A book of paintings by artist Alana Bergstrom with an essay by Laurel Reuter the Founding Director and Chief Curator of the North Dakota Museum of Art.

Excerpt from the essay "Alana Bergstrom: A View with a Room" by Laurel Reuter:

"E. M. Forster’s novel "A Room with a View" painted the repressed culture of Edwardian era England in the early years of the twentieth century. That was a rigid and pretentious society. A hundred years later Alana Bergstrom’s acrylic painting "View with a Room" chronicles a world at war and the terror and dread that engulfed it. In 2009, the artist enlisted in the Army. A year later the 18th Military Police Brigade named her “Warrior of the Year". As a sergeant in the Military Police Corps, she deployed to Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom 2011 and 2012...

The 2014 painting "View with a Room" became a breakthrough painting for the artist. The original Room with a View was a private place, a refuge of one’s own. "View with a Room" with its pink, orange, and blue walls and its dark floor and ceiling is ominous, confining. The view, a slice of landscape, is compressed by its own dark wall. Even the red wedge of sky presses down, allowing no escape. Her color brings no light to the situation. Grace and innocence have disappeared. "View with a Room" isn’t about war but the larger sense of foreboding that creeps into human lives, unbidden, based in no identifiable reality...

Where will this artist take us next? She is well worth watching".

Born in Rapid City, South Dakota, Alana Bergstrom moved throughout the Mid-West. She received her Master of Fine Arts and Certificate Teaching of Art at the Hoffberger School of Painting, Maryland Institute College of Art in 2014. Bergstrom enlisted in the Army in 2009. As a Sergeant in the Military Police Corps, she deployed to Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom ’11-’12.