Past Exhibitions

Art Camp, a celebration of regional student artists, begins on Friday, April 12th with activities for high school students and teachers at NDSU's Renaissance Hall in downtown Fargo (across the street from the museum).

The Practice is the Point celebrates the union of artistic and social practice, by exploring the ways artists create, listen, and react to the needs of their communities.

Fargo Moorhead Visual Artists (FMVA), North Dakota Arts Education (NDAEA) and the Plains Art Museum are coming together to promote and support our state and regional arts educators.

Each year, Fargo Moorhead Visual Artists (FMVA) presents the Studio Crawl—a popular, free event that gives the community access to professional artists' studios. The Studio Crawl is an opportunity for people to meet artists, see demonstrations, and purchase their work.

After a 25-year exploration of all aspects of Lakota lifeways through ceremony, dance, and prayer, Gerald Cournoyer presents his observations in his newest solo exhibition, Sending A Voice. Gerald Cournoyer rejects Edward Curtis’s observations that the Lakota are a people of the past.

There are so many moving parts and people behind the scenes here at Plains Art Museum. Within the multitude of roles and tasks required to keep a museum running, one element that connects many of us here is our love for art.

In its fourth year, Plains Art Museum and Circle of Nations School implement an incredible learning opportunity for Native American youth who are emerging student artists. The Museum engages some of the highest quality contemporary Native artists who are educators and mentors for these artists as they approach life as an artist after high school.

The Zoetic Spaces exhibition combines works from Plains Art Museum's permanent collection, Hannaher’s Inc. Print Studio education collection, and works from around the area to create an environment to celebrate our shared existence.

This year’s 2023 Gala Art Auction will fill you with wonder and awe, as you peruse over 100 works by talented artists from all over the country. This gallery is packed full of fantastical imagery and craftsmanship, where you are sure to find the next piece to add to your collection.

Over her almost 70 year-long career, Hazel Belvo has been a prominent contributor to both the arts and feminist advocacy in the region. Hazel co-founded the Women's Art Registry of Minnesota (WARM), was Chair of the Fine Arts Dept. at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD), and taught at the Grand Marais Artist Colony.

School Spirit: Celebrating Youth Art Month, now in its 21st year, showcases the talents of regional K-12 art students from area schools in a variety of media. This exhibition celebrates our region’s emerging artists and promotes awareness of the vital work done by art educators.

This exhibition celebrates the vision, ingenuity, and talent of North Dakota teen artists. Since 2015, Plains Art Museum and the Red River Valley Writing Project have partnered to serve as the state affiliate for the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards.

Architecture for the Birds is a popular annual exhibition presented in partnership with the North Dakota State University Department of Architecture & Landscape Architecture. The work is the result of a design challenge posed to participating students: to design and build a birdhouse based on the work of a Pritzker-Award-winning architect.

Returning for its sixth year, and again demonstrating power in quality, diversity, and strength, Plains Art Museum welcomes back the 2023 North Dakota Human Rights Art Exhibition. This exhibition displays artwork that celebrates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its standards of achievements for all peoples and nations.

John Nellermoe's lake paintings intersect realism and abstraction with reverence to his environment and playful respect to the picture plane. Through dissecting the plane into strips of land, water and sky while pushing and pulling space, Nellermoe's work simultaneously disorients and calms.

The Fargo Moorhead Visual Artists (FMVA) Constraint exhibition challenges participating member artists to produce new artworks that fit within a given theme.

Plains Art Museum, in partnership with Crow’s Shadow Institute for the Arts, is honored to bring Continuity of Culture. This exhibition will highlight prints from Crow’s Shadow’s permanent collection in conversation with Indigenous objects from Plains Art Museum’s permanent collection.

This exhibition highlights two different bodies of work by painter Britta Anderson. On view will be her traditional water scapes paired with a multimedia series Anderson calls the Comfort Collection.

Each year, Fargo Moorhead Visual Artists (FMVA) presents the Studio Crawl—a popular, free event that gives the community access to professional artist studios. The Studio Crawl is an opportunity for people to meet artists, see demonstrations, and purchase their work.

Plains Art Museum will host the work of Ann Johnson in the exhibition Unseen Traces in the Work of Ann Johnson. Reflecting on her 2022 Lawndale Contemporary Art Center installation, See Me, Ann “Sole Sister” Johnson is matter-a-fact about the intent: “This is about being seen. Seeing the women in the shadows.”

Below the Surface showcases pieces that can help teach about the principles and elements of art and design to a larger audience.

In its third year, Plains Art Museum partners with Circle of Nations School to implement an incredible learning opportunity for Native American youth who are emerging student-artists.

Established in 1985, Red River Watercolor Society (RRWS) is a non-profit, international organization of volunteer artists and art supporters. RRWS’s vision is to provide a diverse selection of watermedia and related opportunities for RRWS members and the Red River Valley community.

This year over 60 talented artists have contributed to our 25th annual Spring Gala Art Auction Exhibition. This gallery holds pieces for every collection, boasting a wide range of aesthetics and imagery.

With a roster of over 95 established visual artists, poets, writers, musicians, activists and visionaries, Grupo Soap del Corazón, led by Dougie Padilla and Xavier Tavera, is one of the longest-running Latinx artist groups in the country.

Museums hold in their collections vast numbers of artworks and objects that rarely go on display. On average, museums only exhibit about five percent of their collection at any given time, and Plains Art Museum typically exhibits even less than five percent of the artwork it holds.

School Spirit: Celebrating Youth Art Month, now in its 20th year, showcases the talents of regional K-12 art students from area schools in a variety of media. This exhibition celebrates our region’s emerging artists and promotes awareness of the vital work done by art educators.

