CURRENT EXHIBITION
ABOUT THIS
Charlie Borovic, June - September 2026
Charles Borowicz is an interdisciplinary artist working in photography, video, and installation. His practice explores ideas of perception, modern myth, and the precarious balance between the fantastic and the mundane. Both raised and proudly practicing in the Midwest, Borowicz draws from ordinary environments, familiar cultural spaces, and common images, presenting them as fragments to experience that hover between documentation and fiction. Through a practice of long, deliberate looking, collecting, culling, and finishing, he produces cinematic photographs, moving-image works, and projection-based installations, elevating the mundane, questioning the fantastic, and rebalancing the scales of attention. He finds deep satisfaction exploring chance, the beautiful awkwardness of our shared reality, and the power of the simple while incorporating unique technical and creative methods to achieve ambitious work.
PAST EXHIBITIONS
LEMONADE
Jim White November 2025 - February 2026
Born with hydrocephalus, collage artist Jim White’s life has been profoundly shaped by surgery, medical implants, cascading diagnoses, hospitalizations and disability. His practice reenacts the trauma of having tissue surgically removed and medical augments added, but his compositions transform the violence into something smart, funny, offbeat, and playful. Images from art books are cut, torn, and pinned onto a cork board creating dozens of piercings before the final composition is glued into place.
By smashing together reproductions of historically important art in unexpected and often humorous ways, these compositions turn art history into both personal biography and cultural critique. Nothing is sacred. Masterpieces are simply raw material waiting to be reimagined in Jim’s world. Describing his practice, White says, “In my life I have felt, both as a disabled child and as an artist, that I had to adjust myself for others. As a reaction to that I have turned that outwards and changed my surroundings to make sense to me. Collage serves as an honest vehicle, representing my mind and body quite literally. My small world has been in constant repair, both medically and foundational. It is why collage appealed to me so strongly. Working with recognizable imagery, I not only get to pay homage to the artists I work with, a new image is created that is mine. Talisman. Calendar. Kaleidoscope. Still familiar, yet an altered altar like an invisible disability. I am my art.”
Jim White's collage Dada Pee Pee is a mash up of Salvador Dali's Mona Lisa and Marcel Duchamp's urinal.
Image of Jim White's Lemonade exhibition from the hallway. The doors to Golden Hind Gallery have work installed on the outside.
Iowa collage artist Jim White and moderator Mia Buch during the artist talk portion of Lemonade, White's solo show at Golden Hind Gallery in Des Moines, Iowa.
Jim White's collage Dada Pee Pee is a mash up of Salvador Dali's Mona Lisa and Marcel Duchamp's urinal.
IT’S ALWAYS A COMPETITION
RACHEL MERRILL, November 2024 - March 2025
Rachel Merrill’s meticulous and labor intensive interdisciplinary practice combines hand created textiles and sculptures with performances that turn the demands of womanhood into absurd, unwinnable pseudo sports.
“Using American sports competition (organized conflict) as a metaphor, I question the performative demands of womanhood, competition, power dynamics, and manipulation. Deliberately manufacturing garish, tawdry costumes and props, these spectacles compile personas- humorously absurd, ridiculously repetitive, and contradictions of the manufactured self. The repetitive and monotonous work (laboring over the costumes and props, performing pseudo-scripted choreography, and manipulating manufactured video/ photos) is a calculated part of momentary grandeur.” - Rachel Merrill
Feminist performance artist Rachel Merrill is sitting on a sled wearing a garish orange costume with her arms outstretched.
Feminist performance artist Rachel Merrill is standing in a green field waving a long orange flag and wearing a pink tutu, heels and a head protector as part of her series It's Always a Competition.
Feminist performance artist Rachel Merrill is seen standing in an empty parking lot waving two hot pink flags and wearing an absurd orange and pink smock that she created. She appears to be directing a nonexistent plane to land.
Feminist performance artist Rachel Merrill is sitting on a sled wearing a garish orange costume with her arms outstretched.
THIS IS YOU FORGETTING
GROUP SHOW December 2023 - January, 2024
Early photographs were incredibly rare and expensive artifacts, but camera phones have created a ubiquitous ease and cheapness to our ability to capture an image. Many of us take thousands of photos of everything and nothing and never print any of them. Most will be forgotten and lost. All of the photographs in this show are previously unprinted images from smart phones, and each photographer has shared the total number of photos on their camera roll (the highest number was 45,887). Special thanks to our juror Noah Doely. Artists in the exhibition are: Brevity Brown, Molly Wood, Bob Lockhart, Zoe Hermsen, Abraham Ready, Ryan Del Rosario, Brian Matthew Hart, Zoe Filzer, Lex Thompson, Melissa Guerrero, Madalyn Rowell, Justin Allen, Dustin Dooley, Brie Goldman, Becky Beckett, Naomi Crocker, Angela Black, Ethan Edvenson, Baily Thomas, and Julia Franklin.
A photograph of a dining booth with red banquet benches and a photo mural of a forest behind it.
Photograph of a playground in summer with a tree that has fallen on it.
A photograph of a parking lot's yellow stripe with a white and yellow baby sock on it.
A photograph of a dining booth with red banquet benches and a photo mural of a forest behind it.
TO NAME ONE'S HEART
STEPH BRUNIA February - April 2024
Steph Brunia has a problem. She’s a photographer who sees all the insufficiencies of photographs as a means of capturing the truth of the world. Her work has always acted as a sort of mirror of her relationships - father, sisters, and lovers have all become subjects over the years, but becoming a mother has created an even more intense desire to capture what is, in some ways, ineffable. She says, “Fleeting gestures, last light, open wounds, long shadows, blinking subjects and long stares have become my visual vocabulary of late. I am consumed by such longing - to savor, to hold still, to greedily drain each and every last drop. I am both filled and emptied by these acts.” To Name One’s Heart draws from a large series of photographs Brunia has been taking that document the magic of motherhood and everyday existence.
