Brad Kahlhamer (born 1956) is an artist known for his multi-media practice, ranging from sculpture and painting to performance and music. He is currently based in New York City, working from his studio in Brooklyn.
Kahlhamer questions notions of authenticity and representation within a very specific discourse of Native American art. These matters become all the more complex and urgent in view of a concept of originality or of the primordial as established by many Native American people today. Adopting the position of delinquency within these fields of discourse is a simultaneously precarious act stepping into a realm of as the post-Smithsonian delinquent. Staging oneself as a vulnerable target – which also provides the potential for innovation, for a discursive handling of identity, cultural representation and reflection .[8]
His work has been collected by institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Seattle Art Museum, the Hood Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art among others.