This exhibition celebrates the vision, ingenuity, and talent of North Dakota teen artists. Since 2015 Plains Art Museum and the Red River Valley Writing Project have partnered to serve as the state affiliate for the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards.

Architecture for the Birds is a popular annual exhibition in partnership with the North Dakota State University Department of Architecture & Landscape Architecture. The work is the result of a design challenge posed to participating students: to design and build a birdhouse based on the work of a Pritzker-Award-winning architect.

Returning for its fifth year, and again demonstrating power in quality, diversity, and strength, Plains Art Museum welcomes back the 2022 North Dakota Human Rights Art Exhibition.

Born in Kansas City, W. Scott Olsen grew up in the north suburbs of Chicago. A pilot, traveler, adventure writer, photographer and professor of English at Concordia College, Moorhead, MN, Olsen is the author of eleven books, editor of several anthologies, and former editor of the national literary magazine, Ascent.

Plains Art Museum, in partnership with Philomé Productions, is hosting Empower Haiti: Disaster Relief and Orphanage Fundraiser. This auction and exhibition feature seven distinct and original photographic prints from Wess Philomé, an energetic and insightful, incisive creative talent who has resided in ND for 15 years.

Fargo Moorhead Visual Artists (FMVA), North Dakota Arts Education Association (NDAEA) and Plains Art Museum are coming together to promote and support our state and regional arts educators. This joint exhibition features the artwork of art educators and artists who directly interact in educating others in the visual arts.

Plains Art Museum, in partnership with EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop (RBPMW) in New York City, New York (est. 1948), is honored to present unique prints, large-scale sculpture, and hand-made books in Gestural Expanse: Prints, Sculptures and Books by Chakaia Booker.

Each year, Fargo Moorhead Visual Artists (FMVA) presents the Studio Crawl, a popular, free event that gives the community access to professional artist studios. The Studio Crawl is an opportunity for people to meet artists, see demonstrations, and purchase their work.

Steven M. Andersen is perhaps best known for the creation of Vermillion Editions Limited, a large, well-equipped fine art print studio that started in Minneapolis’ Warehouse District in 1977. Through Vermillion as well as Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) in Long Island, NY, The Cooper Union, Styria Studio and Parsons School of Design in New York City, Andersen has worked with some of the most

The Summer Gala Art Auction Exhibition includes 91 diverse, original & fascinating artworks made by some of the most talented and prolific contemporary artists from around the region. Artworks represented encompass a wide range of artistic expression and price point. The auction is not only a great exhibition of contemporary art, but is your chance to build a collection and support local artists.

The second annual Northern Plains Summer Art Institute (NPSAI) is a two-week intensive art program for Native American high school and college-aged students seeking an art education that mixes fundamentals in art and a connection to their cultural identity. Students spent two weeks with their peers learning from active Native American professionals in multiple disciplines of the art world.

Bias: Current Monotypes of Laura Youngbird shares a recent collection of the artist’s layered and multi-process monotypes using the dress as metaphor. Not a simple garment, for the artist it represents a powerful artifact with currents that bind grandmothers, mothers, sisters and relatives with the power of a common thread.

Using the chromatic spectrum of vibrant colors blended into their complements, Kristen Sarette’s latest exhibition of lithographic work gives us the opportunity to experience color and form saturated in a never-failing sense of optimism.

As a pillar of modernist painting, Sam Gilliam has had a profound influence as an innovative contemporary artist. To this day, his work continues to inspire younger generations. Beginning in the 1960s in Washington D.C., the legendary artist pursued the development of a new Abstract Expressionism that celebrated the cultivation of the individual voice that helped to transcend cultural and politica

This iconic quote underlies the importance of light to our visual culture. Even Light Itself: Selections from the Collection illuminates artworks and objects by local and internationally known artists from the Permanent Collection of Plains Art Museum, and reflects on the properties of light and color.

A multi-year project in creation that will result in a two-gallery exhibition and several programs, High Visibility: On Location in Rural America and Indian Country is diverse in content and media. Visitors will engage with installations, performance works, interdisciplinary work, alongside traditional 2 and 3-dimensional pieces.

Painter and printmaker, Roger Broer has been producing works of art since the 1970s, often creating extraordinary, visionary works reflecting his Lakota culture and the world he occupies.

Each year, Plains Art Museum’s Hannaher’s, Inc. Print Studio has the honor of hosting a print exchange including artists from seven different regional universities. During the print exchanges, artists agree to create an edition for an exhibition and in return they receive a portfolio including several of the other participating artist’s prints. There is an element of surprise for the participating

School Spirit: Celebrating Youth Art Month, Month, now in its 19th year, showcases the talents of regional K-12 art students from over 40 area schools in a variety of media. This exhibition celebrates our region’s emerging artists and promotes awareness of the vital work being done by our local art educators.

Awarding the exceptional artistic and literary talent of North Dakota teenagers and bringing their remarkable work to a wide audience, the 2021 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards Exhibition celebrates the vision, ingenuity and talent of these artists with pride.

The 2021 North Dakota Human Rights Art Exhibition is a display of artwork celebrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and its standard of achievements for all peoples and all nations as its foundation.

While I’m not originally from North Dakota, it is where I became an artist. It was here that I fell in love with long drives on roads that paralleled railroad tracks and with the view of seemingly endless fields surrounding me. This landscape carried the narratives of lives and moments that are now long past, and I began to seek out the fragments of these histories by exploring abandoned houses.

Plains Art Museum is pleased to announce To See What I Could See: An Examination of Contemporary Printmaking from our permanent collection. The prints in this exhibition relate and connect to one another through the avenues of formalism, collaboration, narration, and process.