Art on the Plains is the Plains Art Museum’s signature juried exhibition for contemporary art in the region. Now in its eleventh year, AOP has become an important career builder for emerging artists and a point of pride among more established professional artists. The exhibition is known for presenting the latest trends in art of the region, providing a snapshot of the artists and art that make up our regional art scene. This year’s accepted entries represent 48 artists from four states.

AOP was juried by Hesse McGraw, curator for the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, Neb. He is the former assistant director of Max Protetch gallery in New York City and former senior editor of Review, a Kansas City-based visual culture magazine. He was the founding director and curator of Paragraph, a contemporary art gallery operating under the non-profit Urban Culture Project in downtown Kansas City, Mo. He has curated exhibitions for FLEX Self Storage (Topeka, Kan.), The New Genres Festival (Tulsa), The Stray Show (Chicago), Guild and Greyshkul (NYC), -scopeMiami, RARE (NYC), Rocket gallery (London) and White Flag Projects (St. Louis).

Exhibition sponsored in part by Bremer Bank.

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Right now, in the recesses of your cupboard, resides a cup. This cup has been long forgotten and left to sit idle for too long. Why is it still in your cupboard?

With the “Missfit” Cup Liberation Project, artist Michael J. Strand has asked participant to bring their favorite rejected cups to the Museum, which he will then trade for a shiny, new hand-thrown cup to replace it. Their cups will then reside alongside 99 other rejected cups as a collection of the best of the worst, a collectively curated orphanage of castoff cups.

What sort of cups? You know the ones. That cup you made in the “paint your own pottery” class, the one with a lovingly hand-painted image of Kirby Puckett commemorating the 1991 World Series. The plastic collapsible camping cup that leaks everywhere. How about that plastic cactus-shaped cup? Who actually thought that was a good idea for a margarita? No matter what, Strand will retire them in style and expose the rich narratives that go along with them.

See an overview of new art works that have become part of Plains Art Museum’s permanent collection over the past four years in this new exhibition. Since 2007, hundreds of works of art have been donated to the Museum, and several new pieces have been acquired through Museum purchases or commissions. Become acquainted with a selection of about fifty works, many of them on view for the first time.

Birch Bark, Clay, Pixels, Paint showcases a variety of art in different media, including the first digital art in the Museum’s collection, MSUM Professor Henry Gwiazda’s video piece, Claudia & Paul, a doll’s house, consciousness. Viewers will marvel at the exquisite and innovative birch bark collage made by the father and son team, Pat and Gage Kruse of the Minnesota Mille Lacs Reservation, showing an abstract starburst design. Discover vivid still life paintings by Lorraine E. Berger, a former art teacher from this area who recently retired as Regents Professor of Art at the University of North Texas. See the inspiring ceramics of Brad Bachmeier, Ross Hilgers, and Richard Bresnahan, all noted artists and teachers from our region.

More treasures by artists from the region and nation make this exhibition a revealing showcase of the range and growth of the Museum’s collection, which now numbers over 3,500 works of art. Learn about the donors who have made possible many of these new acquistions.

Pat and Gage Kruse, My Brother’s Blanket #3, 2010, 38 x 36 in., birch-bark, red willow, deer sinew, Museum Purchase

Ladies and gentlemen! Children of all ages! Come one, come all to this extraordinary exhibition inspired by the drama and showmanship of the American circus. Contemporary mixed-media artist Judy Onofrio’s life-sized sculptures of performers, animals, and circus acts will be exhibited alongside historic examples of circus banners, posters, and carvings from Circus World Museum that provide context for her work. This spectacular installation will feature four of Onofrio’s major floor sculptures from the last decade and ten of her recent wall sculptures and two smaller floor sculptures. Colorful and dynamic, Onofrio’s work is known to engage and inspire viewers of all ages.

judyonofrio.com

The exhibition was curated by Catherine Wilkins, a Minneapolis-based independent curator. Supported by US Bancorp and Fargo-Moorhead Area Foundation.

