Over the course of his practice, Kahlhamer has worked within and between the mediums of painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, performance and music. This profusion of media builds layers of influence that are drawn from physical localities, daily surroundings, aesthetic experiences, collected ephemera and conjured histories that are both real and imagined. Through his paintings and sculpture new universes are built, simultaneously urban-rural and high-low with their own language of symbols drawn from such seemingly disparate sites as Topps Chewing Gum (his former employer), the Lakota Thrifty Mart in Eagle Butte, South Dakota, California skateboard culture, proliferative street art of Bushwick, Brooklyn and Kahlhamer’s personal taxidermy collection, to name only a few. The work has often been described as existing in and representing a “third place” measured by complexity and contradiction, its most salient attributes. Kahlhamer’s unruly methodology can serve as a mirror for a cross section of American cultures and their very consumption while also being a meditation on his own identity and his interest in the “re-wilding” of himself and the contemporary tribal male.

The individual elements of Fort Gotham Girls + Boys Club were first born in 1985 after a visit nearly a decade earlier to the Heard Museum where Kahlhamer encountered their vast collection of Hopi katsina dolls. Signifying supernatural beings, katsina are traditionally used to represent and teach facets of Hopi cosmology. Over years of constructing these dolls using a host of found materials and living and working amongst them in the Lower East Side/Bowery neighborhood of New York, a sort of post-Smithsonian tribe had emerged in the studio.

Brad Kahlhamer was born in Tucson, Arizona and currently lives in New York City. His work has been exhibited extensively in the United States as well as internationally. Recent group exhibitions include The Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky, at Museé du quai Branly, 2014 (traveled to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2015) and One Must Know The Animals, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin, 2012. He will be part of the re-opening show of the SF MOMA, San Francisco. He was the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Award, 2006 and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in painting, 2001.

Kahlhamer is included in numerous public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Seattle Art Museum, Washington; the Denver Art Museum, Colorado; the Weatherspoon Art Museum, North Carolina; the Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin; the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas and the Hood Museum of Art, New Hampshire. He will be included in Musée du Quai Branly’s exhibition The Art and Life of the Plains Indians opening in 2014 and traveling tothe Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Missouri and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.