Join The George Morrison Center for Indigenous Arts at the University of Minnesota for an artist talk with Jonathan Thunder in celebration of the show Jonathan Thunder: The Artist as Storyteller, a one-person gallery exhibition of paintings by the acclaimed Minnesota-based artist.
The exhibition includes fifteen artworks spanning the period from 2016 to 2024 plus a new large-scale painting commissioned for the exhibition and produced in 2025. Thunder is known for his surreal paintings, digitally animated films, and installations in which he addresses personal experience, mythology, history, and social commentary.
The artist explores and interrogates identity dynamics using images that incorporate masks, humanistic animals and animalistic humans. When composing each work, he thinks from a storytelling standpoint to create a vignette. Jonathan Thunder has said, “If there is an image, there has got to be a story.”