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Ever heard the expression “two heads are better than one”? Well, when it came time to curate an upcoming exhibition at the Museum, we took that idea to a logical extreme by giving the big decisions to you and others like you, allowing our community to vote and handpick pieces from the Museum’s permanent collection for display.

The exhibition, titled You Like This: A Democratic Approach to the Museum Collection, utilized the phenomenon of crowdsourcing (outsourcing a task to a large group of people) to narrow the 3,500 objects in the Museum’s permanent collection down to 50 for display.

• View the introductory video to You Like This.

The process began last spring with an initial survey to decide which types of art and artists the community wanted to see (read the follow up). Museum staff then worked with a group of community members to narrow down the works of art to a more manageable number using the guidelines from the initial survey (read the follow up). After that, the public voted again in a final survey we posted online in July. Then, we called back the community curators after the final selections were made to choose how the works will be displayed when You Like This opens (read the follow up). It’s been a fun process, made more so by the thrill of uncertainty.

• View video comments from a few of the community curators.

We invite you to see the show you had a hand in creating. While you’re at it, we invite you to consider this idea of crowdsourcing – we are, and we plan on taking the experiences we learned from You Like This and using them in future projects.

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Artist, West Fargo High School art teacher, and FMVA board chair Eric Syvertson stands in front of his work in progress for Big Country: FMVA Scale the Plains.

When The North Dakota Mural by James Rosenquist was unveiled at the Museum last fall, its sheer size—13 ft. x 24 ft.—made an impressive impact. Rosenquist is known for producing large canvases as well as painting large images, an approach that emerged in the 1960s from his life as a billboard painter.

In celebration of the inaugural year of the mural, Plains Art Museum challenged members of the Fargo Moorhead Visual Artists (FMVA) to create large-scale work to be considered for the exhibition Big Country: FMVA Scale the Plains. Presenting diverse work in many media by twelve artists that span generations, Big Country will surprise visitors with big ideas and big work in sculpture, painting, photography, pastel, and watercolor. Artists range across generations, media, and conceptual interests. You won’t want to miss these surprising works by Sandra Cress,
Ellen Diederich, Sarah Dotzenrod , Kaylyn Gerenz, Jon Offutt, Carl Oltvedt, Timothy Ray, Meg Spielman Peldo, Michael Strand, David Swenson, Eric Syvertson, Gin Templeton, and Chris Walla.

The Museum is pleased to work with the FMVA, an important artists’ organization whose mission is to educate, encourage, enable, and inspire visual artists in our community. The FMVA organizes their own exhibitions, provides professional development to artists, and organizes the Studio Crawl each fall. For more information, visit fmva.us.

The art auction for our 15th Annual Spring Gala will feature outstanding work across a wide variety of media by 89 artists. All works will be on display in Fred J. Donath Gallery during our Gala Auction Preview exhibition April 23 – May 6.

Click any of the thumbnails below to view the full image and learn details about the artist.

Learn about the remarkable collectors Herb and Dorothy Vogel in this exhibition of fifty works by twenty–four artists from their collection that were donated to Plains Art Museum. The Vogels’ inspiring life story demonstrates how people of modest means can amass significant collections of art. Loretta Cantieri, an artist who teaches contemporary art history at Minnesota State University Moorhead, served as guest curator for the exhibition.

“Artists’ studios and art galleries were the Vogels’ second home,“ Cantieri said. “Their eagerness to experience art daily and directly led to them amassing a collection of cutting edge work by up and coming artists.  The exhibition is a rare opportunity to see these artists and art movements shown in our area. It will be full of surprises and intrigue.”

Based in New York City, Herb and Dorothy Vogel literally filled their one-bedroom apartment with art, purchased over a forty-year period. With modest incomes from Herb’s work as a post office clerk, and Dorothy’s job as a librarian, they constantly went to gallery openings, got to know artists early in their careers, and bought art. Eventually, they had a collection of nearly 5,000 works. As exploratory art buyers, they enjoyed conceptual art and other experimental styles that emerged in the 1970s through the 1990s.

