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

The North Dakota Museum of Artis grateful to the following entities

who have given generously to guarantee that

the arts may flourish.

Marking the Land: Jim Dow in North Dakotafeatured on

PRAIRIE PUBLIC

HEAR IT NOW with Merrill Piepkorn

Monday, October 22, 2007

Pledge $20 a month or more to Prairie Public

and you will receive

Marking the Land, soft cover

Pledge $1,000 or more and receive a hard cover copy

Commissioned by the North Dakota Museum of Art,

Jim Dow began photographing folk art within the North Dakota landscape in 1981.

By 2000, he was shooting anything he pleased and wandering across

the borders into Minnesota and South Dakota.

Marking the Land was produced by the North Dakota Museum of Art

in collaboration with the Center for American Places:

220 pages, 186 color photographs, hard and soft cover,

distributed by the University of Chicago Press

or through the North Dakota Museum of Art.

Cover: Melanie Rocan, SWIMMING #2, , 54 x 66 inches, 2007

North Dakota Museum of Art

A U T U M N A r t A u c t i o nS at u r d ay, N o v e m b e r 1 0 , 2 0 0 7

Wine and hors d’oeuvres 6:30 pm

Auction begins at 8 pm

Autumn Art Auction is

Underwritten by

Auction PreviewOctober 14 until auction time in the Museum galleries

Monday - Friday, 9 to 5 pm, Saturday - Sunday, 1 to 5 pm

All works to be auctioned will be on display.

.

patronsChester Fritz Auditorium

Clear Channel Radio

East Grand Floral

Grand Forks Herald

High Plains Reader

Holiday Inn

KVLY TV

KXJB TV

Leighton Broadcasting

Merrill Lynch

Office of Academic Affairs, UND

SponsorsBremer Bank

Ellen McKinnon

Minnesota Public Radio

WDAZ TV

SupportersAltru Health System, Truyu

Ameriprise Financial Services, Inc.

Avant

Blue Moose Bar & Grill

Bronze Boot

Cancer Research, UND, Mary Ann and Don Sens

Community Bank

Curtis Tanabe DDS

Farmer's Insurance Group, George Wogaman

Greater Grand Forks Community Theatre

Gustafson Gluek, PLLC

HB Sound & Light

Museum Café

North Dakota Eye Clinic

North Dakota Ballet Company

North Dakota Quarterly

Auction Supporters continued next page

SupportersRed Pepper

Rhombus Guys

Sanders 1907

Special Arrangement, Daryce Van Hoff

Special Olympics

Suite 49

Summit Brewing Company

Valley Bone and Joint

Waterfront Kitchen & Bath, Northern Plumbing Supply

Whitey’s

`Contributors

Axis Clinic

Acme Electric Tool Crib of the North

Camrud, Maddock, Olson & Larson

Capital Resource Management

Columbia Liquors

D. Tran, DDS

Fine Print

Greater Grand Forks Symphony Orchestra

Gregory J. Norman Funeral Chapel

Happy Harry’s

Ink, Inc.

Letnes, Marshall, Swanson & Warcup Ltd.

McDonald Family Dentistry

Praxis Strategy Group

Rite Spot Liquor

River City Jewelers

Salon Seva

UND Writers Conference

Xcel Energy

Zimney Foster PC

AdvertisersAmazing Grains

Best Western Town House

Brady, Martz, and Associates

Browning Arts

Burger King

Chad Caya Painting

David C. Thompson, Law Office

Drees, Riskey, Vallager, Ltd.

Economy Plumbing

Edward Jones, Mark A. Larsen

Forks Chem-Dry

Gate City Bank

Greenberg Realty, Mary Adams

Greenberg Realty, Kelly Thompson

Home of Economy

Hovet Roofing, Inc.

Meland Architecture

Monarch Travel & Tours

Earl Pomeroy

Reichert Armstrong Law Office

Robert Vogel Law Office, P.C.

Shaft Reis & Shaft Ltd.

SuperOne Foods

SuperTarget

Valley Dairy

Vilandre

Wall's Medicine Center, Inc.

You Are Here Gallery

Buy local. Read the sponsor pages

to learn about those who

invest in the Museum.

Please return their investment. —John Foster, Retiring Chairman

Museum Board of Trustees

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, 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 Heather and David Schall, Chairs

Heather and David Schall, Chairs

Brad and Michelle Stenberg

Chad and Elisa Hanson

Alan Mulhern

Devera Warcup

Stacy Warcup

Autumn Art Auction Committee

David and Heather Schall reside in Grand Forks

with their four children. Jordyn is a sixth grader at South Middle

School, Camryn is a third grader at Kelly Elementary, Isaac is four

and Ellie is two. David and Heather are both natives of Grand

Forks. David graduated from the University of North Dakota and

is currently an orthopedic surgeon at Valley Bone and Joint Clinic

in Grand Forks. Heather previously was a Diagnostic

Cardiac/Medical Sonographer.

Photograph by Christy Doyea Photography

Rules of Auction

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

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

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

the Rules of the Auction listed in this catalog.

q Absentee bidders will either leave their bids on an Absentee

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

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

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

Auction.

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

the auction.

q All sales are final.

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

Commissioner determined that the gross receipts from the

sales made at the Auction are subject to sales tax at 6.75 %.

This does not apply to out-of-state buyers who have works

shipped to them.

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

shall either determine the successful bidder or re-auction

the item in dispute.

q Purchasers may pay for items at any point following the

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

conclusion of the evening—unless other arrangements are

in place. Absentee bidders will be charged on the evening of

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

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

them by the artist. This confidential “reserve” is a price

agreed upon between the artist and the North Dakota

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

MISSION: To foster and nurture the aesthetic life and artistic

expression of the people living on the Northern Plains through

exhibitions, programs, and publications which engage the

region, the country, and the world.

VISION: To create the richest learning environment possible for

experiencing art and developing community that affirms the

highest level of respect for art, artists, and audiences.

VALUES: For the Museum to be successful, our most important

resource, our people, must have a clear sense of where we are

going, and the collaborative spirit in which we undertake that

journey. Our values are guiding principles for how we will go

about our work. They are guideposts to daily conduct that speak

to the integrity of our behavior.

1) Rural Lens: We interpret rural life through the arts, just as we

view the art of the world through a rural perspective.

2) Global Context: We place the lives of artists and audiences

within the context of contemporary art and critical thought from

around the world.

3) Humanities Focus: We function as a laboratory for all forms

of artistic, aesthetic and cultural inquiry.

4) Collaboration: We build and nourish relationships with

artists, visitors and each other.

5) Scholarship: Academic rigor and quality research underpin all

museum programs and publications.

6) Stewardship: We are stewards of the public trust for the

artistic environment of our region, and the human, financial and

physical resources of the Museum.

Photograph by Mike Mohaupt

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 companies and individuals; thank them for

their significant contribution; and note how many are locally

owned and operated. Sometimes they say, “I don’t care if I get an

ad, I just want to give to you guys.” Supporting cultural life is not

in the interest of the “big boxes” but rather has become the

business of the butcher, the baker and the keeper of bees—and

of Ellen McKinnon who buys her own ad because it pleases her.

In 1992, Madelyn Camrud inaugurated the Museum’s first

Benefit Dinner and Silent Auction. She added the Autumn Art

Auction in 1998, assisted by a good committee and supported by

the Museum staff. The goal from the beginning was to develop the

buying audience for artists from our region. For decades, the only

artists who could stay in northern Minnesota and North Dakota

while continuing their professional careers had to find a different

way to make a living—usually teaching on the college level. The

mantra became, “If we don’t support them, who is going to.”

From the beginning, the Museum has never asked artists to

donate work. Instead, we allow them to establish their minimum

price, an amount the Museum guarantees. (For the winter

auction, works of art are less expensive and the minimum is

established at $100.) The auction procedures are:

DIVISION OF MONEY between the artist and the North

Dakota Museum of Art on a work sold in the Auction: The artist

is guaranteed to receive the amount of the reserve bid. If work

does not reach minimum bid, it will be brought in by the

Museum and returned to artist. Any amount over the reserve bid

and the Museum’s equal match is split 50/50 between the artist

and the Museum. Example: If a reserve bid is $200, and the work

sells for $395, the artist receives $200 and the Museum receives

$195. If the same work sells for $500, the artist and the Museum

each receive $250.

Gradually we have seen the prices for art increase as our buying

audience experiences the pleasure of knowing artists and living

with art. And also gradually, the Museum has begun to make

some money from the auction as well. It wasn’t long, however,

before every art entity in the region began holding their own

auctions—and positioning them to compete with the Museum’s

auction. Then non-art entities thought, “why not us?” It was as if

the Museum threw a pebble into the pond and art auctions

rippled out.

Art has also become an accepted part of younger people’s lives.

They participate, they buy, they live with art—and all of our lives

become richer.

Remember, when you buy through the Autumn Art Auction, the

price includes framing or presentation. Frames are often custom

made by the artists who pay attention to using archival materials.

This alone adds significant value to some of the work.

Not all of the artists live locally, but they all have some

relationship with either the Museum of Art or the region. As I

recently told artist Marjorie Merriman, Nancy Friese has worked

with me on tracing artists who have backgrounds in North Dakota.

