Let’s Walk West: Brad Kahlhamer

Let’s Walk West presents recent work by Brad Kahlhamer, an Arizona-born, New York-based artist and musician. It includes large-scale watercolor-and-ink paintings, texts excerpted from his journals and song lyrics, working photographs, and preliminary studies, along with a selection of nineteenth-century Plains Indian ledger drawings selected by Kahlhamer from the collection of the Heard Museum in Phoenix. Let’s Walk West looks at Kahlhamer’s rambling journey into his Native American heritage and the landscape of the West. He was born in Tucson in 1956 of Native American parentage, but was adopted and raised in rural Wisconsin. His art is propelled by a quest to reconnect with his Native identity and to reconcile it with his middle-American upbringing. His paintings arm-wrestle with an unknown biography, with people and places both real and imagined, part visionary, part pop culture. Eagles, coyotes, and javelinas appear like talismans, alongside caricatures of family and friends.