Brad Kahlhamer

b. Tucson, AZ, 1956

Brad Kahlhamer works in a range of media including sculpture, drawing, painting, performance, and music. Kahlhamer is of indigenous descent, adopted by German parents, and grew up in New York’s Lower East Side. Reflecting on his Native American heritage and experience as both cartoonist and underground punk musician, Kahlhamer draws upon diverse sources of inspiration, including German Expressionism, Native American ledger drawings, music and graphic novels.

In Kahlhamer’s Dreamcatcher series, the artist reinterprets the dream catcher in silver constellations formed by dance bells and woven wire. The threads of wire form overlapping circles and zig zagging lines suggestive of cosmological orbits and stars, and contain a rhythmic kineticism illustrating the artist’s love of music and dance. Kahlhamer says of these works: “the dream catchers were always taking and reaching back, taking that cartoon sensibility, the ledger drawing lines of urgency, and then adding my particular character glyphs in a somewhat transparent structure that I would call a dreamcatcher.” Kahlhamer transforms a commercialized object into an almost-invisible vortex or portal in order to explore cultural hybridity and his own experience of navigating multiple communities simultaneously.

Kahlhamer is the recipient of a Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculpture Grant, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Rauschenberg Residency, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, and in 2022 was a Civitella Ranieri Foundation fellow. Kahlhamer holds a B.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, Fond du Lac Campus. He has served on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts, as a Visiting Artist and Critic at the University of Minnesota, a Richard Diebenkorn Teaching Fellow at the San Francisco Art Institute, and served as the Alex Katz Chair in painting at The Cooper Union in Fall of 2023. He currently lives and works between New York, NY; and Mesa, AZ.