Because we have so few artists, we sometimes borrow them from

the past. You are being borrowed! Marjorie’s

grandparents were early settlers who lived in the Dakota Territory

before North Dakota became a state. Her drawing of a

Norwegian stave church is in the Auction.

Laurel Reuter, DirectorNorth Dakota Museum of Art

From the Museum Director

Vivienne Morgan: I’m English—not a snow lover—but

the weather in northern Minnesota 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.

I made the The Absence Series using Holga negatives, which I

shot in downtown Bemidji, Minnesota, at the Greenwood

Cemetery not long after my father died. Because it pleased me, I

Lot #1

Vivienne MorganBemidji, Minnesota

Ennui, 2007

Digital print on Innova paper

18 x 18 inches

Range: $150 - 250

took a lot of photos with my Holga. The series I made was for a

local exhibition called Between Two Lands. It was about

absence: the absence of my father whose ashes were scattered on

a football pitch in Bristol, England, and my own nearly thirty-year

absence from my family and England.

I had been watching the Cemetery that fall as I drove by, since it’s

the only place in northern Minnesota with anything close to topi-

ary. You have to love the old European order expressed in

topiary, the annual clipping of trees and grasses making all things

in the garden good. One day a thick fog rolled in and the rest of

the town disappeared, and magically I was back on some

Devon estate.

When you are gone for long enough you are no longer absent,

you just cease to exist.

Lot #2

Vivienne MorganBemidji, Minnesota

Absence Found, 2005-07

Nine Holga negatives cross processed

Each 8 x 8.5 inches

Range: $500-600

Invented in Hong Kong in 1982, the Holga is an inexpensive,

medium format (120 film) toy camera that has come to be

appreciated for its low-fidelity aesthetic. The Holga's cheap

construction and simple meniscus (convex-concave) lens often

yields pictures that invoke an other-worldly presence, resulting

from soft-focus tones, misty colors, and streaming lights.

Ironically, the camera's quality problems became a virtue among

some photographers, with Holga photos winning awards and

competitions in art and news photography.

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

moved to the United States and earned her MFA from Bowling

Green State University. She now lives in the countryside near

Lot #3

Guillermo GuardiaGrand Forks, North Dakota

and Lima, Peru

Neo David, 2007

High fire ceramic

31 x 9 x 8 inches

Range: $300 - 400

Guillermo Guardia (Memo) 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 from 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 museums, 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 on the figure, unglazed and

burnished surfaces that allow the clay itself to dominate the

work. The work in the exhibition, Neo David, breathes with life,

both contemporary and ancient.

I had to go to Peru and immerse myselfin Pre-Columbian ceramics before I

understood Guillermo’s work. Given thatcontext, I believe he is creating an im-

portant contemporary art form deeply embedded in the past.

Laurel Reuter, DirectorNorth Dakota Museum of Art

Lot #4

Monte BreckheimerPekin, North Dakota

Trillium

Oil on old barn wood

16 x 16 inches, 2002

Range: $175 - 225

Monte Breckheimer turns seventy-five years old on

October 26, 2007. He waited until he was sixty and retired from

farming south of Tolna, North Dakota, before embarking upon his

artistic career—that is, when he was sixty he began to really

investigate art. He had always liked looking at paintings in books

and magazines but never imagined he could become a painter.

First, he tried his hand at rosemaling, “that decorative folk

painting of Norway, which began in the low-land areas of eastern

Norway about 1750 when such upper-class artistic styles as

Baroque, Regency and Rococo were introduced to Norway's

rural culture. At first Norway's painters followed the European

styles closely. Those who rosemaled for their livelihood would

not have been land owners but poor city dwellers. After being

trained within a ‘guild’ they would travel from county to county,

painting churches and the homes of the wealthy for either money

or room and board. Thus rosemaling was carried over the

mountains and toward Norway's western coast. Once farther

away from the influence of the guilds, these artists explored new

ideas and motifs. Soon strong regional styles developed.”

(According to the Illinois Rosemaling Association.)

Rural painters of all kinds began to imitate this folk art. Not

having been taught in an urban guild, the amateur became

spontaneous and expressive in his or her work on smaller objects

such as drinking vessels and boxes. Immigrants to the United

States arrived with their belongings stuffed into elaborately

painted trunks. Since they were even farther from the dictating

guilds, their work became even more original. Breckheimer

began to study with these first- and second-generation

immigrants, and, as always, he bought books and traveled to

exhibitions, including the Norwegian-American Museum in

Decorah, Iowa.

Breckheimer was also a woodworker and after a few years he

began to turn the plates and build the boxes to underpin his

painting. Not given to restrictions, it wasn’t long before he began

to just paint the world around him and the one that existed in his

imagination. He painted on gourds, on paper, on wood, on

canvas. Soon he was entering the Pekin Art Show and winning

prizes: Best of Show, two Seconds, one Third, two Honorable

Mentions. In 2005 the Jud Days Art show gave him the Artists’

Choice award. Then the North Dakota Museum of Art included

him in their touring Artists Self-Portrait exhibition. With great fun,

he painted himself with a goofy, toothless grin, his teeth in a

wineglass in his hand.

Trillium, the painting in this auction, combines woodworking

and painting. Breckheimer first made his intricate support out of

barn wood and then painted both the “picture” and the

surrounding “frame.” While being interviewed for this auction,

he said, “I didn’t want to let the painting interfere with the

woodworking, but it sure has. I love painting more than

woodworking. I just love painting.”

Lot #5

Zhimin GuanMoorhead, Minnesota

Violinist II

Oil and wax on metal

12 x 12 inches, 2007

Range: $900 - 1,200

Sponsored by Prairie Public

Zhimin Guan speaks of his painting process: I am

amazed to see how painting materials and gesture marks

transform each other into a spiritually and physically integrated

autonomy. I strive to establish a vital breath and universal

harmony through forms, colors, space and dynamic gestures. In

my art career, I have always incorporated the traditional with the

experimental, the figurative and the abstract. I wish to continually

change through aesthetic modification over time and discover the

right form and metaphor among endless possibilities.

The artist 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; North Dakota

Museum of Art, and, most recently, a solo exhibition at the

Plains Art Museum, Fargo.

Lot #6

Daniel SharbonoMinot, North Dakota

Dress

Acrylic and found materials, 2007

11 x 21 x 3 inches

Range: $250 - 300

Daniel Sharbono is a Minot artist, designer, and

freelance graphic designer whose recent projects include design

work for Main Street Books, 10 North Main, Otis and James

Photography, Dakota Kids Dentistry, Minot State University, and

62 Doors Gallery and Studios.

Found objects and materials discovered at flea markets, yard

sales, old barns and garages, and the occasional curbside

shopping trip, are rescued and recycled for use in artwork that

gives these objects the opportunity to be appreciated.

Most of Daniel’s work is about observing the things around you

and learning to appreciate them for their inherent aesthetic

qualities—signs of a personality, loyalty, and a past filled with

experiences we can all relate to.

Dress was created for a juried show with a figurative theme at 62

Doors Gallery in Minot where it received an honorable mention.

Lot #7

Doug PfligerMinot, North Dakota

Whirly-Gig-Dog-#97

Wood, metal, and paint, 2007

18 x 3.5 x 13 inches

Range: $125 - 150

Doug Pfliger has donated the proceedsfrom the sale of this sculpture

to the Museum of Art

Doug Pfliger states, Humor and color tend to dominate

my art. My work is narrative, as many of the series have a

continuous story or repeating characters. I want viewers to

respond immediately to a piece for the surface humor, and then

look for the deeper psychological content of the work. I have

been working for the past few years with the themes of chairs,

houses, toys and trailers in 2D and 3D formats.

A Hazen, North Dakota, native, Pfliger currently teaches art at

Minot State University where he received his Bachelor of Science

degree in art education in 1984. He taught art in the public

school system for thirteen years before pursuing graduate work.

He received his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1997 from the

University of North Dakota. After spending several years

teaching at Northern State University in Aberdeen, South Dakota,

he returned to Minot State University in 2001.

Lot #8

Bill HarbortMinot, North Dakota

Dakota in Love

Mixed-media collage

32 x 38 x 4 inches, 2007

Range: $400 - 600

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 in New York 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. (For the unfamiliar, muscle cars, also

called Pony Cars, have giant V-8 engines with super chargers and

special exhaust. These gas-guzzlers were really fast! Muscle cars

reached their epitome in the 1960s with the advent of such cars

as the GTO, certain Mustangs, Camaros, and some Chrysler

models like the Challenger. Unfortunately the energy crisis killed

the genre.)

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,

which is 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.

The artist lives in Minot with his wife Sandy, sons Nicholas and

Tyler, and three ex-racing greyhounds (Ethyl, Diesel and Petro).

Lot #9

Kim BromleyFargo, North Dakota

Billboard Beauty: Erin 329

Collage and oil on canvas

2004

Range: $3,000 - 3,500

Sponsored by High Plains Reader

Kim Bromley created Erin as part of his

Billboard Series. In real life, billboards are

changed on a regular basis by slapping a

printed sheet—or sheets—of paper on top to

cover up the last message. After the billboard

accumulates approximately eight layers, they

are all stripped off, not unlike removing layers

of old wallpaper. Then the accumulation begins anew. Bromley

goes to the billboard company and selects scraps of layered

paper, which he collages onto his canvas with rabbit-skin glue,

over which he commences to paint and draw. The billboard

scraps suggest the layering of time.

