Pao Houa Her: The Imaginative Landscape is installed at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center and throughout Sheboygan’s local restaurants, community centers, and outdoor sites.
Pao Houa Her creates images that document the people, places, histories, and myths of her HMong American community. Her’s artwork is rooted in personal experience. Born in Laos in 1982, she fled with her family after the Laotian Civil War. They spent a year in a refugee camp in Thailand before settling in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Through images, Her honors a homeland that she remembers only through family stories and considers what might constitute that homeland today.
“The terrific range of project proposals we receive each year speaks to the mobile and porous disciplinary boundaries of contemporary art practice, and to the rich and inventive ways writers approach art today. They are alert to the urgent need to expand the conventions of art history and criticism with ideas from other discourses, such as black studies, transnational and diaspora studies, gender and women’s studies, and LGBT studies. The work of lesser known and overlooked artists and art communities continues to be mined, with writers articulating new ways to counter the striking imbalances of race, class and gender that continue to affect the arts and the culture industry.”
Pradeep Dalal, Program Director, The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant
