The desire to create, and in doing so express something of oneself, is an imperative for many people. For those who work at the Kemper Museum, surrounded every day by beautiful works of art and graceful architecture, this desire most often manifests itself in the visual arts. While the act of creating can be a collaborative process, more often, in the visual arts, particularly, it's a solitary process: something from inside the creator, going out to the viewer. While the act of creating a work of art is an inside/out process, so too is this particular exhibit: works coming from "inside" the Kemper Museum, out to you.

Above: Christopher Bell, PlayDoh Boutonniere, 2009; PlayDoh, 5 x 2 1/2 x 1 inches; Courtesy of the artist.

For this exhibition, volunteers at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art were asked to select “that’s my favorite work” from the Museum’s collection. The result, Volunteer Voices: Selections from the Collection of the Kemper Museum, draws together sculptures, paintings, drawings, and more by a variety of artists, including Leslie Dill, Wayne Thiebaud, and Bruce Nauman.

Watch Kemper ARTcasts related to the exhibition.

Above: Michael Lucero, Anthropomorphic Form with Hen, 1997, from Reclamation; white earthenware, glazes, pre-Columbian head, 15 x 13 x 7.5 inches

Keltie Ferris is a postdigital painter, employing formalist strategies and materials—oil, acrylic, sprayed paint, and oil pastel—to create enigmatic and visually seductive abstractions. Her quick, gestural marks, hard-edged forms, and diaphanous passages of sprayed oil paint demonstrate rigorous investigations of spatial illusion, color, and surface texture. Motley textures, marks, and palettes hover and collide into one another, creating complex compositions of competing strata of visual information. While recalling the works of Joan Mitchell, Sigmar Polke, Ross Bleckner, or Albert Oehlen, Ferris’s methodically structured paintings uniquely evoke the digital networks and urban topographies of the twenty-first century. And, with titles such as Jobriath (the first openly gay pop star) and Lady Stardust (David Bowie’s 1972 hit), our minds are punctuated with a broad range of associations from identity politics to pop-culture icons.

Listen to a Kemper ARTcast related to the exhibition.

Above: Keltie Ferris, Cassiopeia, 2009; oil, spray paint, acrylic on canvas, 80 x 90 inches

At some point, the organic curves of nature invariably run up against the hard edges of humanity. Whether seen as progress or destruction, that encounter becomes a signpost of the pioneer spirit in humankind and marks a contrast between the manufactured and the natural. The seven artists whose works come together in Settlement have chosen this point of overlap, the transition point between natural and manufactured, as their subject. As the title suggests, these images do not portray a perfect cohabitation with nature, but rather reveal the intention to adapt the environment to one more suitable for human habitation.

Listen to a Kemper ARTcast related to the exhibition.

Above: Greg Rose, Tropicalia, 2003; oil and alkyd on canvas on wood panel, 47.5 x 47.5 inches; Museum purchase, Barbara Uhlmann Memorial Fund 2003.15

Drawn from the Kemper Museum’s permanent collection, this exhibition comprises works by a handful of artists who shaped the postwar American aesthetic of the 20th century. Early modernists such as Hans Hofmann and John Marin were pivotal in the development of the dominant artistic style of the postwar period in America, Abstract Expressionism. Central to this painting style was the artist’s physical gesture expressed through rapid, dynamic brushstrokes or marks on the canvas. Evident in works by Willem de Kooning, Friedel Dzubas, Grace Hartigan, Franz Kline, and Joan Mitchell, the powerful gesture was regarded as the ultimate signifier of personal expression and the gateway to emotional and psychological content. By the early 1950s, artists such as Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, and Jules Olitski challenged the grand gesture of Abstract Expressionism by eliminating brushwork altogether and staining or pouring wide “fields” of thinned paint directly onto unprimed canvas. Color Field painting reduced painting to its intrinsic formal elements—paint and the two-dimensional picture plane— eliminating extraneous associations. Through their bold, innovative investigations of color, form, and pure expression, these artists were the dawn of a new generation of artists in postwar America and, in many respects, continue to illuminate and inform artistic practices today.
 
Above: Hans Hofmann, Rising Sun, 1958; oil on canvas, 60 x 72 inches; Collection of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Bebe and Crosby Kemper Collection, Gift of the Enid and Crosby Kemper Foundation 2002.12

Inspired by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s book La poétique de l’espace (The Poetics of Space) (1958), this exhibition features photographs from the Kemper Museum’s permanent collection that focus on the spatial dynamics of our architectural and natural surroundings. Through photographs by William Christenberry, Lynn Davis, Walker Evans, Todd Hido, and Aaron Siskind, among others, the exhibition reveals the mysterious and poetic worlds dwelling within domestic, urban, and natural spaces.

Above: Todd Hido, Untitled #1975-a, 1996; chromogenic color print mounted on aluminum, 38 x 30 inches; Collection of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum Purchase, Barbara Uhlmann Memorial Fund, 2005.21