According to the artist, The concept of billboards has always

fascinated me. First and foremost, they create an immediate and

powerful visual impact. They follow principles of design. They

mark their territory and influence how we think. Yet, they merely

illustrate a specific idea. My challenge in working with

billboards is to create something visually powerful going beyond

illustration.

This work is about being a billboard and comments on their

effect on our society.

Bromley has an MFA in Painting and Drawing, Southern Illinois

University at Carbondale (1986), and an MA in Painting and

Drawing, University of Northern Iowa (1983). He has completed

painting residencies in Cedar Falls (2004); Chicago (1998);

Badlands, South Dakota (1997); Cuba (1994); Jamaica (1993);

Ecuador (1992); and in Mexico (1987 and 1990). His work is

represented by Yvonne Rapp Gallery, Louisville, Kentucky. The

artist possesses functional knowledge of the Spanish language

and hypnotherapy certification.

Lot #11

Jerrel HolmValley City, North Dakota

Badlands Spine Vessel

Porcelain, 2007

31 x 8.75 inches

Range: $350 - 400

Lot #10

Mark AnthonyMoorhead, Minnesota

Fog, 2006

Archival digital photograph

31 x 8.75 inches

Range: $350 - 400

Mark Anthony, an artist-photographer, explores the

land around him seeking nuances of poetry and using

photography to create aesthetic links between the land and the

people who live there. Anthony composes images or scenes that

combine incongruities or anomalies that reflect tellingly on the

environs. He may photograph a romantic view of an early

morning foggy river bank and include in the picture frame the

mechanical ironworks of a deserted riverbank dam. Perhaps

above all, he is concerned and interested in portraying the

formal beauty of the land, the realities of the land, and human

collective relationships to the land.

Anthony spent his childhood in Watford City, North Dakota, and

his high school years in Fargo. He earned a BA in Architecture

from North Dakota State University and a BA in Biology from

Moorhead State University with degree-equivalent class work in

Art and Humanities. His great interest was in architectural

restoration but he ended up at Moorhead State as publications

photographer. After six years he left to open his own commercial

photography studio, now in its fourteenth year. Anthony

continues his work as a commercial photographer, an artist, and

a teacher at both Moorhead State and NDSU.

Jerrel Holm became interested in sculpture while attendingMinot State University, where he earned a BS degree in Art Education. He earned an MA in Art Education from Saint CloudState University and an MFA from the University of North Dakota. After teaching high school for twelve years in WatfordCity, North Dakota, Holm spent ten years working as a studio potter. In 2004 he moved east to Valley City State University to re-turn to teaching, while continuing to make art.

According to Holm, the harsh, rough, and desolate land surrounding my

former studio in western North Dakota often seems at odds with the

delicate, smooth, and pure porcelain being formed on my potter’s wheel. This

western environmental influence is apparent in the forms I make today rang-

ing from barrel shapes to squat, bulbous, mushroom-like pieces. The simple

taut forms with clean hard lines expand and contract from a base and con-

clude with a small opening on some, while others remain completely closed.

The forms become more complex and unusual as the smooth surface is inter-

rupted by the rhythmic repetition of points, resulting in a sense of

tension. This tension is repeated in the torn rims of porcelain bowls and sculp-

tural forms to create a natural organic image. Other works begin as

vessels but at the end of the forming process are bestowed with masculine

and feminine characteristics to become sculptural. Some pieces are left naked

of glaze to express harsh, frozen winters. An ash-type glaze coats the surface

of others, reminiscent of hot arid summers. My sculpture survives the winter

season out-of-doors. Porcelain is the most exacting of clays,

demanding a special kind of respect and patience. I find the slow

meticulous way I work in tune with my nature.

Mark Anthony has requested that his portion of the proceeds from the sale

of this work of art be used to purchase a Museum membership.

Lot #12

Jessie PalczewskiSpearfish, South Dakota

Blue, 2006

Collagraph print, gouache, Japanese paper and thread

68 x 60 inches

Range: $1,800 - 3,200

Sponsored by Office of Academic Affairs, UND

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 from Black Hills State University

(2003) and her MFA from the University of North Dakota (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 of personal growth, quilts have been my outlet for life

occurrences that are otherwise hard to communicate.

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; images from his travels;

and, most importantly, daily life in his studio, home, and

gardens. 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.

This small still life, executed in egg tempera, is of the window sill

in Kaul’s studio. The plants are the everyday plants of a

Minnesota home, the mood one of quiet restfulness. Paintings

such as these are creating an important legacy. A hundred years

from now, they will be highly prized as historic renditions of an

earlier time and place. Kaul is a painter with a scholarly bent

who has become widely respected and loved within the region

he calls home.

Lot #13

Marley KaulBemidji, Minnesota

Being and Becoming, 2007

Egg tempera and acrylic wash on wood panel

17.5 x 21.5 x 3 inches

Range: $1,500 - 1,700

Sponsored by Clear Channel

Lot #14

Nancy FrieseCranston, Rhode Island and

Buxton, North Dakota

Coulee, 2004

Oil on linen

14 x 18 inches

Range $1,800 – 2,200

Sponsored by Holiday Inn

Nancy Friese painted this small oil in preparation for the

large sixteen-foot painting, Grove, Coulee and Open Sky (2004)

installed in the entryway of the Ina Mae Rude Entrepreneur

Center, Grand Forks, North Dakota. She painted it out-of-doors

south of Grand Forks on a coulee during the month of August.

Nancy Friese is a painter and printmaker who has shown

extensively nationally and internationally in over thirty solo and

100 group exhibitions. These include the Brandts Klaedefabrik

(Odense, Denmark), the Barbican Center (London), Metropolitan

Museum of Art (Tokyo) and in the Untied States at the Bronx

River Art Center, College of Wooster Art Museum, Chrysler

Museum, Everson Museum, Herbert Johnson Museum of Art,

International Center of Print New York, The New York Public

Library, Rhode Island School of Art and Design Museum of Art,

Snug Harbor Cultural Center.

She has received three National Endowment for the Arts

Fellowships, including the US/Friendship Commission six-month

grant to Japan. Nancy received the College Art Association and

Reader’s Digest Giverny Grant, a Blanche E. Colman Award and

a George Sugarman Foundation Award for painting.

Nancy has participated in over fifteen competitive art residency

programs for both painting and prinkmaking including the

MacDowell Colony; Millay Colony; I-Park Enclave; Musee’ de

Pont Aven Residency Program in Brittany, France; Theodore

Lot #15

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.

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 colour 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 colours and

patterns of oriental fabrics are suggested. Over the last decade,

the dimensions of Perkin's 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.’

Lot #16

Duane PerkinsWinnipeg, Manitoba

Untitled

Porcelain

14.5 x 16.5 inches, 2007

Range: $1,400 – 1,800

Sponsored by Grand Forks Herald

Friese cont.

Roosevelt Medora Foundation Residency in North Dakota’s

Badlands; Ragdale Colony, Illinois; and the Center for

Contemporary Print, Connecticut. She was a painter in

residence for a four-month residency in Lower Manhattan

Cultural Council’s Studioscape Residency Program in the World

Trade Center during 9/11.

Friese has an MFA from Yale University School of Art and Yale

Summer School of Music and Art. She studied at the University

of California, Berkeley and the Art Academy of Cincinnati. She

has a B.S. from the University of North Dakota. Friese is a full

professor at the Rhode Island School of Design. She spends her

summers painting on the family farm near Buxton, North Dakota.

Lot #17 (far left)

Milena marinovFargo, North Dakota

Jesus and Mary

Egg tempera on wood panel

with glazes

18 x 11.5 inches

Range: $1,500 - 1,800

Lot #18

Milena marinovFargo, North Dakota

Jesus

Egg tempera on wood panel

with glazes

18 x 11.5 inches

Range: $1,500 - 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. Bulgarian icons can

boast of a thousand year's history. Bulgaria was the first of the

Slav peoples to adopt Christianity from Byzantium as her official

religion in 865. Since then the Bulgarian icon has developed as

a fundamental part of the art of the country from the ninth

century through the present day. Milena Marinov continues this

tradition while living in 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 manifestation 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 canon of icon

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

in painting Jesus Entering Jerusalem, Christ must be riding a white

mule. Depending upon the complexity of the composition, the

artist will spend from two to four weeks completing one icon.

The icons offered in this auction are meant to be a pair. They

reflect Marinov’s past year of intense work “writing” the icons for

the iconostasis of the All Saints Orthodox Christian Church in

Fargo. An iconostasis is a wall of icons and religious paintings,

separating the nave from the sanctuary in a church. Marinova

completed five of the six major icons, which will include

versions of the images in the auction, as well as two

Annunciation icons for the central King’s Gate that opens into the

sanctuary. She estimates that it will take her another two years to

complete six icons for the lower story of the iconastsis, which

depict stories from the Old Testament, twelve feast icons, and the

crowning Last Supper.

While the North Dakota Museum of Art is primarily a

contemporary art museum, we are pleased to support the work

of this superb artist working within an ancient tradition.

EWa Tarsia, RCA is a Polish artist who became a Canadian

citizen in 1995. The success of her artistic career in Canada was

celebrated in June 2007 when she was 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 work included in this auction represents the evolution of

Tarsia’s printmaking into personal techniques that meld the

actual printmaking plastic plate into the final work of art, in this

case the painting Treasured Memories.