Working with the National Gallery of Art, the Vogels launched The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States, donating fifty works to a museum in every state. Plains Art Museum was chosen to become home for their gift in North Dakota. Collectors Humble and Extraordinaire: The Herbert and Dorothy Vogel Gift will display the entire gift, including work by Richard Tuttle, Judith Shea, Edda Renouf, Jene Highstein, Robert Barry, Jill Levine, Judy Rifka, Ruth Vollmer, and many more.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Prairie Public Broadcasting will be airing the award-winning documentary, Herb and Dorothy. The film is an intimate portrait of their love of art as matched only by their love for one another. Visit prairiepublic.org for program times. The film will also play in the exhibition gallery.

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Gain a new view of the print collection held by Plains Art Museum in this exhibition of 40 prints created at Vermillion Editions Limited, a famous printmaking shop in Minneapolis. Begun in 1977 and operated through 1992 by the legendary master printer, Steve Andersen, Vermillion Editions Limited brought the printmaking renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s from the East and West Coasts to the heartland. Andersen collaborated with regional, national, and international artists, helping them achieve their artistic visions through his innovative printmaking expertise. Along the way, he also amassed an impressive archive of contemporary prints by modern masters and emerging new talent.

In the mid-1990s, Steve Andersen worked with staff at the Museum to launch Hannaher’s, Inc. Print Studio, located on the south end of the third floor. The studio continues to operate as a working print shop for classes, special projects, and demonstrations.

The Museum has never before presented an exhibition drawn entirely from this gift of 331 works from Vermillion Editions Limited, a significant group of prints donated to the Plains in 1996 by an anonymous donor. The exhibition will present the history of Vermillion Editions through the work of well known artists, looking at the key points in the print shop’s history and at its innovations in printmaking. Artists include Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, George Morrison, Hazel Belvo, Joseph Beuys, Nancy Randall, Nicolas Africano, Steve Sorman, Mike Lynch, David Rathman, Scott Sandell, and many more.

Vermillion Editions to Hannaher’s Studio is curated by MSUM print professor and print studio director John Volk. Print studio intern Chelsey Dahlstrom serves as a key assistant on the project and Volk’s printmaking students—Snjezana Hauer, Amanda Heidt, Elise Forer, Asiya Frolova, Megan Larson, Michael Zimmer, Sarah Forsberg, and Marie Meland—are also contributing.

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The landscape in North Dakota is the sky—the stars at night, the clouds in the daytime. At night I thought about the stars and light-years and the speed of light and everything that was sort of inexplicable.

— James Rosenquist, Painting Below Zero: Notes on a Life in Art

With the installation of The North Dakota Mural at Plains Art Museum, James Rosenquist returns to his home state in a big way. Drawing on his childhood memories of the Great Plains, he created a work that speaks to the wide open spaces, huge vistas, and ocean-like skies of the region. Using his signature style of mixing different images together at varied scales, he invites us to contemplate how nature, society, culture, agriculture, industry, and history relate to each other in this particular place. The heavens of stars, nebulae, and galaxies depicted in the upper half of the painting make us ponder our place in the universe as much as our location on planet Earth.

The North Dakota Mural was commissioned by Plains Art Museum as one facet of the Museum’s campaign, “There’s a Little Artist in All of Us.” Many in the local arts community have worked toward this long-standing dream of acquiring a major work by this important artist and local son. The Museum’s campaign also aims to broaden and deepen art education for the community and region by building a Center for Creativity and Life-Long Learning; Fingerprints Interactive Education Gallery, and an increased endowment to support exhibitions and programs. Plains Art Museum thanks James Rosenquist for his in-kind donation of creative work and an anonymous donor who supported the commissioning of this artwork. Additional thanks go to the National Endowment for the Arts and an anonymous donor for supporting installation costs.

