Henry Payer is a Ho-Chunk multidisciplinary artist who works primarily with collage and mixed media. Payer has been recognized and awarded honors included having artworks chosen as Best of Show at the annual Northern Plains Indian Art Market in 2014 and 2011, Best of Division: Two Dimensional, 2016 4th Annual Native POP: People of the Plains and was award a Chancellor’s Fellowship while attending University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Payer will give a talk about his work and contemporary Native American art as part of the Paul A. Olson seminars in Great Plains studies. The talk is free and open to the public. There is usually parking available in the Que Place garage, attached to the Center for Great Plains Studies and Great Plains Art Museum.

Payer’s work will be on display in the lower-level gallery as part of the Rubendall Artist-in-Residence program. His exhibition will be on display March 2 - June 30. Payer will be in residency at the Great Plains Art Museum March 2-9 and will attend First Friday, March 2, 5-7 p.m. Visit the Artist in Residence page for more details and a full schedule: https://www.unl.edu/plains/gallery/artistinresidence.shtml

Payer’s narrative compositions are bold and contemporary. His works reference the altered landscape through Indigenous cartographic methods of “picture-writing” with traditional aspects of spatial representation and symbolism combined with European modernist models of cubism, spatial distortion and collage. Each work offers a visual narrative of symbols and appropriated voices from American consumer society that reconfigures history, the landscape or the identity of a portrait. Henry represents the work of a new generation of artists seeking to expand the range and voice of their visual and cultural representation, while attending to forms of tradition.