As a printmaker, Tarsia 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 af-

fection. Covered with marks, lines and subtle traces of colour,

printing plates are often as interesting as the images pulled from

them. 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.

As an environmentalist, Tarsia 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 fourteen 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 sur-

faces and then applying layers of colour. “It is a sickness,” she half-

jokes, “an uncontrollable compulsion medicated only by the

production of more art.” (Kristen Pauch-Nolin)

Ewa Tarsia will have a solo exhibition at the North Dakota

Museum of Art in 2008.

Lot #19

Ewa Tarsia, RCAWinnipeg, Manitoba

Treasured Memories, 2006

Mixed media including acrylic and

plastic on canvas

48 x 48 inches

Range: $3,500 – 4,500

Sponsored by Leighton Broadcasting

Lot # 20

Adam KempGrand Forks, North Dakota

Lincoln Park, 2007

Acrylic, oil hardwood floor

with customized wood frame

32 x 99.5 inches

Range: $1,000 - 1,200

Lot #21

Cheryl OlsonDrake, North Dakota

Untitled

Watercolor on paper

4.25 x 7 inches, 2006

Range: $150 - 200

Adam Kemp, Grand Fork’s unofficial Artist in Residence,

was born in 1962 and 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 and sculpture, Kemp’s work includes a

commissioned wall mosaic at the Hotel Donaldson in Fargo

(summer 2003). Kemp continues to teach popular sessions in

the Museum’s Summer Art Camp and to run the You Are Here

gallery in downtown Grand Forks, of which he is half-owner.

Cheryl Olson: I was a farmer's daughter, born and raised in

North Dakota. I've lived in the state most of my life. I married a

farmer and became a farmer's wife. Living so close to the land, I

developed a deep appreciation for the wild and wide-open

landscape of the prairie. I've tried to duplicate that natural

balance and design in my paintings, using small detail with

obscure impressions, hopefully leaving some of the landscape to

the interpretation of the viewer. I like to play with the vivid and ob-

scure colors that our late night and early morning sun paints in the

North Dakota sky. It is a feeling I have every day I look

outside, and I hope you can experience it through my paintings.

Adam Kemp is donating halfof the proceeds of this sale

to the Museum of Art

Lot #23

Linda WhitneyValley City, North Dakota

Dakota Plains Portrait, 2005

Encaustic, seed beads and horse hair

Each 6.5 x 8.5 inches plus hair

Range: $300 - $400 for pair

Lot #22

Linda WhitneyValley City, North Dakota

Bluegill, 2006

Encaustic and oilbar on canvas

15 x 21.25 inches

Range: $125 - 150

Linda Whitney has a long history of service to the arts

in North Dakota reflected in her current position as President of

the Board of Valley City’s Community School of the Arts. In 1999,

she was honored for this lifetime of service with the Governor’s

Award for the Arts. Whitney took her MFA in Printmaking from

the University of North Dakota in 1993 and has gone on to work

in the field as a teacher, a juror/curator, and an artist. She

currently is Chair and Professor of Art at Valley City State

University. She exhibits extensively throughout the region, and

through the International Print Exchange #5 she will show work

in 2008 at SUNY, Buffalo; Pratt Fine Arts Gallery, Seattle; and

Denmark’s Roennebaeksholm Arts and Culture Centre.

According to Whitney, Everything about the encaustic process

feeds my personality. The smell of the warm beeswax brings to

mind lazy, sun-filled summer days and the smell of the honey

being extracted from the hive. The liquid pigments, which cool

and solidify quickly, encourage me to work with thick, textural

layers of color directly on the surface. The thickness of the wax

surface allows me to draw back into the image with my etching

needle, satisfying my need for linear detail. Rubbing oilbar into

the inscribed lines gives me a reason to get my hands dirty.

Bluegill comes from those childhood afternoons spent on a lake

covered with lily pads fishing for panfish. It comes not from the

thrill of catching a living creature on a hook but from the

knowledge that one can provide food for supper even though one

is only eight.

Dakota Plains Portrait: Working with my hands can be a very

spiritual act especially when the mantra of a repeated, some

might say tedious, act is involved. Creating with materials

historically used by another culture—the seed beads and

horsehair—vicariously connects me to those artists of another

time. Using the impression of my own face places me, in an

abstract way, in an ancient place on the plains. The portrait mask

is a document of what I want to be when I grow up, working

creatively in a connected way.

Lot #25

Jessica ChristyValley City, North Dakota

that’s how the gypsy went to heaven

Encaustic and mixed media

30 x 22 x 3 inches, 2006

Range: $400 - 500

Lot # 24

Melanie RocanLa Broquerie, Manitoba

Swimming #2

Oil on canvas

54 x 66 inches

Range: $2,000 - 2,500

Sponsored by KVLY TV

Melanie Rocan: Born in 1980, this bilingual Franco-

Manitoban graduated with a BFA from the University of

Manitoba and is currently completing her Master of Fine Arts at

Concordia University, Montreal. She has recently been

nominated as a semifinalist in the 8th annual RBC [Financial

Group] painting competition. Her work is included in a group

exhibition traveling to galleries across Canada including the

Musee d’art contemporain de Montreal, The Museum of

Contemporary Art in Toronto and the Contemporary Art Gallery

of Vancouver. In 2005, she was part of an exchange program

with the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland. In 2007 she will be

part of a Too-Sicks group show at the Harvey Levine Gallery, in

Los Angeles.

My recent work speaks of the fragility of human beings and the

reality of the subconscious state. I want to capture a distressed

beauty in the work which suggests the inner emotional

condition, highs and lows, a psychological unease. There is a

dichotomy between the difficulty to comprehend the reality of the

internal world and a reaction to the outside world’s fragility and

the present state of the earth. I use the environment to

address issues concerning identity and by isolating the figure I

want to emphasize the ever growing disconnect between us and

our environment.

I rely on an intuitive process to create these works which gives

me the freedom to search and make discoveries. I find the

struggles of creating work by intuition and memory takes me on

a constant search to re-invent and build the work, within the

internal domains of my conscience. This process also allows

room for balance from my hand and the medium itself to

communicate. I use a variety of languages and diverse

techniques combined on one surface, a pastiche in the imagery as

well as in the way I paint. By using these techniques I want

to capture and evoke inconsistencies of emotions, making the

work linger in between a darkness and a playfulness, to be able

to affect and give sensations.

Jessica Christy was born in Valley City, North Dakota,

and recently graduated from Valley City State University. The

daughter of well-known artist/art professor Linda Whitney, she

has lived in and around art her entire life. Consequently she

began making and showing art at a young age. In the fall of 2007

she began work on her MFA in mixed media at the University of

North Dakota.

Asked about her work, she replied: When creating my art, I delve

deep into my subjects, to a place where I can look out from their

perspective. I grew up having my mischievous behavior blamed

on being “bohunk.” I became curious to its origin and started

digging into the culture of the Roma. I am fascinated with

American culture and its perspective on the world, so studying

the world of the Gypsies allowed me to step back and approach

tradition and society in a whole new light. That’s how the gypsy

went to heaven… discusses some of the most prominent beliefs

of the Roma. The power of the color red and strong belief of

order and cleanliness are addressed. I created this piece in an

attempt to highlight and separate the preconceived ideas of the

way these people live.

Ned Krouse, a native of Ft. Wayne, Indiana, was an

elementary school teacher for many years before his interest in

pottery and his desire to make handmade objects led him back

to school and a degree in fine art. He completed his MFA at the

Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia in 1982 before moving to

Wilmington, North Carolina, where his wife, Susan, was

pursuing a career in museum work. Her Doctorate in Cultural

Anthropology later allowed them to travel across much of

America.

Ned's curiosity about other cultures encountered during his

travels has allowed him to formulate and incorporate his own

ideas about glazes, color, size, and form into his work. Ned's

ceramics have been widely exhibited in the Northeast, the

Midwest and North Carolina.

As a studio potter, Krouse specializes in colorful raku pottery. His

pieces are removed from a kiln while red hot and smoked in a

reduction chamber (usually a metal garbage can filled with straw

and sawdust). Krouse has been a part of the teaching staff at the

Potters' Guild since his move to the Lansing area in 2000. Back

in 1989-90 Krouse taught for a year at Minot State University,

filling in for a faculty member on leave.

Lot #26

Ned KrouseHaslet, Michigan

Prairie Sunset, 2007

Slip decorated and raku fired stoneware

14 inch diameter, 3.25 inches deep

Range: $150 - 175

Lot #27

Brent BraniffMinot, North Dakota

Crisis

Oil on canvas

24 x 8 inches, 2007

Range: $350-400

Lot #28

KIM FINKGrand Forks, North Dakota

The Blood Beneath My Feet

Hybrid print (woodcut, flocking,

stickers, and serigraph)

38 x 36 inches, 2006

Range: $600 - 800

Brent Braniff exhibited a color pencil drawing in last

year’s auction. However, over the past year and a half my art has

taken a drastic change. I have gone from drawing to painting and

from tightly planned illustrations to doing work that evolves from

idea to idea. The process becomes part of the finished art.

Each of these paintings has moments of discovery without the

predetermination I was accustomed to with the illustrations. I

found that the less I force myself to follow a pre-planned

execution the more successful the piece. More recently I began

to introduce some of the narrative that I had in my drawings by

painting my photography into the work. My themes of spirituality

and sensuality become some of the foundation for the color

fields and symbols that are major elements in the image.

At first, I was convinced that if I turned to this more painterly

direction I would lose the directness that I enjoyed with the

drawings. In fact, I found the opposite to be true. With each

chance I took, reworking the intended outcome, the layers of color

became the richness of the story.

Perhaps this is the direction I should’ve taken all along. Although,

I haven’t abandoned drawing all together I’m sure that the past

year will have an effect on the look of any future works.

Brannif, who grew up in Devils Lake, North Dakota, was

studying art with Walter Piehl at Minot State University while

exploring electronic music on the side.Today Braniff continues to

live in Minot where he works as a television technician.

Kim Fink’s current work involves hybrid printing techniques,

illustrating what he says is an exploration of comparative culture

in what is termed “cultural” or “group memory”—implicit as well

as explicit—all of which forms us as individuals, as a group, and

ultimately as a nation. Conceptually, I develop a visual diary or

personal “travelogue” specifically reflecting our times in the early

twenty-first century. Images are drawn largely from contemporary

mass media and contrasted by hand-executed application in

opposition to mechanical or “cool” reproduction processes. It is

an attempt to create a fusion of cultural realities that explore

subjective versus objective visions and attempt to develop a

synthesis between image and meaning.

As art critic Michael Duncan wrote of Fink’s work: Kim Fink

assembles picture games, refining their strategies in structured

Ian August is a painter, lately of portraits from life, and a

member of the Winnipeg collective Two Six (or Two-Sicks or 26

or Twenty-Six or Too-Six). This group of seven artists in their early

to mid-twenties began as teenage graffiti writers steeped in

skateboard culture. Most are recent graduates from the

University of Manitoba's School of Art in Winnipeg, including

August who matriculated with honors in 2004.

According to Winnipeg's artist/critic Cliff Eyland, Two-Six paints

quietly in their shared studio and bicycles wildly in the streets,

decorating the city with original works of art that they call

“prefabs.” Many prefabs are painted with commercial colors

called “mistints,” that is, house paint that has been rejected by a

buyer after already having been mixed. Mistinted paint on

rejected pieces of wood found in the dumpsters makes prefabs a

fabulous return of the repressed.

Prefabs are small, original paintings that are “nail bombed” to

city fences and walls during the ritual bicycle expedition 26 calls

a “party bike.” In galleries, they install, along with large stretched

paintings, collections of small wall works they call “Shame Walls,”

a punning reference of Halls of Fame.

Each artist in the group also makes his or her personal work.

Such are the five small paintings in this auction by Ian August.

Painted on the outside of covers torn from hardcover books, they

defy logical interpretation although his working titles give clues:

wood grain, sore toe, stir sticks, Sumo Love, rope knot. His

charming and not-so charming characters go madly about their

unknown business, resembling, if anything, leftover characters

from Dr. Seuss. Another clue: Ian spent the last year in Banff but

returned to Winnipeg to live “because he missed the winters.”

Lot #29

Untitled

2006

9.5 x 6.3 inches

Lot #30

Untitled

2005

10.2 x 7.25 inches

Lot #31

Untitled

2004

9.4 x 6.3 inches

Lot #32

Untitled

2003

8 x 5.5 inches

Lot #33

Untitled

2006

9.6 x 6.4 inches

Ian AugustWinnipeg, Manitoba

Five paintings on

book covers

Range: $80 - 100 each

combinations. These goals are meticulously painted mysteries

and intricately layered prints. It’s an image world, baby. . . you

gotta know the symbols to survive. . . . (from the exhibition 4-

Way Stop, Donna Beam Gallery, University of Las Vegas, 1999).

The Blood Beneath My Feet is the central panel of a five-panel

allegorical work-in-progress that explores human life, addressing

such themes as the transience of life, death and wisdom, amongst

others. Primarily woodcut, this hybrid, or mixed-media print

includes silkscreen, flocking and stickers.

Kim Fink teaches printmaking at the University of North Dakota.

Lot #34

Jon SolingerMoorhead, Minnesota

Elm Elegy, 2006

Digital and film

42 x 19 inches

Range: $600 - 700

Jon Solinger: This work is part of a photography project

intended to lyrically document the life and death of trees in my

Moorhead neighborhood’s landscape. It especially relates to elm

trees and Dutch elm disease; how the process of change on my

street points out the impermanence of all things.

In this work I’m experimenting with visual ideas from the world

of books; folding the print to create gutters reminiscent of an open

volume, and presenting the print on a wooden easel

inspired by a library dictionary stand.

I like drawing a parallel between book forms that remind me of

many stories read, individual trees’ life stories as told by growth

rings in their stumps, and the larger tale of the demise of the

elms in my neighborhood. They all unfold in a progression that

moves from beginning through to an end.

These landscapes speak to the give and take between humans

and the natural world, how we respond and adapt, and signs of

time's passage.

Jon Solinger of Moorhead has been photographing the trees of

the Red River Valley and the Minnesota lake country for years.

In 2000 the North Dakota Museum of Art secured a grant from

Nodak Electric Foundation to allow Solinger to photograph

extensively. The Museum mounted an exhibition of eighty of his

photographs which opened in Grand Forks in the summer of

2005 and subsequently toured for two years throughout North

Dakota through the Museum’s Rural Arts Initiative. The Museum

is publishing a book of these photographs. His most recent

exhibition was a two-man show with Mark Anthony at the Plains

Art Museum in Fargo, winter 2006-07. 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. Solinger teaches photography

part-time at the University of Minnesota, Moorhead, and runs

Solinger’s Resort on Lake Lida, four miles east of Pelican Rapids,

Minnesota.

Note: Work will be housed in a Plexiglass box.

imposed on simple shapes and forms. These images resonate with

many childhood and local memories. At the same time I wish to

dazzle the viewer’s eyes with color.

Robert Crowe lives on the family farm near Comstock,

Minnesota. This past summer he showed at the Plains Art

Museum in Fargo in the exhibition Personal Journeys on

Common Ground: Robert Crawford Crowe, Dan Jones, Carl

Oltvedt. He is represented by the Boerths Gallery in Fargo.

“Plein Aire” painters work on location to quickly capture the

fleeting light effects that occur in nature. Typically the initial

painting is completed on location in two to three hours before the

quality of the light changes. The artist may return to the same

location at the same time of day to complete the work, or may

make adjustments in the studio.

Painting in this manner, rather than from photographs, gives the

artwork a quality of being truthful to nature and conveys an

atmosphere and feeling of a place that is not achievable by any

other means. When viewing a Plein Air painting, you can almost

imagine yourself in the scene. —Carmel Plein Aire Gallery

Lot #35

Robert Crawford CroweMoorhead, Minnesota

Untitled

Pastel on paper

18 x 22 inches, 2007

Range: $800 - 1,200

Sponsored by KXJB TV

Robert Crowe: Having been born into the family who

owned the Bergstrom and Crowe Furniture store in Fargo for ninety

years, I spent most of my early life in retail and interior

design. During this time I was painting artistically and doing faux

finishes in my spare time. Finally, I became frustrated with retail

and decided to return from Dallas to Fargo to finish a long

overdue art degree at the University of Minnesota, Moorhead.

While finishing my BFA, I began teaching at Creative Arts Studio

in Fargo. There I became friends with Robert Kurkowski, the

Studio’s director, and through Bob I fell in love with teaching

kids. After getting my BA, I decided to pursue a BS in education.

While completing this second degree, also at Moorhead, I met and

became friends with painting instructor Carl Oltvedt and

Dan Jones, another local painter.

Carl and Dan introduced me to Plein Aire painting. This way of

painting has a long history in that most of the great Impressionists

and Expressionists painted this way. The three of us became close

friends and began to paint together often. Through Carl and Dan I

learned to appreciate our Lakes Country and our beautiful Red

River Valley. These subjects have been my major focus for the last

ten years as I continued to paint realistic, local landscapes.

For the last three years I have been concentrating on abstraction of

these local images by pushing color as far as I can. The result is

what you see in the work in the exhibition: brilliant color

In 2002, he began work on his MFA in sculpture at the University

of North Dakota (2004). He currently works as Coordinator of

Marketing and Graphic Design at Presentation College,

Aberdeen. He also serves as an adjunct art instructor at Northern

State University and Presentation College.

In 2007 Blair completed an outdoor sculpture commission for

Northern State University. The sculpture, My Body is a Cage,

was installed in June in the main green space on campus.

Blair has a long relationship with the North Dakota Museum of

Art as a artist who creates sculpture with children through the

Museum’s Rural Arts Initiative. As part of the Museum’s Emptying

Out of the Plains project, Blair cast tree sap into the images of

the human heart as a memorial to trees that once thrived in

North Dakota during the glacial Lake Agassiz era. His tombstone

installation also cited trees that have the potential to become

extinct. When asked to create an additional sculpture in the

Museum Garden, Blair asked himself, “How would a museum

display a tree specimen?” His answer: Treat it like a dinosaur.

His tree dinosaur occupied the southwest corner of the Museum

Garden for months.

