Kahlhamer from p 21 Installation view of “Brad Kahlhamer: Swap Meet.” Below: Brad Kahlhamer. Kahlhamer, who is of Native descent, began experiencing life as an artist early on. Born in 1956, he was adopted by a white family through a program of the Lutheran church, and knows little about his biological parents. “Arizona adoption laws in those days were quite strict. There was no going back, no empathy. ... I think my mother might have come from Phoenix, actually, and gave birth to me at Tucson Medical Center. I wrote a song about it, actually,” he says. His adoptive father was in construction, and “my early life was lumberyards, secondhand construction materials, brick- yards, cement mixers — very much a worker mentality, a maker mentality. Tools. Hands. Doing stuff. I never left it. Except that I had an obsession to draw. I started to draw about 3, 4, 5 years old,” he says. He flourished in the southern Arizona desert, he says. “I ran around in Marana a lot, just a wild child. My parents were astute enough to say, ‘Wow, this kid is just going to do his own thing. We’re just going to let him ride. We’ll feed him, he’ll come home when he’s William LeGoullon hungry, and that’s it.’ And that was my life.” It was his life for a while, but at the age of 25, after some time living in Wisconsin and on the road as a musician, Kahlhamer moved to New York City. He took a job at Topps, the iconic trading card and bubblegum company, where he met renowned artist Art Spiegelman. (Most famous for his graphic novel series Maus, Spiegelman created comics for Topps for many years.) “He was probably one of my first mentors,” Kahlhamer says of Spiegelman. “He took me out of one sort of low-paying section of the company and immediately shoehorned me in with his group, which was the creative development group, and those were the top underground cartoon- ists of the day. I quickly became the art director, the new product director.” In New York City, Kahlhamer found artistic inspiration (the influence of artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat are strongly present in his work) and a community of creators. “Part of what I love about New York is the density of culture and artists,” he says. “Even in my own studio building I think there’s 20 active studios on one >> p 25 Jennifer Goldberg 23 phoenixnewtimes.com | CONTENTS | FEEDBACK | OPINION | NEWS | FEATURE | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | FILM | CAFE | MUSIC | PHOENIX NEW TIMES MARCH 31ST– APRIL 6TH, 2022
