The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts

Pao Houa Her: The Imaginative Landscape

Institution
John Michael Kohler Arts Center
Grant Cycle
Spring 2024
Amount
$60,000
Type of Grant
Exhibition Support
Website
jmkac.org ↗
Pao Houa Her, untitled, My Mother's Flowers series, 2016. Archival pigment print; 20 x 16 in. © Pao Houa Her, courtesy of the artist and Bockley Gallery.
Pao Houa Her, The Imaginative Landscape installation view at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, 2025. Pao Houa Her, (from left) untitled, Pictures of Paradise series, 2023–24; lenticular print. Kwv Txhiaj in the Valley of Widows, 2023; single channel video, 24 minutes, looped. Courtesy of the artist and Bockley Gallery. Photo courtesy of John Michael Kohler Arts Center.
Pao Houa Her, Hmong Veteran, Attention series, 2012. Archival pigment print; 50 x 40 in. © Pao Houa Her, courtesy of the artist and Bockley Gallery.
Pao Houa Her, Maroon backdrop, My grandfather turned into a tiger series, 2017. Archival pigment print. 52 1/2 x 40 in. © Pao Houa Her, courtesy of the artist and Bockley Gallery.
Pao Houa Her, Kwv Txhiaj in the Valley of Widows, 2023. Single channel video, 24 minutes, looped. Courtesy of the artist and Bockley Gallery. Photo courtesy of John Michael Kohler Arts Center.
Pao Houa Her, untitled (portrait), After the Fall of Hmong Teb chaws series, 2017. Archival pigment print; 52 1/2 x 42 in. © Pao Houa Her, courtesy of the artist and Bockley Gallery.
Pao Houa Her, untitled (women in traditional outfits), The Imaginative Landscape series, 2019. Archival pigment print. 40 x 32 in. © Pao Houa Her, courtesy of the artist and Bockley Gallery.
Pao Houa Her, untitled, Pictures of Paradise series, 2024. Lenticular print. © Pao Houa Her, courtesy of the artist and Bockley Gallery.
Pao Houa Her standing in front of untitled, My Mother's Flowers series, 2016.

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.

See Also

1986

Warhol painted more than 100 works related to Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, which some have read as complex reckoning of his homosexuality, Catholicism, and mortality in response to witnessing AIDS devastate the gay community.