Pao Houa Her

Last updated

Pao Houa Her
Born1982 (age 4041)
Known forPhotography
Movement Modernism, Feminism, Hmong, Vietnam war

Pao Houa Her (born in 1982) is a Hmong-American photographer whose works are primarily centered around the history and lived experiences of the Hmong people. [1] [2] Her's photography consists of greenery and geographic images. [3] She is also a professor at the University of Minnesota and teaches Introduction to Photography. [4]

Contents

Early life and education

Her was born in Laos, where she lived until the age of three, at which time her family fled to Minnesota, where she lives today. [5] She remembers vividly the long migration from Laos to camps in Thailand and, finally, on to St. Paul, Minnesota where Her's family settled in 1986. [5] She graduated from Humboldt High School in 2001. As a sophomore, Her became increasingly interested in photography. She learned her art shooting film—she wouldn't start working in a digital format until graduate school. She started at Inver Hills Community College before transferring to the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. [6] Her received a bachelor's of fine arts in photography from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2009. In 2012, she received a master's of fine arts in photography from the Yale School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut. [7]

Work

Her combines images that range from her life in Laos that include ancient large stone jars with burial sites to portraits of the elderly. The artist's image backgrounds range from empty studio back drops to plastic flowers. Her often arranges her photographs in groups and series to both suggest and disrupt narrative meaning. She has stated, “I create my own homeland, a place of belonging both real and unreal, an equal product of Hmong history and my imagination.” But her photographs can also stand separately. Either way they all aim to visualize the Hmong-American narrative. [8]

Grants and awards

Solo exhibitions

"Attention"

"Attention" [12] is one of Her's solo exhibitions focusing on Hmong-American veterans who fought in the Vietnam War or known as the Secret War. Hmong-American veterans were left to fight alone during the Vietnam War after the U.S. retreated in 1975, and they ignored the Hmong-American veterans after the war. [13] [14] "Attention" presents ten portraits of Hmong-American veterans in their uniforms and badges that they bought to protests for the recognition they deserve. [14] [13]

Group exhibitions

Related Research Articles

Uta Barth is a contemporary German-American photographer whose work addresses themes such as perception, optical illusion and non-place. Her early work emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s, "inverting the notion of background and foreground" in photography and bringing awareness to a viewer's attention to visual information with in the photographic frame. Her work is as much about vision and perception as it is about the failure to see, the faith humans place in the mechanics of perception, and the precarious nature of perceptual habits. Barth's says this about her art practice: “The question for me always is how can I make you aware of your own looking, instead of losing your attention to thoughts about what it is that you are looking at." She has been honored with two National Endowments of the Arts fellowships, was a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004‑05, and was a 2012 MacArthur Fellow. Barth lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

The Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD) is a private college specializing in the visual arts and located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. MCAD currently enrolls approximately 800 students. MCAD is one of just a few major art schools to offer a major in comic art.

May Lee-Yang, also known as May Lee, is a Hmong American playwright, poet, prose writer, performance artist and community activist in Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States. She was born in Ban Vinai Refugee Camp in Thailand and moved to Minnesota as a child with her family. She is also the executive director of the non-profit organization Hmong Arts Connection.

Malichansouk “Mali” Kouanchao is a Lao American visual artist, web and interactive designer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She is the subject of a children’s book Mali Under the Night Sky. Her multidisciplinary works explore the relationship between art, transformation, and communal healing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jim Denomie</span> Native American painter (1955–2022)

Jim Denomie was an Ojibwe Native American painter, known for his colorful, at times comical, looks at United States history and Indigenous peoples of the Americas.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christy Lee Rogers</span>

Christy Lee Rogers is an underwater fine art photographer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Siri Kaur</span> American artist

Siri Kaur is an artist/photographer who lives and works in Los Angeles, where she also serves as associate professor at Otis College of Art and Design. She received an MFA in photography from California Institute of the Arts in 2007, an MA in Italian studies in 2001 from Smith College/Universita’ di Firenze, Florence, Italy, and BA in comparative literature from Smith College in 1998. Kaur was the recipient of the Portland Museum of Art Biennial Purchase Prize in 2011. She regularly exhibits and has had solo shows at Blythe Projects and USC's 3001 galleries in Los Angeles, and group shows at the Torrance Museum of Art, California Institute of Technology, and UCLA’s Wight Biennial. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, art ltd., The L.A. Times, and The Washington Post, and is housed in the permanent collections of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the University of Maine.

Annu Palakunnathu Matthew is a British photographer. Her work has been exhibited at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum; Harvard Art Museums; Guangzhou Biennial of Photography, China; Tang Museum, New York; and The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Matthew is a professor of art (photography) in the University of Rhode Island's Department of Art and Art History.

JoAnn Verburg is an American photographer. Verburg is married to poet Jim Moore, who is frequently portrayed as reading the newspaper or napping in her photographs. She lives and works in St. Paul, Minnesota and Spoleto, Italy.

Andrea Carlson is a mixed-media American visual artist currently based in Chicago. She also maintains a studio space and has a strong artistic presence in Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Minnesota.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kyle Staver</span> American artist

Kyle Staver is an artist who lives in New York City.

