Altru Professional Center

overview

This exhibition will be presented at the Altru Professional Center, a space affiliated with Altru Health System. It will highlight the work of commissioned artists and associates, who have contributed to the hospital’s growing collection and enriched the broader community through the arts. The exhibition will offer patients, visitors, and staff an opportunity to engage with artwork in a focused setting outside of daily hospital routines, reinforcing the value of art as a source of healing, inspiration, and connection.

artists

JOLENE MIKKELSON AND THE NORTH STAR QUILTERS

About North Star Quilters Guild

The North Star Quilters Guild is a non-profit organization serving North Dakota and Minnesota, dedicated to promoting and celebrating the art of quilting in all its forms. Our mission is to foster education, creativity, fellowship, and service while preserving quilting’s deep cultural and historical roots.

In addition to traditional and contemporary fabric quilting, we also celebrate the artistry of barn quilts—large, painted wooden panels featuring geometric, quilt-inspired designs displayed on barns, homes, and community buildings. Here at the Altru Professional Center, these colorful works of folk art honor local heritage, beautify both rural and urban landscapes, and tell the stories of families, farms, and communities across the region.

Connecting with the Altru Health System Art Collection, local artist Jolene Mikkelson was commissioned to create a quilt inspired by the theme “Our Hospital in the Park.” A lifelong resident of Grand Forks, North Dakota, Jolene is a retired occupational therapist who dedicated 20 years of service to Altru. She has transformed her lifelong passion for sewing into a vibrant art quilting practice that blends fabric, color, and creativity.

Having sewn since childhood, Jolene finds joy in the expressive freedom of art quilting—where texture and imagination come together to tell stories. Deeply rooted in her love for Grand Forks, Jolene captures the warmth of home in every piece she creates, even when her travels take her to Bemidji or Marco Island, Florida—where she always carries a bit of Grand Forks with her.

Through classes, exhibitions, collaborations, and our Outreach Program, Guild members share techniques, exchange ideas, and create quilts that bring warmth and comfort to those in need. Together, we strive to keep the quilting tradition alive, evolving, and inspiring for generations to come.

TODD HEBERT

North Dakota–based artist Todd Hebert creates paintings that blend technical precision with a dreamlike sense of atmosphere. Drawing on the visual language of airbrushed graphics—rich, saturated, and slightly surreal—Hebert transforms everyday imagery into something uncanny and poetic. His soft-edged technique and glowing color fields evoke both nostalgia and disquiet, heightening our human connection to familiar scenes like a child building a snowman or friends playing football on a frozen field.

Hebert’s visual lexicon is distinctly American: scarecrows, picnic coolers, snowmen, ceramic owls, and satellite dishes. These objects, at once ordinary and strange, take on symbolic weight in his compositions. They become suburban totems—markers of time, weather, and ritual—where humor, melancholy, and beauty coexist. The artist often juxtaposes the grandeur of nature with the absurdity of human invention: a picnic table dwarfed by a massive ice flow, or a snowman glowing beneath an endless sky.

For Hebert, the cycle of nature is mirrored in the rhythm of seasonal artifacts and fleeting cultural moments. His paintings are quiet, almost meditative narratives that chart the passage of time and the absurd poetry of the everyday.

His commissioned work for Altru Health System , titled Three Bubbles and a Snowman, continues this exploration. Installed in the main lobby, the piece greets visitors with its whimsical yet contemplative presence—an emblem of Hebert’s ability to find wonder and mystery in the most familiar forms.

ELMER THOMPSON

Growing up on a farm in rural North Dakota, Elmer O. Thompson (1891-1984) developed his creative impulses with photography, educating himself in matters of staging, lighting, and processing. Mr. Thompson quickly became an expert in the use of his 5 x 7 camera. His early photos show the development of a talent that would lead him first to the State Normal and Industrial School in Ellendale, where he served as the official school photographer. He went on to earn an electrical engineering degree at the University of California, served in the Signal Corps in Paris in WWI, and then moved to the center of technological innovation in New York City.

Mr. Thompson earned the first six of his ultimate thirty patents at the AT&T Headquarters at 195 Broadway. From there he moved to RCA Victor, then spent several decades at Philco, where he earned two dozen more patents, including the first wireless radio remote control (Philco’s “Mystery Control”) and a phonograph that transferred the signal from record to the amplifier by means of an optical sensor (the “Beam of Light” system).

Mr. Thompson’s progress—from the prairies of North Dakota to the technological heartland of the early radio and television age—illustrates the marriage of artistic vision with technological innovation. This exhibition illustrates that career with large framed prints of his photographs, many of which were taken in and around Ellendale and near his home in Cavalier County. These include individual portraits, landscapes, buildings, and staged trick photographs.

A special reception and an illustrated presentation by historian Dr. Ken Smith will be held Sunday, February 10 at 4 pm at the Museum. Paul Gronhovd, owner of Mr. Thompson’s glass plate collection and a photographer himself, printed the images for the show. On Sunday he will also discuss the process of recovering and presenting fine historical photos.

Curated and produced by Paul Gronhovd, 2017, Grand Forks, ND, Loaned to NDMOA for Exhibitions: “THE INVENTOR” The Elmer O. Thompson

DENNIS BUKOWSKI

I capture nature exactly as it offers itself — unedited, unaltered, and alive. My work is rooted in observation and patience, allowing the land, light, and sky to reveal their own quiet stories. From the stillness of an open field to the restless movement of clouds across the horizon, I seek to honor what is already there — not shaped by my hand, but discovered through presence.

Each photograph is an invitation to pause and notice beauty in its most honest form. These are moments the world gave freely — sunlight glancing off water, the rhythm of wind through grass, the subtle shift between day and dusk. Nothing added, nothing taken away.

Through this practice, I aim to remind us of our place within nature’s rhythm — that the extraordinary is often found in the unremarkable, and that stillness itself can be a form of wonder.

MORGAN BUKOWSKI

I chase the edge of the storm — drawn to the darkening skies, the scent of rain, and the trembling hush that settles before thunder breaks. In those charged moments, the world feels suspended between calm and chaos, and I am compelled to capture that tension.

My photographs are windows into this fleeting power — a visual record of nature’s raw emotion and fragile balance. Each image is an attempt to hold still the pulse of the atmosphere, to let you stand where I stood, to feel the wind shift, and to breathe the same electric air.

Through light, shadow, and movement, I explore how storms mirror our own inner landscapes — the turbulence, the beauty, and the clarity that follows when the skies finally open. These photographs are not just about weather, but about presence — being awake to the moment when everything changes.

Location at Altru Professional Center, 4400 South Washington Street, Grand Forks, ND 58201

Hours are Monday-Friday 8 am - 5 pm

PAC and Altru Professional Center want to inspire a socially connected and a civically engaged artistic community.