Searching for a means of working in large-scale while traveling, New York-based artist Brad Kahlhamer began using a bedsheet as canvas while visiting a friend’s ranch outside Sedona, Arizona. For the artist, the portable nature of the linen—easily folded and carried to the next destination—harkened to winter counts, pictorial calendars painted on hides (and later, textiles) which were traditionally made by century Plains Indian communities as a record of historical events. Winter counts typically included discrete images, often organized in a spiral, that represented the most important event of each year. In American Horse, Kahlhamer does away with this convention, collapsing and layering dense formations of drawn and written allusions in an evocation of the media-saturated, digitally-altered reality of twenty-first century life.¹ The spiraling composition of the work’s historical antecedents remains in charging horses and arrow motifs—themselves drawn from Plains Indian aesthetics—which encircle the central self-portrait in a grand sweep.

      Born to Native parents whom he never met and raised by a German American couple, Kahlhamer remains unaware of his tribal ethnicity. As such, the artist notes that his work, unlike that of many Native artists, draws from deeply individual—rather than community-based—sources.² The artist’s output speaks to a lifetime of straddling Euro-American and Indian aesthetics while simultaneously coming to terms with his own dual heritage, a sensibility Kahlhamer refers to as the “Third Place.”³ American Horse, like much of Kahlhamer’s work, draws deeply from the punk rock and underground cartoon aesthetics that informed the artist’s early years in New York, where he worked as an illustrator for Topps under graphic novelist Art Spiegelman.⁴ The poignant choice of bed cloth as canvas speaks to the DIY sensibility that is at the heart of the New York underground scene. The painting is imbued with the same gritty intimacy and, seemingly, even made of the same materials as the graying, hand-stenciled shirts popularized by Vivian Westwood, which became an international fashion aesthetic in punk culture. Stream of conscious text and images abound in American Horse. References to Billy Jack, a 1971 cult film about a half-Native martial arts master, appear in numerous instances. Humorous, ghost-like figures with Kahlhamer’s visage float across the canvas, carried by fluid strokes of red paint.

      Kahlhamer does not shy away from juxtaposing these droll callouts with references to Native and, especially, Northern Plains cultures, both contemporary and historical. The central figure’s eyes appear to weave in and out of a design drawn from Northwest Coast art. In the upper right corner of the work, Lakota Thrifty Mart refers to and reproduces the signage of a reservation grocery store in Eagle Butte, South Dakota. Buried in the tangle of the central figure’s hair is a reference to the Nakota Horse Conservancy, an organization that seeks to preserve a horse breed developed by Plains people in the 19th century.⁵ Perhaps the key to the work lies in its title. There were two Lakota chiefs named American Horse, men with markedly different worldviews. The elder American Horse, an ally of Crazy Horse and Red Cloud, fought and died during the 1876 Battle of Slim Buttes. The younger chief was a statesman and historian who opposed Crazy Horse, advocated for friendly relations with the United States government, and served as an early promoter for the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, a prominent residential school in Pennsylvania.⁶ The relentless dialectic in American Horse between the historical and the contemporary, between Native and Euro-American sensibilities, between the banal and the extraordinary speaks to the larger project that is at the heart of Kahlhamer’s work, a deeply personal exploration of the shifting contradictions, dualities, and conflations that inform the artist’s output.

¹ Conversation with the artist, October 4, 2021.

² Susan Krane, Lets Walk West: Brad Kahlhamer, (Scottsdale, AZ: Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, 2005), 23-25.

³ Ibid, 14.

⁴ Ibid, 15.

⁵ “Why We Exist,” Nakota Horse Conservancy, http://www.nokotahorse.org/why-we-exist.html

⁶ A biography of the younger American Horse appears in Charles E. Eastman, Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains, (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1918), 165-178.


Image courtesy the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery.