Brian Dow is a Native American artist from northern Minnesota. He currently lives in Bemidji, MN and originally from Ponemah which is located on the Red Lake Indian Reservation. His journey as a professional artist began just over five and a half years ago. Since that time, he has encountered significant success within greater Minnesota, including the Bemidji, Duluth, and metropolitan areas. At the commencement of his career, measured by the moment his first painting sold for $20 (to his mother no less), he was still working as a custodian at a casino hotel with the Leech Lake Gaming Enterprise. Fast forward to today and that same casino hotel now has a couple of his paintings hanging in their lobby and two additional paintings in another lobby of a separate casino hotel within the same gaming enterprise. From humble beginnings he has been able to earn a respected and well-known name for himself.

 

His success is not limited to the lobby of two casino hotels though. His paintings are also sold in gift shops from the west in Thief River Falls, MN to Mount Pleasant, MI to the east. Aside from numerous pieces of local and far away commissioned art, he has paintings and framed prints located coast to coast, in twenty states currently. He has paintings that hang in medical complexes, tribal colleges, tribal council buildings, elementary and high schools, Bemidji State University, drug treatment and rehabilitation facilities, a local juvenile center, and most notably the McKnight Foundation in Minneapolis, MN.

 

Brian has won many awards for his paintings and is looking forward to earning more awards as a visual artist. But today he realizes that it's not about being an award-winning artist, he realizes that he is here for what the Creator has intended him to do. Is making people happy with his artwork that are mostly given as gifts for loved ones by the people who love and support his work. Without them he wouldn't be where he is today as an artist. 

​

7th Generation

 

His 7th Generation image depicts the children of today who are to lead us into the future for a better and much more livable future for our grandchildren and theirs to survive to live in harmony. With the ideas of elderly who he met on the powwow trail 2018 stating that they disliked the End of the Trail image which told of our end as a people, he took that image and turned it into something more meaningful and beautiful. In which this painting takes him back to the words that Crazy Horse spoke of over a century or more ago to where all colors of life will move forward together and live in harmony, that the man is giving up his leadership and handing it over to the youth to lead us into the future.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

​