SJMA
DOCENT
COUNCIL
The Imaginative Landscape: Pao Houa Her
July 11, 2025
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January 4, 2026
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.
Pao Houa Her’s practice engages with the legacies, potentials, and aesthetics of landscape and portrait photography traditions, examining the complex intertwining of desire, homeland, and artifice. Rooted in the experience of her Hmong community and shaped by family experiences and lore passed down by her elders, Her’s work centers women as the knowledge bearers of both past and future. Using a formally rigorous photographic approach, Her explores constructions of homeland that resonate across diasporas.
Pao Houa Her uses her camera to explore the longing and desire of a community culturally defined by an elsewhere. 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.The exhibition is co-organized by Lauren Schell Dickens, chief curator at SJMA, and Jodi Throckmorton, chief curator at John Michael Kohler Arts Center (JMKAC) in Sheboygan, Wisconsin March 15–August 31, 2025,
The exhibit Preview PDF for download is from the JMKAC so some info may not be relevant to SJMA's exhibit.
Notes on Time Based Media
Discussion veered toward how to manage discussions of Time-Based Media (TBM), or videos with or without audio. The Docent Council website has materials on Touring Time-Based Media under Resources/Touring Help. More is available under Resources/Google Drive/NDSPresentations/2019. The videos—Tapitapultas and Hands Around in Yangon—that had been embedded in the 2019 NDS presentation are viewable on the Kadist website.
The Imaginative Landscape: Pao Houa Her
The exhibit playlist includes a collection of videos related to the exhibit and the artists.
Brown Bag video not available
Brown Bag Video URL
About the Artist
Pao Houa Her was born somewhere in the northern jungles of Laos in Southeast Asia. She is the eldest of seven children born to a factory worker dad and a senior day care provider mom. She fled Laos after the Laotian Civil Wa with her family when she was a baby, crossed the Mekong on her mother’s back, they lived in the refugee camps in Thailand and landed in America on a silver metal bird in the mid 1980s. She is a visual artist in Minnesota who works within multiple genres of photography. She received her BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and her MFA from Yale University. She’s a professor of photography at Macalester, but she’s a photographer above all, with a body of work that leans into the extremely conceptual—it’s generally about photography but specifically about how she can use photography to make sense of her Hmong cultural identity.
Pao Houa Her is a first generation Hmong American artist whose practice engages primarily with legacies and potentials of landscape, portraiture, and documentary photographic traditions and aesthetics, creating works that examine identity, longing, and belonging in Hmong diasporic communities.
The exhibit info at the JMKAC . https://www.jmkac.org/exhibition/pao-houa-her-the-imaginative-landscape/
Great written interview with the artist https://mspmag.com/arts-and-culture/hmong-artist-pao-houa-her/
Artist's Gallery https://bockleygallery.com/artist/pao-houa-her/
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