Opening reception, formal presentations kick off Museum exhibition The North Dakota Museum of Art announces the opening of Artists and War, a multi-media group exhibition of six artists from around the world creating art about war or conflict. The opening reception will be held at 6 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 9, with formal presentations by Daniel Heyman, David Opdyke and Adrienne Noelle Werge. This event is free and open to the public. Beverages and light fare will be provided. This exhibition is the first in a series of exhibitions about the subject, which will result in a touring exhibition and book. Daniel Heyman (Philadelphia) dry-points and watercolors. For the past four years, he has concentrated his art on making images about the war in Iraq, specifically the abuse and torture of innocent Iraqis at Abu Ghraib and other prisons. The winter issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review reproduced a series of Heyman images with an introduction by Laurel Reuter, director of the North Dakota Museum of Art and curator of Artists and War. The February issue of Esquire will feature Heyman's work as well. David Opdyke (Brooklyn) is installing Mixed Messages, an airborne installation of thousands of paper airplanes made from pages of an Arabic-English dictionary, specially commissioned for the Corcoran in Washington, D.C. Opdyke was born in 1969 and received his BFA in painting and sculpture at the University of Cincinnati in 1992. He showed for years at the Roebing Hall Gallery in New York but has just joined the Ronald Feldman Gallery. In 2005 Opdyke received the Aldrich Emerging Artist Award from the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Conn. Adrienne Noelle Werge was born in Vietnam of a Vietnamese mother and American father, an American serviceman. As an infant at the end of the Vietnam War, she was adopted from an orphanage outside Saigon and grew up near the University of Notre Dame in Indiana where her father was a professor of English. She graduated with an MFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work, Such a Time As This: Remembering Vietnam is about loss, identity and parents. Siah Armajani’s Fallujah, a monumental sculpture, echoes the themes and images of Picasso’s Guernica. Armajani (b. 1939) is an Iranian-born American sculptor who moved to Minneapolis in 1960, where he continues to reside. Armajani has devoted his 30-year career to investigating the connection between architecture and society, and to designing spaces that serve human needs on both an imaginative and a practical level. Hanna Hannah (Santa Cruz) exhibits paintings—casein and mixed media on mulberry or rice paper. The artist was born in El Salvador, where her parents lived after they emigrated from Germany with the rise of National Socialism in 1939. She moved to the United States in 1958 at age 11. She earned her master's degrees in French literature and painting. Currently she teaches in the art department at the University of California Santa Cruz. Miguel Angel Rojas is one of a handful of Colombian artists who use the medium of photography to expose unexpected layers of reality. His photo installation that echoes Michelangelo’s David will be in the exhibition. Born in Bogota in 1946, Rojas has been living and working in Colombia his entire life. He has taught art at the Jorge Tadeo Lozano University, the Los Andes University, and the National University, his alma mater. He has had numerous solo exhibitions in his native country and has formed part of ground-breaking group exhibitions in the United States, most notably "The American Effect" at the Whitney Museum, N.Y. (2003), FotoFest (1992) Houston, Texas, and the traveling exhibitions "Images of Silence" (1989-1990) organized by the Museum of Modern Art of Latin America, WH, and "Re-Aligning Vision" (1997-1999) organized by Museo del Barrio, N.Y. The North Dakota Museum of Art is located on Centennial Drive in Grand Forks. Hours are weekdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and weekends from 1 to 5 p.m. The Museum Shop is open during these hours as well. The Museum Café is open weekdays 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. with lunch served from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Although the Museum does not charge an admission fee, the suggested donation is $5 for adults and change from children. -- Brian Lofthus, Assistant to the Director, North Dakota Museum of Art, blofthus@ndmoa.com, 777-4195