Greg Blair: This piece is from my series that integrates

natural materials with works on paper. I have been thinking

about the influence of Christianity on our cultural perceptions

and attitudes towards nature. Within Christian imagery, evil is

often represented as an animal or something else from the

natural world: the snake in the Garden of Eden, the plagues of

frogs and locusts, and the devil as half goat. This piece is the

opposite in that good is represented by something organic or

natural. I decided to use the Holy Trinity, God, Jesus, and the Holy

Spirit, because together they sybolize the epitome of goodness.

The three leaves, which are positioned level to each other, are

almost exactly the same, but each is still unique. One of the leaves

has the top portion broken off and placed slightly above the leaf

body. This is meant to be the crown that God wears in the

kingdom of heaven. I chose this opposite representation of

Christian imagery in order to satirically comment on the

underlying ideology concerning nature in Christianity.

Greg Blair was born in Edmonton, Alberta, but spent his early

years in Red Deer (south of Edmonton in the treed foothills of the

Rocky Mountains). He received his BFA degree from the

University of Lethbridge in Alberta with an emphasis in sculpture.

Lot #36

Greg BlairAberdeen, South Dakota

The Holy Trinity

Leaves, paper and charcoal

19 x 24 inches, 2007

Range: $350 - 500

Greg Blair has donated theproceeds from the sale of this work of art to the

Museum of Art

Lot # 37

Georgie PapageorgePretoria, South Africa

Study, Waiting for the Mountain to Come Out Series

Oil and graphite on Fabriano paper

27.75 x 39.25 inches

1997

Range: $800 - $1,200

Georgie Papageorge draws like an angel. Her line is

sure, swift, and elegant. Inevitably the drawings appear in her

exhibitions as “working drawings.” Rather, I believe them to be

summations, made by the artist at the end of a large body of

work, incorporating all that has gone before. Once finished, the

large-scale monumental drawings, laced with calligraphy and

expanded with washes of paint, become singular works of art,

more comprehensive and more mysterious than the

photographic murals, the sculpture, the installations, and the

videos from which they gather their substance.

Georgie Papageorge, born in 1941 as Jennifer Jane van der

Merwe in Simonstown, Cape Province, South Africa, changed

her name to George when she was ten—and a few years later, to

Georgie. This heralded the beginning of what can only be

described as an extraordinary life, marked by tragedy and an

incredible ability to rise above it all. She graduated with a BA

from the University of South Africa, Pretoria, at the age of 40 and

embarked on an international art career.

Her art has never been without intense personal, spiritual, and

social investment, with the notion of transcending “barriers”

central to her work—political in her earlier art and

transcendental in later works.

Throughout the 1980s South Africa and its violent political

situation provided the conceptual basis of her art. The political

work, which came from this time, included Collaboration,

Suspension and other monumental works that were exhibited in

the United States, including the North Dakota Museum of Art,

which owns a substantial body of the earlier work and in 2005

published a full catalogue covering ten year’s work.

In 1994, Papageorge began working in the Kalahari Desert,

Botswana, to produce the Gondwanaland Series, a land-art series

based in the Sowa Salt Pan. In pursuit of the Great Rift Valley, she

traveled north to Mount Kilimanjaro, which she has climbed

three times, making this great African mountain the subject of her

next major project.

This drawing comes from that large series, “Kilimanjaro Through

the Rifting Barrier.” She made the drawing, Waiting for the

Mountain to Come Out, in a mealie (corn) field while waiting for

the barrier of clouds to move away to reveal the tip of

Kilimanjaro. She centers herself in line with the mountain

through the use of the circle. In 2008-09 the North Daktoa

Musuem of Art will mount a major exhibition of Papageorge’s

work, including the Kilimanjaro series.

Lot #38

Todd HebertLos Angeles, California

Snowman with Grass #3

Acrylic and watercolor on paper

2007

10.50 x 29.75 inches

Range: $1,800 - 2,200

Sponsored by East Grand Floral

Todd Hebert’s paintings are fuzzy definition incarnate—

lush images of melting snowmen, sweating water bottles and

bubblegum backyard Americana seen, delicately, coolly, through

the prism of the morning dew caught on an invisible spider web.

The young Los Angeles-based artist's paintings are deftly blurry,

eerily suggestive, an enigma made out of the familiar and the

obvious. There is a special, childlike and almost primeval, sense

of wonder at the physical world which the works increasingly con-

vey. Still their highly crafted, minutely designed facture

unabashedly plays with the idea of digital manipulation with a

very knowing, not quite entirely out of focus, playful “broken cam-

era” aesthetic—resulting in the mysterious soft edges and off kil-

ter, from the hip perspective that have become one of Hebert's

signature framing games, a magical mixture of thematic heft with

light-as-air touch. Patient distillation, requiring the same of the

viewer.

Following his Emerging Artist Award exhibition at the Aldrich

Contemporary Art Museum (Ritchfield, Connecticut) last year,

Hebert showed five new paintings at Mark Moore in Los Angeles,

a show in which he further investigated the physical and

metaphorical properties of that which might be his favorite

element—water. As his gallerist points out, his paintings are like

elaborately staged film stills, reminiscent of some of Los Angeles

legend John Baldessari's conceptual-based paintings that play with

the nature of meaning and notions of art theory, and of

fiction, abstraction, what constitutes substance.

Like so many of Hebert’s paintings, Snowman with Grass #3 is

full and empty at the same time, and as evanescent, beautiful and

ephemeral as they are real.

Hebert was born in Valley City, North Dakota, 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.

The artist recently completed a print edition for the Aldrich

Contemporary Art Museum and is also currently in a three-

person show, “Works on Paper: Todd Hebert, Dennis

Hollingsworth, Jason Meadows,” at the Cirrus Gallery in Los

Angeles. Hebert will have a solo show at Jack Shainman Gallery,

New York, in 2008.

— Quoted passage by London critic Lupe Nunez-Fernandez

Todd Hebert is from North Dakota. He sees the world the way North Dakotans do a good part of the time: the world made white

and blurry, or gorgeously colored, by shifting snowin a country where the Prevailing Westerlies seldom

stop blowing.

Barton Lidice Benes’ suite of twelve construction

lithographs was produced between October 2004 and June 2005

at the Sequoia Press, in conjunction with the University of North

Dakota Art Department. Kim Fink, Chair of UND’s Printmaking

Department, founded the Sequoia Press.

There are twelve suites, numbered 1/12 to 12/12 and there is no

bon a tirer suite or proofs. Each print is signed, numbered and

dated by the artist. All images are on archival material as follows:

Each “dream” image has been scanned and printed on archival

80 lb. “ultra-white” printing paper, using an Epson 3700 Photo

Scanner and MacIntosh G5 computer as matrix. Each “dream” is

printed with an Epson Stylus Photo 2200 printer, using T0300

series archival ink, and flocked with #612 “golden flow” Vintage

Glass Glitter, and glued onto Arches 400 lb. watercolor paper,

using archival glue.

Each dream “bubble” is flocked with #612 glass glitter on Arches

300 lb. watercolor paper, using archival glue. Each “stamped”

image is printed from aluminum plate lithography matrix.

Lot #39

Barton Lidice BenesNew York, New York

Wet Dreams, 2004-05

Twelve constructed lithographs with

title pages and box (right)

Each approximately 8.5 x 10.5 inches

Edition 12/12

Range: $2,500 - 3,000

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 #40

Walter PiehlMinot, North Dakota

red bob: sweetheart of the rodeo,

with thanks to Dave Doll

Acrylic on canvas

39.5 x 27.5 inches, 2007

Range: $3,500 – 4,500

Sponsored by Merrill Lynch

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.

Ultimately Piehl is charmed by the bucking horse, for him the

real sweetheart of the rodeo, and the title of his on-going series,

of which there are hundreds of paintings and drawings.

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 work. 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. And, Piehl continues to ride horses.

Lot #41

Marjorie Talle MerrimanTowson and Baltimore (studio) Maryland

Stavlirke Series #9

Ink and watercolor on paper

28 x 22.5 inches, 1983

Range: $350 - 450

Norway’s Stave Churches: Most churches built in Norway

before the Black Death swept across the country (and Europe as

well) in the years 1349-51, were stave churches, which take their

names from the distinctive building technique using vertical

staves. There must have been approximately 800 - 1000 stave

churches in Norway, although there are only about thirty original

stave churches remaining today.

The oldest type of stave churches were built in the 1000s, but the

timber of their walls were set directly into the ground and, as a

result, they quickly rotted away. In the 1100s it became

customary to set the walls on beams or sills above ground. Thus

all stave churches still standing rest on such sills.

There are several kinds of stave churches. The simplest have only

a nave, with a narrower chancel—in these churches the roof

rests on the walls. Some stave churches have a tall, sturdy upright

or mast in the middle which supports the ridge turret and

strengthens the walls. The biggest and most elaborate type has a

central section with a lofty ceiling, which is supported by

freestanding posts upon the floor. A lower aisle encircles the

central area. — Arild Hauge, Denmark

Stave churches may be Norway's foremost contribution to world

cultural heritage—this church is on UNESCO's World Heritage

List.

Marjorie Merriman is a consummate painter-

printmaker with deep ties to the Northern Plains region. Her

grandparents were married in the Dakota Territory. Her

grandfather, Ole Larson Huset, owned two farms in North

Dakota and his heirs, including Marjorie, share the ownership.

