Origins, Taxidermy and The "Third Place"

Brooke Williams: You started this visit by showing me a slightly crooked taxidermy bird you mounted yourself over fifty years ago. There’s a beautiful, almost brutal physicality to that work. You mentioned that your father was a carpenter— how did growing up around that kind of manual labor shape your relationship with making things?

Brad Kahlhamer: Taxidermy was my early painting stand-in for the wild. I hunted, I shot the bird, and then I mounted it myself. It’s kind of gruesome work you know—carving the brains out, setting the glass eyes. Having done this thing I was kind of like, I don’t think I want to be a taxidermist… But looking at it now… it lasted 55 years, which is pretty cool, actually.

When I was growing up, my dad was in construction, he was a part of that Greatest Generation. On his desk, he had one of those funny, little blue-collar sayings: “Please pay me so I can pay them." That phrase hit me right in the frontal lobe. I still use it on a lot of my works because it sums up both the joy and the absolute futility of labor. It’s all so transitory.

BW: In 1999, you introduced the concept of the "Third Place" to describe your reality— caught in some kind of middle ground between your Native heritage and your adoptive German-American upbringing. How did that shape your visual language at a time when the art world wasn’t really making space for Native artists?

BK: So back in 1999, Jeffrey Deitch approached me—I didn’t know who he was… had no idea he was a downtown powerhouse— and he said “Let’s do a show.” And then he gave me dates, and eventually it came time to do the catalogue. He called me up on a Sunday, and he said, 'We need to write your foreword.” I really had never gone through a professional exhibition process and didn’t know how one organizes, writes, has thoughts… It forced me to place myself within a broader context and to think about, well, where am I?

So I came up with the concept of “Third Place” … that all of my work, all of the things you see around you in this studio, exist in their own space. Different from the First Place, which is Native heritage, and the Second Place which is the more conventional upbringing I had with two parents of Germanic descent. And it just kind of stuck. Third Place was not an easy way, but it was a path to navigate what I was feeling at the time, which was a bit of an alienation. Because in the 80s, 90s, and really up until recently, there was no curatorial bandwidth for Native art. We had Black art and Hispanic art, but I was constantly looking down the table of all the art dinners I was invited to—no Natives. And I was like, Okay, next year. And then a year would go by and I’d think, Okay, future generations. Still nothing… until recently, after the pipeline protests in North  Dakota sparked a movement. Now the curators and the art world are beginning to make space.

Survivalist Chandeliers and The "Indigenous Futurism" Code

BW: Much of your 3-D work uses traditional Native forms like dream catchers, but you scale them up or combine them with things like chandeliers that find their origins from very different traditions. Where does that impulse come from?

BK:  My work is always an evolution— I started to incorporate dream catchers on these smaller figures as an innovation as far back as the mid 80s, and I had a bunch of them in the window of my old studio in Bushwick. So one day I’m just playing guitar, looking at these figures with the early versions of dream catchers, and I suddenly decided to make a giant one that would create universes—  similar to the perspective from the Planetarium up at the Natural History Museum. And then later, when I was driving through New Mexico, I saw the Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescopes— the ones that were in that film Contact with Jodie Foster where they’re talking to God— and that’s where I got the idea that these dream catchers were going to be like relay stations that I’ll place all over the world as a kind of counter to the New Age thinking. There are probably 40 out in the world now, with the original and the biggest one at SFMOMA. That actually feels like a full circle moment since San Francisco is the epicenter of that Northern California, summer-of-love, hippie thinking.

There was a lot of co-opting of Native concepts around the dream catcher, and I was not resentful of it, but I do wonder if maybe there's a correction due. It's not bad, but... do we have the whole story right? Simply put, you either stay in your lane, or you can push the boundaries. I just thought, well, maybe there's a counter narrative. But it wasn't an angry reaction. I mean, I'm making dream catchers for crying out loud. It's like talking to the fairies.

And then I had this idea of making what I call Survivalist Chandeliers. These are based on ancient fish trap ideas. If we put one of these in the East River, we might catch a few smelt or even a small salmon. So when it all goes to hell, I can catch fish with these. But then the concept was, what am I going to do before the end times? We're gonna celebrate luxury and beauty through the concept of the chandelier. It's a collapse of two sort of opposing concepts.

BW: And while we’re on the topic of scale, your work also takes your intimate small scale line drawings and expands them into these massive tarps and canvases. How did moving to that scale change what you could do visually?

