ARTnews

The paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by Brad Kahlhamer explore the gritty New York of the 1980s and ’90s through a Native American lens. Born in Tuscon, Arizona, in 1956 to Native parents, he was adopted at a young age by white German American family. (As a result, he has no tribal affiliations because he cannot trace his ancestry, a requirement for official enrollment.) As a young man, Kahlhamer on the periphery, slightly excluded from everywhere he went. It wasn’t until he moved to New York in the ’80s, when he fell in with the city’s vibrant underground art scene and its alternative spaces, that he began to fully realize his practice, a combination of Indigenous ledger drawings in an animated, somewhat frantic style that owes something to Art Spiegelman and Peter Saul. It’s all more than a bit punk.