NAC Sustaining Membership Drive 2022

The Nemeth Art Center has served the Park Rapids, MN community since 1977. Our mission is to provide thoughtful, challenging contemporary art programming to our rural Minnesota audience through exhibitions, classes, discussions, and events. Our highly anticipated 2022 season included our annual youth art show collaboration with MCAD; a solo exhibition by Cuban mixed media artist, Yunior Rebollar; a two-person show with the internationally lauded Dana Schutz and Ryan Johnson; and an installation from Minneapolis-based ceramicist, Ginny Sims.

Artist reception for Dana Schutz, Ryan Johnson, and Ginny Sims. July 2022

Our 2023 season is shaping up to continue this exciting momentum with off-season youth classes and expanded educational offerings, solo exhibitions from Pao Houa Her, Mary Ann Papanek-Miller, and Brad Kahlhamer (plus more TBA). We also look forward to introducing the first iteration of our artist residency program.

The support we have been shown the past few seasons from our audience has been tremendous, and we hope to maintain that momentum as we expand our offerings and continue to push our thoughtful and sometimes challenging curatorial direction. Please consider becoming a NAC sustaining member, and be part of our effort to decentralize contemporary arts access.

Here's a bit of what we're looking forward to in 2023:

Youth Art Show 2023
Our annual collaboration with the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. High school students from around the region submit work to be considered for the juried exhibition.
The first place winner receives a scholarship for MCAD's Pre-College Summer Session, including room and board, studio materials, and instruction.

Pao Houa Her: Attention series
Pao Houa Her is a Hmong American artist whose practice engages primarily with legacies and potentials of landscape, portraiture, and documentary photographic traditions and aesthetics, creating works that examine identity, longing, and belonging in Hmong diasporic communities. Born in Laos in 1982, Her was raised in Minnesota and is based in Blaine.

Her is an assistant professor in Photography and Moving Images at the University Minnesota. She holds an MFA in Photography from the Yale University School of Art (2012) and a BFA in Photography from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (2009).

Among Her’s solo exhibitions include Paj quam ntuj / Flowers of the Sky at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (2022–2023), Emplotment at Or Gallery in Vancouver, Canada (2020), and My grandfather turned into a tiger at Midway Contemporary Art in Minneapolis (2018). Recently exhibited in the Whitney Biennial (2022), her work has been included in group exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC; the Milwaukee Art Museum; MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum in Chiang Mai; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; among many others.

Mary Ann Papenek-Miller: Preparing for Winter series

Mary Ann Papanek-Miller is Professor and Chair of the Department of Art, Media, and Design at DePaul University in Chicago. She was born in Hinsdale, Illinois, and currently lives and works between Chicago and the woods/lake country of rural northern Minnesota. She received a Master of Fine Arts degree in Art from the University of Houston, Texas with a dual emphasis in drawing and in metals.

Her artwork bombards the viewer with a layered collection of visual images meant to be read as a narrative, and often addresses her deep concern for the environment. Images often remain as an after image, layered over the next image and the next image and the next; provoking chance, seasoned with reflections from stories, songs and rhymes of childhood.

Brad Kahlhamer: Artist in Residence

While born to Native parents, Kahlhamer was raised by a German-American family, and spent most of his childhood in Arizona and Wisconsin. As a young adult, the artist lived on the road as a traveling musician before finally settling in New York City.

His paintings are expressive matrices of images, text, and gestural paint—reflecting a rich, peripatetic personal history. Southwestern deserts, Midwestern waterways, and Northeastern cities co-mingle within the loosely biographical works. 

Kahlhamer’s works mix visual registers: stenciled spray paint and acrylic; dreamcatchers, teepees, headdresses, eagles, and buffalo. Each work is a product of cultural hybridity, mixing Abstract Expressionism, graffiti, and popular culture with Native American imagery that transcends tribal specificity. (Kahlhamer has described himself as “tribally ambiguous,” his official connection sealed in records that predate his adoption.) The works, and his life, explore this disjunction and union, as well as the energetic tension between authenticity and ambiguity.

Kahlhamer has been the subject of over 31 solo exhibitions at prestigious venues such as: Deitch Projects, Denver Museum of Contemporary Art, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Jack Shainman Gallery, Minnesota Museum of American Art, among many others.