Black sans serif wall vinyl letters say TO NAME ONE'S HEART on a white wall.
Photograph of multiple photographs of a child installed in a grid on a white wall.
Iowa Arts Council Fellow photographer Steph Brunia is shown installing her work in the Golden Hind Gallery. We see her black pants and boots from behind, a toilet beside her and an orange level and roll of toilet paper on the ground.
Black sans serif wall vinyl letters say TO NAME ONE'S HEART on a white wall.
PUSSY
JENN DIERDORF AND BRITTANY BROOKE CROW, June - September 2023
Golden Hind Gallery’s third show features Brooklyn, NY artist Jenn Dierdorf and Des Moines, IA artist Brittany Brooke Crow, two women whose work explores the dynamics of being female in a society whose structure was mainly designed by and for men. Feminism has always attracted controversy despite its definition as “the advocacy of women’s rights on the basis of the equality of the sexes”, and landmark progress such as the ability to vote and own property after marriage have made the United States a far more fair country for women. However, recent legislation about women’s physical autonomy will have far reaching and unexpected consequences beyond the question of abortion. Many people feel helpless in the face of sweeping political and legal changes. Deirdorf’s and Crow’s work embody two tactics for reclaiming power when one feels powerless: obfuscation and humor. Crow’s photographs are a beautiful interplay between the viewer’s desire and the artist’s control over what they are allowed to see, while Dierdorf’s delightfully loose watercolors based on the character of Baubo remind us that joy and laughter can break one from the bleakness of depression and renew one’s energy for the work that need to be done.
A view into Golden Hind Gallery's main exhibition space from the hallway. Brittany Brooke Crow's large format black and white prints are prominent.
A view into Golden Hind Gallery's main exhibition space from the hallway. Brittany Brooke Crow's large format black and white print is next to the sink.
Feminist artist Jenn Dierdorf's black and white watercolors from her Baubo series. Three small paintings of legs with faces where the crotches should be hand high on a white wall.
A view into Golden Hind Gallery's main exhibition space from the hallway. Brittany Brooke Crow's large format black and white prints are prominent.
COWBOYS AND HORSE GIRLS
CLAYTON PORTER AND CHARLIE ANN HOPKINS, June 18 - September 1, 2022
Porter (NM) and Hopkins (WA) use the iconography of the American West to address struggles against forces greater than themselves, yet their divergent approaches to the subject of love and loss create a dynamic counterpoint to one another. Embodying the artist’s doomed relationship with a married woman, Porter’s explosive miniature drawing of a bronco rider and horse struggle upon a blank white wall.
While Porter’s work embodies conflict, Hopkins’ photo Impossible Surrender documents a collaborative performance with her horse. A months-long process of building trust with Magpie allowed her to achieve a monumental photo that addresses her concerns for our current environmental landscape and the rise of solastalgia, the homesickness one gets because the home environment has changed in distressing ways.
Artist Charlie Ann Hopkins sits astride her horse Magpie holding a very long white flag that is flapping in the wind. They are facing the camera in a large open prairie with a mountain in the background and light just cresting the hill from their left.
Santa Fe artist Clayton Porter's hand points to a very small graphite image of a cowgirl he drew on the wall of Golden Hind Gallery.
Santa Fe, NM artist Clayton Porter sits on the toilet in the main exhibition space of Golden Hind Gallery in Des Moines, IA. He holds his hat over his face.
Artist Charlie Ann Hopkins sits astride her horse Magpie holding a very long white flag that is flapping in the wind. They are facing the camera in a large open prairie with a mountain in the background and light just cresting the hill from their left.
LOST AND FOUND
INTERNATIONAL GROUP SHOW 2022
Golden Hind Gallery’s inaugural show Lost and Found is an international collection of found art featuring visual art and poetry by Ange Antlehofen, Belle Morte Collective, Stephanie Brunia, Benjamin Dodds, Larassa Kabel, Jennifer Knox, Rachel Merrill, Midwest Pressed and Jim White. From Dodds’ erasure poem using the Wikipedia entry for “toilet paper” to Midwest Pressed’s images of paper scraps leftover from creating their screen prints, each one of these artists is finding unintended meaning in everyday artifacts and giving us a view into their world. Brunia’s careful documentation of the flotsam and jetsam of her family create a level of attention and respect rarely given to things like a doll’s prop created with paper, markers and LOTS of tape. Altenhofen’s decision to embed gemstones and gold leaf into the sofa armrest “distressed by a cat” shows her interest in the interaction between animals and human culture. A plastic “RECEPTIONIST” sign found in the bathroom inspired Belle Morte’s photodocumented performance piece of the same title, and Kabel has found unexpected messages in found collages and accidental photo transfers. White has used art history books to create collages, an act of both creation and destruction. Knox uses “Ol’ Dirty Bastard on Visitors”, text from a sidebar of the celebrity section of The Daily News or the NY Post back in about 2000, while Merrill dug into her collection of vintage pop culture artifacts to create How the Waist Was Won and The Jazzercise Workout Book to expose the performative demands of womanhood, competition, and self-preservation.
A photograph of a fabulously fat dachshund sitting broadside to the viewer. It has no space between its undercarriage and the surface it sits on. It looks rather ashamed.
Collage by artist Jim White showing a vase with peonies that has a figure's torso added to it.
A small bit of paper that has been drawn on in marker by a child. It has pink, green, yellow and there are black polka dots.
A photograph of a fabulously fat dachshund sitting broadside to the viewer. It has no space between its undercarriage and the surface it sits on. It looks rather ashamed.