Her mother, Edith Margaret Huset, grew up on a farmstead near

Hatton and in a house on Reeves Drive in Grand Forks.

Marjorie’s father, Henry O. Talle, was born on a farm near Albert

Lea, Minnesota, and graduated from Luther College in Decorah,

Iowa, in 1917. In 1919 and 1920 he taught and was

superintendent of schools in Rugby and Rolette, North Dakota.

Shortly after, the family moved to Decorah, Iowa, where they

lived for the next two decades and where Marjorie was born. She

moved with her family to Washington in 1939 when her father

became a United States Representative in Congress. Marjorie

graduated from The College of William and Mary and received

her MFA in painting from the Mount Royal School of Art at the

Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore.

Both a painter and a printmaker, Merriman has created a

significant body of work about Norway’s stave churches, having

visited the stave church in Norway where her grandfather Huset

was baptized and confirmed.

Active in Maryland Printmakers Association, she continues to go

daily to her studio where she houses her own printing press. Her

recent concentration on printmaking has produced work that is

abstract although it references nature and symbolic forms.

According to printmaker Nancy Friese (a cousin), “Marjorie’s

work has a direct and graphic strength.”

Marjorie Merriman has lived in Cornwall, England, and the US

Virgin Islands, and she has traveled extensively including four trips

to Norway to paint churches. Merriman co-founded a non-

profit exhibition space in Maryland where she curated monthly

shows. As a curator she also has produced several large group

exhibitions, including a show of five family painters for

Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum in Iowa, and has

advised corporate collections.

Jim Bailey’s work in the auction, Sixtyfour, was given

Honorable Mention in ANA 35: A National Juried Exhibition at

the Holter Museum in Helena, Montana. Of the 600 entrants,

147 works in all media were chosen. Sixtyfour was reproduced

along with half-a-dozen other images in the exhibition brochure.

Sixtyfour is part of the artist’s Customized Series, which draws

upon two different but equally important aspects of his life:

wheel-thrown ceramic vessels and automotive culture. Bailey

seeks to merge these seemingly unrelated topics in his art.

The ceramic vessel evolved as a practical device for food storage.

Gradually they took on decorative as well as religious elements of

the local culture including being used as reliquaries for human re-

mains. Today ceramic vessels are quite devoid of function,

either practical or symbolic. Commercial products have replaced

them and contemporary social customs have devalued their

importance. Now the ceramic vessel functions solely as a

decorative object, the expression of personal taste and interests.

According the artist, my interest in cars dates back to my youth,

when the automobile represented my first definition of

masculinity and personal freedom. As an adult, this interest has

shifted to the cultural implications of the customized vehicle.

Many embellishments are pure ornamentation as the hot-rodder

aesthetic demands that functional parts of the automobile be

customized. This ensures a consistency of style throughout the

entire vehicle that manifests itself through a strict accordance to

form—form follows function.

Lot #42

Jim BaileyMinot, North Dakota

Sixtyfour

Stoneware, cone six oxidation with

metal, vinyl. and rubber

24 x 21.5 inches, 2004

Range: $1,600 – 2,000

At some point these separate passions merged, and my

ceramic vessels became infused with the hot-rod

aesthetic. The elaborate fit, finish and presentation in

my artwork replicate the custom car experience and

acts as a testament to a cultural lifestyle. My vessels,

like some “show cars,” are no longer primarily about

utility. These customized vessels become symbolic

objects diverting attention to surface, color, and

imagination. They reveal a host of social and cultural

attitudes and beliefs about function, style and individuality.

As an undergraduate art major, Jim Bailey enrolled in his first

ceramics course in 1992 at Minot State University. A year later

Bailey joined Davy Pottery in Burlington, North Dakota. During

his six years as a production potter, he divided his time between

production, distribution and marketing of the full pottery line.

In 2002, Bailey finished his BFA degree and was accepted into

the graduate program at the University of North Dakota. In 2005

he graduated with a MFA having also acquired three years of

university teaching experience.

From 2005 to 2007 Bailey completed a residency at the Custer

County Art and Heritage Center in Miles City, Montana. As

Resident Artist, Jim was responsible for the in-house adult

ceramic classes. He also contributed to the educational outreach

programs to area schools and communities, as well as organizing

and maintaining the Center’s ceramic studio.

Bailey is currently an instructor at Minot State University where

he teaches ceramics and other related studio courses. He

exhibits, locally, regionally and throughout the United States.

Weekends find him working as a track announcer at the local

drag strip during the racing season.

Lot #43

Gregory VettelFriday, August 13, 1806

Digital composite giclee print

26 x 34 inches

Range: $400 - 600

GREGORY VETTEL: I was born in Hillsboro, North Dakota,

and grew up in the flat Red River Valley, lived in western North

Dakota, the mountains of Montana and Los Angeles and visited

New York, Denver, Chicago, Mexico City, Buenos Aires and

Montevideo, Uruguay. I like the contrast of living in and

experiencing different geographical regions, but have always

come back to my childhood terrain where the sky and land go on

forever.

My landscape photography and love of history are combined in

my auction piece as I attempt to echo the feeling of surviving

through hunting in the North Dakota environment under our won-

derful summer skies. I made this work in response to William

Clark’s journal entry on Wednesday (Friday), August 13, 1806

which said:

The last night was very cold with a stiff breeze from the

northwest. All hands were on board and we set out at sunrise and

proceeded on very well with a stiff breeze astern the greater part

of the day. Passed the entrance of the Little Missouri River at 8

A. M. and arrived at the entrance of Myry (sic) River at sunset and

encamped on the northeast side having came by the assistance

of the wind, the current and our oars eighty-six miles. Below the

little basin I with Drewyer walked through the northeast point.

We saw an elk and several deer. Drewyer wounded the elk but

Gregory Vettel has donated the proceeds from the sale of this

work of art to the Museum of Art

could not get him. I joined the pirogues and party again in the

bend below and proceeded on. Some Indians were seen in a skin

canoe below. They were descending from an old camp of theirs

on the southeast side, those I suppose to be some of the

Minetaras who had been up on a hunting expedition, one canoe

was left at their camp. We had not proceeded far before I

discovered two Indians on a high hill. Nothing very remarkable

took place. The mosquitoes are not so troublesome this evening

as they have been. The air is cool. . . . [spelling has been

regularized]

Greg Vettel received his BA from Minot State University in art and

graphic design. He’s spent thirty-eight years studying and

repairing all types of mechanisms from motorcycles to telescopes

before becoming the Exhibition Coordinator and Registrar at the

North Dakota Museum of Art. This former automobile,

motorcycle, and truck technician transformed his love of

machines into sculpture and prints made of and inspired by

discarded Harley Davidson parts, which he has exhibited

extensively throughout the region. Professionally, he serves as

President of the North Dakota Art Gallery Association and is a

new board member of the Grand Forks County Historical Society.

He purchased the thirty-acre family farmstead in rural Thompson,

North Dakota, and filled it with his wild and eclectic collection of

motorcycles, cars, boats, machines and works of art.

Lot #44

Joan HallSt. Louis, Missouri

Bikar

Handmade paper, printing,

sisal fibers, pulp painting

30 x 40 inches, 1999

Range: $1,200 - 1,500

JOAN HALL is known for her large-scale, sculptural prints

that are thickly layered with handmade paper, pulp, and printing

ink. The process of addition and subtraction, cutting out shapes

and painting with paper, creates a deep and complex surface that

reveals new images as we look deeper into the work. It is as

though the viewer is diving through the surface of the ocean.

Implicit natural phenomena, such as water, wind, currents, and

waves not only show the artist’s long fascination with the sea, but

also portray the permeability of human beings’ basic structure

from part to whole; we are of and by the sea. Hall has always

sailed and always brought the sea into her art. According to Hall:

w I like to work with a mixed media approach to printmaking.

w The Internet has opened up a good community for

networking and reading technical information, so it's been pretty

positive overall.

w I love sailboat racing, so many of my pieces are suggestive of

the sea. I like to multi-layer the sheets of paper I've made using

different textures, weights, and densities. The layering represents

the water and the mysteries that lie below.

w The ocean is like another world. Being out on the water, when

you can no longer see land, you definitely feel like you’re out of

your element. [In my prints] I wanted to recreate the sense of

journey and of the human need to explore and dream of new hori-

zons.

w Making paper, that’s the easy part.

w Linocut, collagraph, monoprint—I’ll use whatever works for a

particular piece. Printmaking and papermaking are so

unbelievably physical and labor intensive that if you don’t keep

pushing, you can get caught up in technique and not think enough

about making art.

Born and raised in Ohio, Hall earned a BA from Columbus

College of Art and Design and spent a summer at San Francisco’s

Institute of Experimental Printmaking, working with Garner Tullis

before receiving her MFA from the University of Nebraska. Today,

Joan Hall is Professor of Art at the Sam Fox School of Design and

Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis where she holds

the Kenneth E. Hudson Professorship.

Her work is included in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum

of Art; the Saint Louis Art Museum; the Fogg Art Museum at

Harvard University; the Leopold-Hoesch Museum in Duren,

Germany; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art; the Pulitzer

Foundation for the Arts; the Evansville Museum of Art; the

Municipal Museum, Suwa, Japan; and the Municipal Museum,

Nanjing, China. Her work has been published in over ten books

and her latest exhibition was at the Hillwood Museum, Long

Island University, New York.

