Past Exhibitions

Art connects students to themselves and each other, reaches students in new ways, and transforms the learning environment into a place of discovery.

Cone Pack is a contemporary clay community from the Fargo-Moorhead area. The collective includes some of the area’s most talented and active ceramic artists.

Talking Head offers a look inside an ambitious, in-progress printmaking project: a variable edition of printed assemblage sculptures by artist Peter Kelly.

STAT! investigates the relationship between our lived experiences and the data and statistics that are used to describe those experiences. Inspired by infographics and visualizations of data, Cayla Skillin-Brauchle explores the aesthetics of data in a time when the dissemination of information is acutely political.

Plains Art Museum is home to over 4,000 diverse national, regional and local works of art. Art communicates ideas and feelings between artists and viewers, but art pieces are also often in dialogue with other works of art.

Architecture for the Birds is a popular annual exhibition in partnership with the North Dakota State University Department of Architecture & Landscape Architecture that epitomizes the creative process.

Since 2011, a group of emerging and professional artists has met weekly at the Plains Art Museum and our Katherine Kilbourne Burgum Center for Creativity for a painting class led by one of Fargo’s most prominent and ambitious abstract painters, Marjorie Schlossman.

In her latest series, Civility is for the Birds, local artist Mackenzie Kouba uses satire in richly layered, colorful compositions to illustrate some of today’s most relevant societal concerns. Kouba’s work is realized with a variety of materials – from oil paint on canvas to collage and assemblage.

The Horse Nation of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ explores how horses have shaped the history, spirituality, and culture of the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota people of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ or Seven Council Fires.

If one looks closely and listens carefully, works of art can ask important questions that elicit understanding of our world. For example, what societal factors influence how an artist depicts another person?

“The Mad Scientist of Music,” a modern-day John Cage, and provocative integrator of art forms, Mark Applebaum masterfully crafts intricate visual artworks of signs and symbols that can also be interpreted and played by musicians.

Curated by Dr. Craig Howe from the Center for American Indian Research and Native Studies (CAIRNS) in Martin, South Dakota, Lakota Emergence focuses entirely on the Lakota emergence narrative as recorded in “How the Lakota Came Upon the World,” published in 1917. The place of Lakota emergence is centered at Wind Cave in what is now known as the Black Hills in South Dakota.

Local veteran and artist, Josh Zeis, brings to you his latest series of mixed media sculpture comprised of etched and molded copper, stoneware, and steel.

Protectors, a screenprint installation by artist John Hitchcock, uses multiple screenprinted images of bison skulls mounted on a background of Naugahyde pelts. The pelt forms suggest landmasses, and each element connects to the environment through form, placement, and symbol.

Every year, Plains Art Museum hosts one of the region’s finest art auctions in conjunction with our Spring Gala. The auction is not only a great exhibition of contemporary art, but is your chance to build a collection, support the livelihoods of artists, and support your art museum.