Past Exhibitions

Harvey Dunn: War Works

November 11, 2018 marks the 100 year anniversary of the signing of the armistice that ended combat in World War I. This exhibition commemorates the anniversary of the end of the war with a series of artworks created by celebrated South Dakota artist Harvey Dunn. The works on display are drawn from the collections of the South Dakota Art Museum and the National Museum of American History. Included are works Dunn created during WWI in his official capacity as a war artist as well as war-themed illustrations he created for stories, advertising and propaganda before and after his service.

Rooted, Revived & Reinvented: Basketry in America

Curated by the National Basketry Organization in collaboration with the Museum of Art and Archaeology at the University of Missouri, ninety-three objects in this exhibition provide an historical overview of American basketry from its origins in Native American, immigrant, and slave communities to its presence within the contemporary fine art world.

Heroes, Saviors & Triumphs: Illustrations by Paul Goble

Harvey Dunn: Illustrations

This exhibition of illustrations by Harvey Dunn from the museum’s Dunn permanent collection is timed to coincide with the South Dakota Festival of Books in Brookings. Copies of the stories that these illustrations were created to accompany will be available in the exhibition space for eager readers to explore.

This exhibit will be featured in our new Art of the Story series:

Nature, Tradition & Innovation: Contemporary Japanese Ceramics from the Gordon Brodfuehrer Collection

This exhibition features more than forty contemporary Japanese ceramic artists who draw inspiration from ancient Japanese ceramic traditions and the natural world that has always influenced those forms. Select pieces are paired with Japanese photographer Tajiro Ito’s spectacular photographs of Japan’s natural landscape.

Additional details can be found in the News Release.

My Hero! Contemporary Art & Superhero Action

This exhibition, organized by Bedford Gallery in Walnut Creek, CA, presents a sprawling collection of international artworks in a variety of media that celebrates and re-envisions the lives of iconic superheroes.

Rabbett Before Horses Strickland: Image Maker

Ojibwe artist Rabbett Strickland creates vivid, richly colored allegorical paintings depicting Ojibwe mythology centered on the trickster character, Nanabozho. His paintings share Nanabozho’s traditional wisdom and challenge injustices. His style evokes the aesthetics of Baroque and Romantic traditions, with their swirling, dramatic compositions and robust figures in the vein of Western artists like Peter Paul Rubens and Sandro Botticelli.

Harvey Dunn: Cotton Candy Skies

This exhibition highlights Harvey Dunn’s distinctive use of cotton candy colored pinks and blues in his depictions of skies, especially within in his South Dakota prairie paintings. Dunn's iconic "The Prairie is My Garden" is on display along with other familiar works as well as less often displayed Dunn works.

Butterflies & Blooms: Illustrations by Paul Goble

This exhibition features illustrations by Paul Goble containing imagery of butterflies and flowers, recurring themes in many of his books that distinguish his unique style from that of other traditionally pictographic American Indian artforms.  Books featured include Adopted by the Eagles, Beyond the Ridge, Buffalo Woman, Dream Wolf, The Gift of the Sacred Dog, The Girl Who Loved Wild Horses, The Lost Children, The Return of the Buffaloes and Star Boy.

Richard Van Buren: Material Witness

Born in 1937, Richard Van Buren has been exploring the relationship of the organic and man-made in his plastic sculptural objects since the mid-1960s. His cast resin and thermoplastic sculptures are expressive abstractions. Impregnated with a range of materials like fiberglass, shells, glitter and costume jewelry, they pop with intense translucent colors, reflective glints and hidden treasures.

Steve Bormes: Deep Sea Imaginarium

Outsider artist Steve Bormes of Sioux Falls creates illuminated sculptures from objects found as close to home as local antique and thrift stores and as far away as Turkey.  This collection of his bizarre, fictional “deep sea fish” that are lit from within will be installed in an intimate, dark, wonder-filled, aquarium-like, immersive environment… Bormes’s “deep-sea imaginarium.”

Artist Reception: December 7, 5-7 p.m. (Artist Discussion at 5:45)

From Dusk to Dawn: Artworks from the Permanent Collection

This exhibition celebrates the beauty of nighttime—from the setting to the rising of the sun—through artworks from our permanent collection.

Harvey Dunn: Night and Day

This exhibition features pairings of paintings by Harvey Dunn, one work depicting a night scene and one work depicting a day scene.  The paintings within the pairings relate to each other in subject matter and/or compositional strategies, revealing interesting connections and contrasts between the works.

