Current Exhibitions

From the Collection of Anonymous II

February 26, 2022

The North Dakota Museum of Art announces the opening of From the Collection of Anonymous II, ongoing gifts from a donor who wishes to remain anonymous.  

Museum directors make lifelong friends. NDMOA’s Director Laurel Reuter has made many close friends in her 50-year career. One of these friends has taken a particular interest in the Museum's Permanent Collection, believing rich collections deeply enrich communities. 

Anonymous Donor realized the importance of access to contemporary artwork in the Dakotas and took it upon himself to donate or purchase as many works as possible for the people of the State. Over the last ten years the Museum has acquired more than 70 artworks via he and his contacts. 

Birth of a New Nation was purchased by an anonymous donor in recognition of Laurel Reuter’s 50 year as Director of the North Dakota Museum of Art, and dedicated to the many initiatives,publications, programs, and exhibitions she has producedthroughout the world.

Rabbett Before Horses Strickland is a member of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. He grew up in the San Francisco area surrounded by an artistic family and attempted his first oil painting at the age of 14. From there, Rabbett immersed himself in the works of Botticelli, Rubens, and Michelangelo among others, and found additional inspiration in surrealism and impressionism. Rabbett paints his dreams that depict traditional Anishinaabe stories that are visions of beautifully balanced forms and color relationships. In addition to being an artist, Rabbett is also a musician and mathematician.

Jim Dow: Twenty Years in North Dakota

April 7 - May 22, 2022

Jim Dow: Twenty Years in North Dakota Lecture
Thursday, April 21, 6 pm, followed by a reception with the artist. This event is free and open to the public.

Join us on a twenty-year travel across North Dakota with Boston-based photographer Jim Dow. In 1981, the Museum commissioned Dow to photograph folk art throughout the State, as much of it was too permanent or too large to move for an exhibition. Dow landed in Bismarck the winter of 1981 and captured murals of North Dakota painted on the inside of the brick walls of the State Penitentiary by an inmate serving a life sentence. Shortly after he photographed the murals, the walls were razed. Dow spent numerous years traveling back roads, eating in small town cafes, visiting bars, and drinking coffee in community centers looking for leads on more murals, outdoor sculptures, hand-painted signs, and the things farmers made in their shops over the long winter months.

Nearly 20 years after his last trip to North Dakota, Dow will return to give a lecture and to photograph in and around Grand Forks one more time.

Sponsors

This program is supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts through the Community Foundation of Grand Forks, East Grand Forks & Region.

Individual Sponsors

$500 and above

Luise Beringer

$100 - $499

Martin Brown

Capital Resource Management

Ross Rolshoven

Treasure Amdahl

Barton's Place

Barton Lidice Benes lived in a magical apartment in New York City. It was filled with over $1 million in African, Egyptian, South American, Chinese and contemporary art, plus much more as touted in the New York Times when it announced Barton’s intended gift to North Dakota (2/6/05).

Barton Benes and his treasure trove spent decades tucked away in a glorious boxcar space in Westbeth, the artist community in New York’s West Village. There, rare works of art joined ranks with the arcane, the wistful, the amusing, the deeply serious, and a “maddening and morbid array of things” (a human toe found on New York’s Williamsburg Bridge, a stuffed mink wearing a mink coat, an eight-foot giraffe head). This temporary installation suggests the drama and mystery embedded in Barton’s private wonderland. Continue reading...

N.D. MUSEUM OF ART RECONSTRUCTS NEW YORK ARTIST’S APARTMENT
 

Radiolab Podcast: As It Happens