Pamela Gaard is a visual artist with a background in science, and is mostly self taught as an artist. She lives and works in Minneapolis.
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I am interested in what we hold onto when the world around us feels uncertain: the people who have shaped us, the stories we carry, the objects and gestures that connect us to one another, and the possibility that we can create a more compassionate future together.

My work begins with people. Through portraiture, photography, painting, and mixed-media collage, I use the individual face and personal story as a way of looking at larger questions of community, identity, belonging, and resilience. I am particularly interested in the space between the intimate and the collective—how one person’s experience can become a doorway into recognizing something shared.

Living and working in Minnesota has made me attentive to the many communities and histories that exist alongside one another. I see art as a way of bringing those experiences into visibility without reducing them to a single narrative. A portrait can honor an individual while also asking us to consider whom we see, whom we overlook, and what happens when we take the time to truly encounter another person.

My own history with making art began early, through photography and stitching, influenced by my family’s connection to the schmatte trade and the abundance of fabric and sewing materials around me. Those materials remain meaningful to me because they carry both memory and possibility. Cloth can be patched, layered, joined, transformed, and passed from one person to another. I think of community in much the same way.

My education and work in science and public health have also shaped my artistic practice. They taught me to pay attention to the conditions that influence people’s lives while remaining deeply aware that behind every statistic is an individual human story. Art gives me another way to listen—to make space for complexity, dignity, connection, and conversation.

At this moment in our shared history, I want my work to ask what it means to care for one another and to remain open to one another’s experiences. What do we carry? What do we preserve? What do we repair? What do we pass forward?

I hold onto the belief that paying attention to one another is itself an act of care. Through my work, I hope to create encounters that encourage that attention—to place individual lives within a larger human story and to cultivate the possibility of connection, healing, and belonging.

Self Portrait, acrylic on BFK Rives, 20” x 20”, 2026

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