Hall has deep roots in North Dakota, her mother’s home. As a

child she spent her summers in Carson, located in Grant County

southwest of Bismarck.

Tim Schouten‘s paintings from the initial Treaty Lands

Series present landscapes within the geographic boundaries of

Canada/First Nations Treaties. The first body of work was created

between 1996 and 2000. The Treaty Lands title has become an

umbrella title for an extended series of works which now

includes the Distances Between web project, the Roads North

and Markers Series of paintings as well as The Treaty Suites 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 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, lu-

minous 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 en-

actment, 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 eloquently

Lot #45

Tim SchoutenPetersfield, Manitoba

From the Treaty 4 Suite

8.5 x 11 inches

Oil, dry pigment, microcrystalline

wax, beeswax and damar resin

on acid free vellum

Range: $150 - 250

summarizes, political questions of property and Aboriginal

disenfranchisement beat at the heart of these paintings.

This most recent Treaty 4 Suite contains a couple dozen exquisite

little paintings made of encaustic on velum. Part of the on-going

Treaty Suites Project, they are based largely on photographs

taken by the artist at the two locations where Treaty 4 was signed

in 1874. The Cree and Saulteaux of the Qu’Appelle Valley and

surrounding regions signed the Treaty with Canada at a spot that

is now on a residential street in the town of Fort Qu’Appelle in

Saskatchewan. Additional Cree, Saulteaux and Stony of the

region made Treaty ten days later at Fort Ellice near what is now

St. Lazarre, Manitoba. Treaty 4 Territory covers approximately

50,000 square miles of southern Saskatchewan as well as small

portions of Manitoba and Alberta.

Note: Today the building in these works of art functions as the

local hockey arena.

Lot #46

Tim SchoutenPetersfield, Manitoba

From the Treaty 4 Suite

8.5 x 11 inches

Oil, dry pigment, microcrystalline

wax, beeswax and damar resin

on acid free vellum

Range: $150 - 250

Lot #47

Marlon Davidson AND Don KnudsonBemidji, Minnesota

Five Landscapes, 2006

84 x 28 x 2 inches

Mixed media (detail below)

Range: $1,500 - 2,000

Marlon Davidson and Don Knudsonhave devoted their lives to art, first individually and ultimately as

collaborators. The work in this auction results from over a dozen

years working in wood and collage to make collaborations of

varying sizes and shifting configurations. Their collaborative art

works are in private and public collections throughout the

United States and Europe.

Davidson and Knudson both attended Bemidji State College and

the Minneapolis School of Art (now the Minneapolis College of

Art and Design). Davidson combined his art with education, first

in public schools and later at Bemidji State University where he

taught in the Visual Arts Department. Knudson has worked since

the late fifties as a sculptor and furniture maker.

We are lifetime artists. We have worked for over four decades,

both in the Twin Cities and later in Bemidji where we have lived

for eighteen years. We think of our lives as an artistic statement.

The great art historian, Bernard Berenson, wrote repeatedly

about “life as a work of art,” Whereas one never arrives at that

state, we find it a worthwhile journey. Making art objects is an

everyday part of our lives. We think of our art as a way of

explaining ourselves to ourselves. Through it, we try to

understand our culture, and to live actively within it. We also

explore the past through our art—especially the history of art.

While we use a variety of materials, our main source of inspira-

tion is nature and historical art.

Both born in northern Minnesota, we also lived for twenty years

in the Twin Cities. We are aware that our work is informed by the

art and artists we knew while living in the Cities.

Lot # 49 (right)

Ingrid RestemeyerMinneapolis, Minnesota

Gentlefish scroll #7, 2007

Etching and cotton thread

on handmade paper

50. 5 x 20. 5 inches

Range: $1,800 - 2,200

These are Sponsored by

Chester Fritz Auditorium

Ingrid Restemeyer is a printmaker and fiber artist

originally from North Dakota but now living and working in

northeast Minneapolis. Influenced by generations of fine crafters,

Restemeyer’s work reflects traditional embroidery techniques

while incorporating other process-intensive mediums through

collage. Her latest body of work features recognizable imagery

in the form of intricate etchings on handmade papers,

successively collaged with fine printmaking papers and

punctuated by paragraph-like forms made from hand-stitched

threads. For years Restemeyer’s art has alluded to storytelling or

narration through the use of her intaglio images as pseudo-

illustrations which suggest a story when paired with code-like

paragraph shapes formed from her hand-embroidery.

Restemeyer has spent more than a decade growing and

developing her unique combination of printmaking and fiberart

techniques. She studied overseas in Auckland, New Zealand and

Lot # 48 (left)

Ingrid RestemeyerMinneapolis, Minnesota

Swim School, 2007

Etching and cotton thread

on handmade paper

50. 5 x 20. 5 inches

Range: $1,800 - 2,200

in 1996 earned her BFA in Printmaking, Fiberarts and Mixed

Media Visual Arts from the University of North Dakota. In the

past several years she has shown extensively and gained gallery

representation across the United States and overseas.

As well as being dedicated full-time to producing and exhibiting

her artwork, Restemeyer is heavily involved in the Minneapolis

arts community, serving on the Board of Directors of the Rosalux

Gallery and as a lead committee member for the development of

the Northeast Minneapolis Arts District.

Lot #51 (right)

Sheila SpenceWinnipeg, Manitoba

Tulipa #5, Botanicals

Pigment on Somerset paper

Montage of five digital photographs

44 x 12.5 inches, 2007

Range: $800 - 1,000

Sheila Spence has always used her camera to investigate

notions of portraiture, self-portraiture, community and identity.

Then in the winter of 2006-07 her subject radically changed. “I

made them when my Mom was dying.” With her failing mother

always on her mind, she began to think of flowers. She pondered

the continuum of life, meditating on birth and death and all the

stages in between. She longed for spring in the dead of winter.

She wanted badly to make portraits of flowers that were achingly

beautiful. But first she needed flowers.

Her mother’s death came slowly, over the course of the winter,

long enough time to force tulips into bloom. The carefully

guarded bulbs came into flower and she took photographs—

unsatisfactory photographs. Just as every stage of life has its

season, every part of the tulip needed to be seen head on: the

roots, the bulb, the stem, the blossom. It was impossible to

achieve if she photographed the complete flower from one

vantage point.

Gradually, each tulip’s portrait evolved into a montage of

photographs, just as each stage of life demands a shifting point-

of-view if it is to be understood. She didn’t hide the passages with

the tricks of Photoshop but chose instead to allow the viewer to

consider them. The photo shapes are different; the colors not the

same.

Once finished, she hung a suite of four tulips outside of her

mother’s room in the care facility where she spent the last days of

her life.

Shelia Spence will have a solo exhibition, Portraits, at the

Winnipeg Art Gallery in 2008. She currently works as Executive

Director of the Manitoba Printmakers’ Association, Martha Street

Studio. Spence is a senior Canadian artist based in Winnipeg with

a long exhibition record and works in the collections of the

National Gallery of Canada, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the

Manitoba Arts Council Visual Art Bank, the Government of

Manitoba, the University of Winnipeg, Air Canada, and the

Wellness Institute of the Seven Oaks Hospital in Winnipeg.

Lot #50 (left)

Sheila SpenceWinnipeg, Manitoba

Tulipa #2, Botanicals

Pigment on Somerset paper

Montage of four digital photographs

44 x 15.5 inches, 2007

Range: $800 - 1,000

Express yourselftransform your photography & artwork

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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—

part of our ongoing promotion of art and artists in the upper midwest. Still Life, oil and mixed media by Mike Marth of Moorhead, Minnesota, is on the cover

of our next issue, available soon for $8 each in the Museum shop. North Dakota Quarterly is local in origin

but national and international in its range.

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

Mike Marth, Still Life

North Dakota Museum of ArtFoundation

Board of DirectorsNorth Dakota Museum of Art

Board of Trustees

Victoria Beard, Vice Chair

David Blehm

Julie Blehm

Ann Brown

Chad Caya

Jeremy Davis

Virginia Dunnigan

John Foster

Bruce Gjovig

David Hasbargen, Chair

Jean Holland

Kim Holmes

Sandy Kaul

Rick Mercil

Laurel Reuter

Alex Reichert, Treasurer

Pat Ryan

Wayne Zimmerman, Secretary

Corinne Alphson, Emerita

Barb Lander, Emerita

Darrell Larson, Emeritus

Robert Lewis, Emeritus

Ellen McKinnon, Emerita

Douglas McPhail, Emeritus

Sanny Ryan, Emerita

Gerald Skogley, Emeritus

Anthony Thein, Emeritus

Kevin Fickenscher, President

Nancy Friese

Bruce Gjovig

Daniel E. Gustafson, Vice Chair

Kitty Keck

Margery McCanna

Betty Monkman, Secretary

Laurel Reuter

North Dakota Museum of Art Staff

Justin Dalzell

Suzanne Fink

Elizabeth Glovatsky

Amy Hovde

Kathy Kendle

Brian Lofthus

Laurel Reuter

Gregory Vettel

Scott Waege

Matthew Wallace

Justin Welsh

Katie Welsh

Student Employees

Stephanie Clark

Rachel Crummy

Ana Moraru

Andrew Yost

and over fifty volunteers

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