Julia Oschatz’s room-size installations, comprising paintings, drawings, and videos housed in cardboard constructions, chart the eternal odyssey of a fictitious protagonist in this German artist’s ongoing narrative. Part animal and part human, this wayward being stars in short, looping videos that blend performance, animation, and painted imagery, and in muted, enigmatic landscape paintings.  Whether dancing to German pop music or meandering through an unearthly terrain, Oschatz’s benign, and at times comical, character embodies the existential quest for meaning and transcendence.

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Above, left: Julia Oschatz, untitled (122-07), 2007; oil, acrylic, spray paint on canvas, 21 5/8 x 29 1/8 inches; Courtesy of the artist and Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects , New York

Stephen Shore’s documentary-style photographs color the familiar and the everyday with a personalized and almost diaristic aesthetic, imbuing the banal with a striking sense of humanity. This exhibition includes Shore’s celebrated series Uncommon Places, documenting America of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The American vernacular emerges through Shore’s images of parking lots, apartment buildings, crossroads, motel rooms, and restaurants in large cities and desolate byways. In total, the exhibition showcases more than 150 color-infused images taken by one of the most influential American photographers (at age 23, Shore had a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, only the second living photographer to do so). Aperture, a not-for-profit organization devoted to photography and the visual arts, has organized this traveling exhibition and produced the accompanying publications.

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Above, left: Stephen Shore, Ginger Shore, Causeway Inn, Tampa, Florida, November 17, 1977, 1977

Deb Sokolow’s elaborate diagrammatic drawings read like graphic novels. Often constructed with pen, pencil, watercolor, and correction fluid on paper, each drawing’s story features diagrams, floor plans, texts, and illustrations that chart an anonymous, paranoid narrator’s obsessive explorations of the circumstances and clandestine connections among various characters and places. For the Kemper Museum, Sokolow works directly on the gallery walls to construct a new storyline based on an amateur detective’s attempts to unravel a mystery involving barbecue sauce, food critics, condiment espionage, and Kansas City’s SubTropolis. Written in the second-person and following the narrative structure of a Choose Your Own Adventure—a popular series of children’s books—viewers assume the role of the central character and determine the fate of the inquisitive detective.

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Above, left: Deb Sokolow, preliminary artist’s rendering of You are one step closer to learning the truth (detail), 2007; graphite, ink on paper; Courtesy of the artist

Considering images of the familiar and the everyday explored in the documentary-style photographs of Stephen Shore, Common Grounds brings together works from the Kemper Museum’s permanent collection that respond to the people, places, and things that compose the American vernacular. Artists Tina Barney, Jim Dine, Neeta Madahar, Fairfield Porter, and Wayne Thiebaud, among others, transform the ordinary into the extraordinary through careful observation and personalized depictions of America’s common grounds.

Above, left: Tina Barney, The Bridesmaids in Pink, 1995; chromogenic color print, 48 x 70 inches; Museum Purchase, Barbara Uhlmann Memorial Fund, 2001.21

A striking sampling of the Kemper Museum's most significant and influential modern paintings and sculptures is currently on view. Dating from the 1910s to the not-too-distant past, these works embody the history of formal and conceptual experimentation and aesthetic progress that helped shape the art world of today. It is against the achievements of Georgia O'Keeffe, Fairfield Porter, and others on view, that we measure today's artists. In doing so, we recognize the powerful influence the art of the past has had on that of the present.

Above: Arthur Dove, The Derrick, 1931, oil paint on canvas, 30 1/8 x 40 1/8 inches, Bebe and Crosby Kemper Collection; Gift of the William T. Kemper Charitable Trust, UMB Bank, n.a., Trustee, and the Enid and Crosby Kemper Foundation