Pao Houa Her: The Imaginative Landscape
On view through August 31, 2025
John Michael Kohler Arts Center
Sheboygan, Wisconsin
www.jmkac.org
Pao Houa Her uses her camera to explore the longing and desire of a community culturally defined by an elsewhere. Rooted in the experience of her HMong community and shaped by family experiences and lore passed down by her elders, Her takes a formally rigorous approach to photography to explore the complex intertwining of artifice and desire bound up in dreams of homeland.
This exhibition is the first survey of Her’s practice, covering nearly twenty years of work, with selections from six major series to date, as well as new work made in the jungles of Laos. Co-organized by the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (JMKAC) and the San Jose Museum of Art (SJMA) in California, the exhibition embraces the diverse U.S. contexts in which HMong communities have adapted and fabricated homelands.
[Images: (Left) Pao Houa Her, untitled, My Mother’s Flowers series, 2016. Archival pigment print. © Pao Houa Her, courtesy of the artist and Bockley Gallery. (Right) 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.]
