew Wallace

Stacy Warcup

Justin Welsh

Student Employees:

Jeannette Baker, Caroline L. Brosseau, Amanda Rice

Sereysophaktra Som, Jennifer A. Verlinde

Katie L. Welsh, Andrew Yost

and over fifty volunteers

North Dakota Museum of Art, 261 Centennial Drive, Stop 7305, Grand Forks, North Dakota 58202-7305 USA