Brad Kahlhamer: Swap Meet

New York and Arizona-based Native American artist Brad Kahlhamer first exhibited at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in 2004 with his hugely successful Let’s Walk West show. For his second SMoCA exhibition more than 15 years later, Swap Meet, Kahlhamer presents new work made in both his Brooklyn and Mesa studios, where he works among the media of painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, performance, and music.

Engaging in fieldwork at swap meets throughout the Southwest since the age of eighteen (his first road trip resulted in collecting a javelina head at a Tucson flea market), Kahlhamer draws from this ethnographic experience. He also pulls from his fascination with Ledger art—drawings done by Indigenous warrior-artists from the northern and southern plains of the contiguous United States and Canada in the mid-19th to early 20th century—and his time spent with Native art communities while living and working back in the Sonoran Desert in Mesa, Arizona.