For photographer Jaimie Warren, life is a performance and the world is her stage. Through a pseudo-documentary lens, she frames the world almost indiscriminately, capturing the quirky personalities, places, and oddball moments that shape her life. Many photographs focus on herself, friends, or passersby in loosely choreographed situations reminiscent of straightforward tourist snapshots, outlandish “party” photographs, or documents of full-blown public spectacles featuring zany characters outfitted to amaze. While her portraits and close-ups of food invoke photographers Diane Arbus, Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, and Nikki S. Lee, among others, Warren’s photographs are uniquely her own in their strategic balance of artifice and authenticity, subtly conjuring all of the inconsistencies, ironies, and hilariously awkward moments that permeate everyday life. Based in Kansas City, this is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition.

Above: Jaimie Warren, Untitled (Self Portrait, Red and Flowers, Tokyo), 2007; chromogenic print, 30 x 40 inches; Courtesy of the artist

This survey of paintings by the late Dan Christensen (1942–2007) documents his never-ending quest to understand the possibilities of color, paint, and pictorial space. Though long associated with the Color Field movement, Christensen’s relentless experimentation with tools and techniques makes him resistant to any one label or category but does place him among this country’s most ambitious abstract and gestural painters. A native Nebraskan, Christensen was a 1964 graduate of the Kansas City Art Institute.

Please join us for the free opening reception Friday, May 15, 5:30–7:30 p.m.

Above: Dan Christensen, Lisa's Red, 1971; acrylic on canvas, 102 x 88 inches; Bebe and Crosby Kemper Collection, Gift of the Enid and Crosby Kemper Foundation, 1995.15

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

Since the early 1990s, American artist Polly Apfelbaum has been absorbed by staining—pouring and dripping fabric dye onto cotton sheeting and synthetic velvet. By “blotting” the fabric, she creates organic, rather than gestural, fields and patterns of pure color.  Reminiscent of stained canvases by many artists associated with Color Field painting, such as Dan Christensen, Helen Frankenthaler, and Kenneth Noland, Apfelbaum’s dyed fabrics often are installed on the wall, stacked neatly, or sprawled across the floor, and allude not only to painting and sculpture, but also to a myriad of categories in between: drawing, collage, tapestries, bed sheets, and clothing.
Apfelbaum’s Split (1998), from the Kemper Museum’s permanent collection, is a litany of odd-shape swatches of crushed stretch velvet. Stained in alternating colors and individually arranged, each saturated segment bleeds into neighboring swatches, forming a kaleidoscope of colors, shapes, and textures. Responding to the surrounding architecture, Split organically spreads over the gallery floor, visually disarming us with its colorful decorative motif.

Get a behind-the-scenes look at the installation of Polly Apfelbaum’s Split. Check out our podcast about the process.

Above: Polly Apfelbaum, Split, 1998; synthetic velvet, fabric dye; dimensions variable; Bebe and Crosby Kemper Collection; Museum Purchase, Enid and Crosby Kemper and William T. Kemper Acquisition Fund, 2004.7