The artwork by the Wyeth family, America’s iconic art family, will be the focus of the exhibition WYETH: Three Generations of Artistry this fall at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. Together, the artists of the Wyeth family—N. C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth, and James Wyeth—represent more than 100 years of American painting and have long been associated with the people and the landscapes of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and Maine. The exhibition will draw more than two dozen works from public and private collections from throughout the Midwest, including some that have never been on exhibition before now.

Above: Andrew Wyeth, Man and the Moon, 1990; egg tempera on Renaissance panel, 30 1/8 x 48 inches; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Promised Gift of the Enid and Crosby Kemper Foundation PG2000:ECK3

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.

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