Jonathan Thunder: The Artist as Storyteller

The George Morrison Center for Indigenous Arts at the University of Minnesota presents 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.”

Artist Statement

“Visual storytelling plays a big role in my practice. In the painting process I work from intuition, but as the painting is put together, I’ll sense a vignette emerging. I draw inspiration from influential experiences. These current events become the setting or arrangement for the painting. The recipe is often experimental and like a dream sequence. I grew up reading Mad Magazine, Robert Crumb, collecting Garbage Pail Kids, riding skateboards with elaborate, odd designs on the deck, listening to Public Enemy, Rage Against Machine, Tom Waits and watching MTV. I’m also a life student of Ojibwe culture and storytelling. The Twin Cities is where I was raised, and I was born on the Red Lake Indian Reservation. These two worlds are integrated to me, yet far apart. Both worlds inform my perspective. I’m also attracted to urban minutiae, bad graffiti, tattoos, tribal symbolism, children’s tales, and dreams. I feel these symbols help place my work in our time and connect it to where we are today.”

–Jonathan Thunder

Artist Biography

Jonathan Thunder attended the Institute of American Indian Arts - Studio Arts Program in Santa Fe (1999-2000) and received a B.A. in Visual Effects and Motion Graphics from the Art Institute International in Minneapolis (2005). His epic animated mural Manifest’o was installed in the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport 2021 - 2023. Thunder has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Jim Denomie Memorial Scholarship, the McKnight Foundation Fellowship, the Minnesota State Arts Board Grant, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and the Tiwahe Foundation Leadership Grant. His work has been included in numerous one-person, two-person, and group exhibitions at All My Relations Gallery, the Duluth Art Institute, the Highpoint Center for Printmaking, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Muskegon Museum of Art, Rochester Art Center, and the Tweed Museum of Art. Jonathan Thunder: Good Mythology premiered on PBS American Masters in 2023.

Sponsorship

Jonathan Thunder: The Artist as Storyteller is presented by the George Morrison Center for Indigenous Arts at the University of Minnesota and made possible with generous support provided by the Harlan Boss Foundation for the Arts. The Quarter Gallery is operated by the Department of Art at the University of Minnesota.