Brad Kahlhamer, “Birds Are Talking,” 2025. Watercolor, acrylic, pencil, and ink on paper; Work: 41 ¾ x 60 in (106 x 152.4 cm) Framed: 44 ¾ x 63 in (113.7 x 160 cm).
ART: Mesa art in Manhattan
The wildly prolific Brad Kahlhamer has opened his first solo show at the Venus Over Manhattan Gallery in NYC Bowery Nation: Birds Are Talking.
On view from May 13th until mid-June, the show debuts a new body of work created primarily at his winter studio in Mesa, Arizona, with eight large-scale paintings on bedsheets, and a new “Supercatcher” sculpture – a dreamcatcher on steroids. The artworks map a deeply personal cosmology that draws upon Indigenous storytelling, punk aesthetics, Abstract Expressionism, and the raw textures of New York City street culture.
“I wanted to show big-scale work based on the Dakota winter camps from the 1800s,” Kahlhamer told ICT. “Artists were drawing on square yard sections of cloth or hides. They would record movements on it, kind of a calendar. I traveled with the in-progress artwork so some of them were responding to the local lands and the atmosphere.
“Part of the innovation that was new for me was the way the bed sheets take color. One of them got left out in the desert rain but I liked how the color was another iteration of paint that got impressed. There’s really something there and I’ll just react to what that night in the rain left me. I’ve become a historic book collector; I buy these books at secondhand shops and reframe a lot of these pictures in a contemporary way.”
With so many images of faces with floating braids, wolves, birds, and horses, does he plan the paintings out?
“These were done in quite an intense rush, it’s very musical, like a set list,” Kahlhamer says. “They have a lot of stories. I’m not looking at a contemporary photograph or an icon. I’ll name them after I come up with the actual subject matters, which is how I would imagine the winter camp. The tribe would have traveled a bit and then added an event, then picked up, gone on to the next, added another event. It would have the sequential images of a comic book.
“The title ‘Birds Are Talking’ is excerpted out of a longer stream of consciousness story. I saw the title in a book that had a montage of different winged creatures. It spoke to me, that birds are talking. And the Bowery Nation is the title of a previous show. They are a fictitious tribe because I’ve been living off the Bowery in NYC since the early ’90s. It’s backdating the history of Manhattan to early times, re-colonizing it in a conceptual way. I use Bowery Nation as a book title. And the Birds Are Talking could be volume one.”
As a companion, Kahlhamer will be showing the original Bowery Nation artin Madrid, Spain, in July.