Skye Gilkerson: There and Back

Skye Gilkerson is a native of Brookings, SD, receiving an MFA in sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2009. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Gilkerson creates poignant conceptual projects across a range of media, including sculpture, installation, photography, film and collage. The endless horizon of the South Dakota landscape remains a continual influence on her work. This exhibition will focus on works especially tied to a contemplation of time and timelessness, place and placelessness, and the tension between the human and universal scale.

Tapun Sa Win

This is an educational exhibit curated by Dr. Craig Howe of the Center for American Indian Research and Native Studies (CAIRNS). According to Lakota legend, long ago there was a beautiful young woman (Tapun Sa Win, or Red Cheek Woman) who married a star and went to live with him in the sky. Near the due date for the birth of her baby, she inadvertently created a hole in the sky through which she could see her relatives on earth. This made her lonesome so she braided a rope to descend to them.

Written in the Stars: Star Stories in the Illustrations of Paul Goble

This exhibition features illustrations by Paul Goble from books that contain star stories from Plains Indian tribes. Books featured will include Beyond the Ridge, Crow Chief, Her Seven Brothers, Star Boy, and The Lost Children.

Peter Reichardt and Andres Torres: imPULSE

imPULSE is a two person exhibition featuring South Dakota State University School of Design faculty member, Peter Reichardt, and recent MFA graduate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Andres Torres. Reichardt and Torres are young South Dakota artists creating fresh and exciting new Formalist imagery. Their works are rooted in an exploration of drawing and painting media, processes and histories, highlighting the dynamic compositional interplay of lines, colors, shapes, spaces, surfaces, and inherited meanings. 

Reception: November 16, 2017

Horses: From the Permanent Collection

This exhibition features artworks from the permanent collection of SDAM that contain horse imagery.  It will provide multi-cultural perspectives, including works by Harvey Dunn, Albin Henning, Charles Hargens, Charles Greener, Oscar Howe, Arthur Amiotte, Robert Penn and Herman Red Elk, amongst others.

Harvey Dunn: War Works from the Permanent Collection

In honor of the 100 year anniversary of the U.S. entry into WWI on April 6, 2017, this exhibition features Harvey Dunn’s war imagery from the Permanent Collection of SDAM. It includes Attack, Battleground, The Return, Gunfire, Streetfighting, Crossing a Pontoon Bridge, (untitled) Red Cross, (untitled) WWI Soldier, Oliver Staggered Over and Entered Major Worsley's Quarters and the two new acquisitions of a WWI battlefield woodcut and the illustration, Alongside G.I. Joe All the Way.

Horses: Illustrations by Paul Goble

This exhibition features illustrations by Paul Goble containing images of horses. Books featured will include Lone Bull’s Horse Raid, The Girl Who Loved Wild Horses, The Gift of the Sacred Dog, Death of the Iron Horse, The Great Race, Iktomi and the Buffalo Skull, Love Flute, Remaking the Earth, and Dream Wolf.

The Horse Nation of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ

This exhibition is organized by The Heritage Center at Red Cloud Indian School (Pine Ridge, SD), in partnership with artist Keith BraveHeart (Oglala Lakota).  Original artworks from people of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ (Lakota, Dakota, Nakota) that are related to and inspired by the Šúŋka Wakȟáŋ Oyáte (Horse Nation) were collected through a community informed process, open call and/or invitation.

For more information about this exhibition:

Women at Work: South Dakota Artists

This exhibition continues the theme of “women at work” from previous exhibitions. It features 18 women artists who are currently working and living in South Dakota and was curated through an invitational process: Loy Allen, Diana Behl, Angela Behrends, Jenny Braig, Ceca Cooper, Denise DuBroy, Amy Fill, Jeannie French, Mary Groth, Amber Hansen, Liz Heeren, Connie Herring, Amy Jarding, Erica Merchant, Reina Okawa, Camille Riner, Patti Roberts-Pizzuto, and Anna Youngers.

Between Order & Chaos: Nonobjective Abstractions

This exhibition focuses on pure or “non-objective” abstractions within the permanent collection of the South Dakota Art Museum. Completely devoid of naturalistic depictions, these artworks take up as their subject matter the composition and creation of the artworks themselves. The works presented range in date from the early 1950s to today and have been collected by the museum since its founding in 1970. They represent only a fraction of the rich and diverse mixture of pure abstractions that the museum owns and cares for.