The Brooklyn Rail

At the crack of dawn, usually around 6 a.m., Brad Kahlhamer stretches out a white bed sheet onto concrete. Just as the sun comes up, looking out into the distance in Mesa, Arizona, he paints. Chronological tales unfold, similar in structure to a book or a movie, but Kahlhamer documents his mind’s own stories. He explained to me that the bed sheet works in Bowery Nation: Birds are Talking at Venus over Manhattan depict “mind events rather than actual events.” They are guided by his intuition. He mostly paints on bed sheets for practical reasons: they are easy to fold up and transport in his carry-on luggage. Nomadic like the birds he paints, the sheets travel from Mesa to New York, or from Italy to his Bushwick studio.

For a storyteller, he is a storied man. Much of his upbringing is written about in other articles, but to tell it briefly: Kahlhamer was adopted by German-American parents, and his birth parents, along with his Native ancestry, are unknown to him. The works in the gallery evoke unclear lineages in his use of hybrid patterns and imagery from various sources. Some characters are symbolic of caricatured “Indians,” others drawn from what he explains are “Native books from the sixties” or old Western films. He has also included drawings that are adaptations of katsina dolls at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, or petroglyphs, and there are punk-inspired skulls as well as one work imagined as a band poster. Mostly, he merges remembered and imagined symbols into portraits of a found home.

The rare quality of Kahlhamer’s quill ink drawings owes much to his skills in handling a precise line. Even when the paintings seem to have been created effortlessly, they often take months to complete. Kahlhamer pointed to the thin strands of hair on the floating heads of his characters, describing them as interconnected, and felt that was the way he constructed a narrative. The ink lines of thin hairs do seem to travel around his bed sheet canvas like water, or unspooled yarn, reflecting how his stories and “mind events” aren’t sequential in linear time, but rather an unfolding of moments that are woven together to create a multi-dimensional story. In Exit Kokopelli (2025), a red-and-black geometric shape acts as a ribbon, outlining the sections of a story to frame certain moments. In fact, he calls his finishing touches “frames,” as they adorn the bordering edges in decorative patterns, their imagery inspired by “a highly abstracted version of Navajo textiles,” he says. Framing completes the work, and it also completes the story, containing the chaos inherent to these dream sequences within its border. It only makes sense that Kahlhamer included a dreamcatcher in the exhibition, perhaps containing the dreams of the room they are placed in. He rattled the colossal dreamcatcher for me in the gallery, its sound similar to the soothing wash of falling rain. “This is the sound of the powwow,” he explained, as the sound lingered in the room.

The landscape of the Southwest is present in the works, even if not inherently there. It’s not the direct landscape that he paints, but the interpretation of the place through signs and iconographies altered into hybrid forms, such as the ink swirls in Ponemah NM + Mesa AZ (2025) that represent the billowing hills of Monument Valley as washy watercolor heads. Kahlhamer’s work is mesmerizing, but it’s also gritty. The ink spools are dark and visceral; the skulls and figures are haunting and somber. One night, Kahlhamer left one of his bed sheet paintings outside when it suddenly rained and hailed, altering Superstition Ranch Market 6:51 (2025) and molding the figure to a ghostly appearance.

In the gallery, far from Arizona, the fabric of the sheets hangs loosely tacked in frames. Kahlhamer has painted many of the bed sheets to the point that the white is no longer visible, awash with stark neon colors in blues, pinks, and yellows, but the integrity of the fabric is still felt. It’s as if the wind could pick them up at any moment.

By Mána Taylor