The North Dakota Mural unveiled, October 7, 2010. Photo Milestones Photography

JAMES ROSENQUIST

From the Midwest to the International Art World

James Rosenquist is one of the most esteemed artists of his generation. Beginning in the mid-1960s, he was at the center of the New York art world and participated in the emergence of the art movement that came to be called “Pop art.” Along with artists Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, and Tom Wesselmann, Rosenquist employed images from popular culture. Departing from the abstract work of the Abstract Expressionists of the 1950s, these artists made images of Hollywood movies, movie stars, advertising, comic books, and everyday products. A remarkably productive group, they continued to create important work for decades, and generations of younger artists have followed their lead in adopting and addressing the ubiquitous impact of popular culture in our lives.

Rosenquist and artists at a party at Andy Warhol’s studio, The Factory, in New York City, 1964. Pictured from right: Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, British fashion model Jean Shrimpton, Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselmann, Claes Oldenburg. Photo: Ken Heyman

Born in 1933 in Grand Forks, North Dakota, Rosenquist spent his childhood in North Dakota and Minnesota. His mother, Ruth Hendrickson Rosenquist, was an amateur painter and aviator who flew the mail between Grand Forks and Winnipeg as one of first female pilots in North Dakota. His father, Louis Rosenquist, also worked in aviation, eventually becoming the head mechanic for Northwest Airlines and Braniff Airways. They may have inspired their son’s imaginative love of planes, space travel, and outer space.

As an adolescent, Rosenquist took classes at the Minneapolis School of Art. After studying art at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis from 1952-54, Rosenquist headed for New York City to study at the Art Students League and to seek his fortune in the lively art world of that period. Having worked earlier as a billboard painter in Minnesota and North Dakota, he got into the trade in New York City to support himself.

In 1960, he began painting large canvases, adopting the scale and imagery of commercial billboards. Rosenquist selected fragments from disparate images and collaged them together to create works of ambiguity and intrigue. His dream-like tableaus combine assortments of objects, food, bodies, machinery, celestial expanses of stars, and more, creating equations of images that add up to be more than the sum of their parts. His suggestive paintings are imbued with an open-endedness that generates multiple responses and interpretations.

Over five decades, Rosenquist has forged a high profile career as one of America’s pre-eminent artists. He has had more than fifteen major retrospectives, including two at the Whitney Museum of American Art and four at the Guggenheim Museum. His work has been included in hundreds of exhibitions around the world and is held in collections of the Museum of Modern Art; the Metropolitan Museum; the Guggenheim Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany; and others around the world as well as in many prestigious private collections. He has received numerous awards and honors, including service on the National Council on the Arts from 1978 to 1983; honorary doctorates from North Dakota State University and the University of Minnesota; The Order of Salvador Dali Award from the Salvador Dali Museum; the Chevalier L’Ordre Des Arts and Des Lettres from the Cultural Ministry of France; and the FCS Art Award from Spain.

Even after moving to New York and then to Florida, where he still lives and works, Rosenquist has maintained ties to North Dakota and Minnesota. From his youth, he was close with John Bennett (nicknamed “Jack”), whose parents, John and Thelma, were best friends with Ruth and Louis Rosenquist.  James and John enjoyed many childhood times together and have remained closely connected. John Bennett and his wife, Mavis, are longtime residents of Fargo and friends of Plains Art Museum. This selection of photographs—and an early watercolor by Rosenquist of John Bennett as a boy—provide a glimpse into Rosenquist’s early life in North Dakota and Minnesota as well as document his emergence in the New York art scene of the 1960s. In 1979, he appeared at the opening of James Rosenquist: Seven Paintings, organized by Plains Art Museum at its former location in Moorhead.

James Rosenquist, The North Dakota Mural, 2010, oil on canvas, 13 x 24 ft., © James Rosenquist. Gift of the artist and an anonymous donor in honor of Dr. Jovan Brkic, a world renowned scholar of philosophy; gentleman, and friend.