Jolene Rickard, born 1956, citizen of the Tuscarora Nation, Turtle clan, is an artist, curator and visual historian at Cornell University, specializing in indigenous peoples issues. Rickard co-curated two of the four permanent exhibitions for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.

Dyani White Hawk is a contemporary artist and curator of Sicangu Lakota, German, and Welsh ancestry based out of Minnesota. From 2010 to 2015, White Hawk was a curator for the Minneapolis gallery All My Relations. As an artist, White Hawk's work aesthetic is characterized by a combination of modern abstract painting and traditional Lakota art. White Hawk's pieces reflect both her Western, American upbringing and her indigenous ancestors mediums and modes for creating visual art.

Jessica Todd Harper is an American fine-art photographer. She was born in Albany, New York in 1975.

Ann Pibal is an American painter who makes geometric compositions using acrylic paint on aluminum panel. The geometric intensity is one of the key characteristics that defines her paintings.

Rosalie Favell is a Métis (Cree/British) artist from Winnipeg, Manitoba currently based in Ottawa, Ontario, working with photography and digital collage techniques. Favell creates self-portraits, sometimes featuring her own image and other times featuring imagery that represents her, often making use of archival photos of family members and images from pop culture.

Maria Cristina Tavera ("Tina") is a contemporary Latino artist, curator, and cultural organizer who lives and works in Minneapolis, MN. Influenced by her dual citizenship, as well as her transnational movement between her residing Minnesota and Mexico families, she combines historical and contemporary texts and images from recognizable Latin American myths, legends, and present news. Tavera uses her prints, paintings, installations, and Dia de los Muertos ofrendas, or altars, to explore the way that national and cultural icons symbolize complex identities and can construct shared communities at home and abroad. Her artwork is both humorous and confrontational as she invites her viewers to question constructs of race, gender, ethnicity and national and cultural identities. She has exhibited her artwork and curated shows all around the world, and has artworks permanently installed in several art exhibits throughout Minnesota.

Nancy Floyd, born in Monticello, Minnesota in 1956, is an American photographer. Her photographic subjects mainly concern women and the female body during youth, pregnancy, and while aging. Her project She's Got a Gun comprises portraits of women and their firearms, which is linked to her Texas childhood. Floyd's work has been shown in 18 solo exhibitions and is held in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography and the High Museum of Art. Floyd is a professor emeritus of photography at the Ernest G. Welch School of Art and Design at Georgia State University.

Yesomi Umolu is a British curator of contemporary art and writer who has been director of curatorial affairs and public practice for the Serpentine Galleries since 2020.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hmongtown Marketplace</span> Hmong-American marketplace and cultural hub in St. Paul, Minnesota

Hmongtown Marketplace is an indoor market focused on Hmong-American products and culture in the Frogtown neighborhood of Saint Paul, Minnesota. Hmongtown is noted for its cuisine and produce, with major local paper the Star Tribune calling the food court "one of the state's top culinary gems." It is variously referred to as the Hmong Farmers Market or Hmong Flea Market, or simply "Hmongtown" to emphasize its role as a cultural hub like a Chinatown, not just a retail location.

References

  1. Pratt, Anna (July 22, 2014). "Hmong-American photographer is a pioneer". Star Tribune. Retrieved May 11, 2019.
  2. Cipolle, Alex (October 22, 2022). "A Minnesota Exhibit Framed Around Longing for Home". New York Times.
  3. StKate (December 14, 2019). "After the Fall of Hmong Tebchaw". The Catherine G. Murphy Gallery.
  4. "Supplemental Information 3: An excerpt from Data Downloads page, where users can download original datasets". doi: 10.7717/peerj.9467/supp-3 .{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  5. 1 2 "Pao Houa Her". Bockley Gallery.
  6. "Academy News – February 2019 PM&R". PM&R. 11 (2): 219–220. February 2019. doi:10.1002/pmrj.12078. ISSN   1934-1482.
  7. "Photo exhibit features East Side Hmong-American experience". Lillie Suburban Newspapers. Retrieved May 11, 2019.
  8. "Contemporary American Art at Illinois". Art Journal. 28 (4): 404–455. 1969. doi:10.2307/775319. ISSN   0004-3249. JSTOR   775319.
  9. "Announcing the 2019 Light Work Artists-in-Residence". Light Work (Press release). September 13, 2018. Retrieved December 30, 2021.
  10. 1 2 3 "Pao Houa Her" (PDF). Bockley Gallery. Retrieved May 9, 2020.
  11. "After the Fall of Hmong Tebchaw". The Catherine G. Murphy Gallery. Retrieved May 7, 2020.
  12. Attention
  13. 1 2 "Pao Houa Her: The States Project: Minnesota". LENSCRATCH. December 11, 2015. Retrieved May 6, 2021.
  14. 1 2 "The secret history of sacrifice and survival behind Pao Her's "Attention" –– Minneapolis Institute of Art". new.artsmia.org. Retrieved May 6, 2021.

[1]

  1. "Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It's Kept". whitney.org. Retrieved June 15, 2022.