BK: Well it’s pretty much a similar process only at scale. Suddenly you can create a series of events, or an entire community, much like a graphic novel, only it’s spread out.  Just like the super catcher is an amplification of the simple dream catcher, these large watercolors and paintings on tarps are amplifications of the ledger drawings in the sketchbooks. Plus I just like working big and playing with time and altitude. I actually started playing with altitude because I was doing a lot of hiking. So in some of the paintings, you'll them graduated on the left or right side. It'll say 2000, 5, 10, 12,000, 15,000, 20,000 feet to give the idea of encapsulating an entire landscape. So you’re standing at 0 while you’re looking 20,000 feet into the sky. That’s something you can more comfortably do on a large scale. Plus being here in New York, steeped in the AbEx tradition of painting from the 50’s and 60’s… this is like a New York sizing up of all the Western landscapes I’ve been carting around in my head.

BW: Your work gets grouped under "Indigenous Futurism" a lot lately. How do you actually view that label?

BK: I read that, and I was like, “What is that? is that a thing?” But I actually think it's generational. You have a lot of younger Natives coming out of art school now, and I think it's a construct enacted more out of an academic thing. It’s like a code or a language to help to navigate the curatorial predilections right now. Optimism for the future, that's then kind of wrapped up in a thought position.

I think for more of the Native part, it's probably a recasting of history. The contemporary Native artist is more of a blended composition—nobody's going back to Pine Ridge to hang out, they want to be here at the New Museum. So the concept of Indigenous Futurism is an entry point that navigates a lot of things that maybe aren't ready for discussion yet.

I keep thinking of that New Age position—it will be co-opted, and it'll be a conjoining of ancestral knowledge to some technology. But along the way, it'll probably lose the original flavor. It'll become something else entirely.

Nomadic Studios, Ledger Roots and The Next Frequency

BW: You’ve been keeping these pocket diaries you call Nomadic Studios—over a hundred sketchbooks that read like a cross between graphic novels, travel logs, and tribal record-keeping. What initially sparked that connection to traditional Plains ledger art?

BK: In 2002, I was prepping a show at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Heard Museum was right across town. They have the largest repository of Native material in the country, and a young curator took me down into their vaults. She started pulling out these drawers, and I saw these 19th-century ledger drawings—works done by Native prisoners on accounting paper given to them by military guards. I was just like, whoa.

I convinced the director to let me get twelve of those original drawings out of the drawers and include them as part of my show, Let's Walk West. Most people didn’t really know what they were back then, but it started a conversation. Now you see encyclopedic museums like the Met and MoMA pairing contemporary artists with historical collections all the time, but I count myself lucky to have been in those archives early, helping establish that continuum.

BW: And how did that evolve into the 100-plus Moleskine notebooks you cart around the world today?

BK: Around 2012, right as I finished Bowery Nation, I was getting on more planes for shows. Those pocket sketchbooks became my portable studio. Most people’s studio today is their phone—they’re constantly snapping selfies or photos of monuments. But for me, to really understand an object, a building, or a person, you have to draw it. Drawing in an airport or on a train takes an intimate act and makes it public—it’s like knitting a pair of gloves when you’re in transit. You’re engaging a craft anywhere, anytime. And then they are easy to share— I like to post pages of them on my Instagram stories…

BW: Which kind of merges your analog work with the digital world! You’re also translating that same sketchbook energy into large-scale works on tarp and canvas, and also into sound and video. Where is your creative energy focused right now?

BK: On paper or tarp, you can scale things up—you can build an entire community on a piece of canvas. I’ll mark altitudes on the sides of paintings from 0 to 20,000 feet, or timestamp them with dates like '2034' to play with time. It’s taking the intimacy of the ledger drawing and giving it that grand New York Abstract Expressionist scale I absorbed when I first moved here.

Right now, though, my energy is in sound. I’m scoring a soundtrack for a short, three-and-a-half-minute experimental video I shot in Minneapolis. I’ve got someone coming into the studio working on Ableton, building these raw, non-verbal laptop sketches and sonic narratives. I want to get that wrapped before I head back out to my Arizona studio camp in January to pick up the paintbrush again.

BW: You’ve watched the New York scene shift for four decades. With galleries clearing out and institutions restructuring, how does the city feel to you right now?

BK: Well, I keep thinking of New York in the 80s, with this real abject poverty over on avenue A, B, and C… I don't think it's going to fall like that, but gallery-wise I think it  resembles a kind of clearing out, almost like a prairie burn and then whatever grows will grow. Yeah, I feel bad for an art student coming out now, but then again, the art world was never easy, you know. I never came to New York thinking, 'Oh, I'm gonna make it.’  I just didn't have that expectation. So it's tough world, I think, right?

But I do love having my studio here. And New York’s really coming back around. I feel like there’s a new energy in the city, don’t you think?

BW: It's funny that you say that because I just went to a birthday party with a bunch of people that I used to hang out with back in the 90s and everybody was saying that New York feels like it's coming back in this way that's really amazing…

BK: Oh that is really good to hear because I recently got back from that big opening in Venice, and I'm just feeling it on my own. I don’t know if it’s the new mayor or the Knicks or a combination, but it's great. Like a little fresh air is coming in.