Permanent Collection

4420 Warwick Boulevard
Kansas City, MO 64111

Contact

Kemper Museum Policies

The Kemper Museum website uses cookies. By continuing to use the site, you agree to our privacy policy and terms of use.

Hours

Employment

Docent Portal

Policies

News

Atrium Project

Oil on Linen

Visit

Free Admission

Free Programs

Location & Directions

Plan Your Visit

Kemper Museum is a free art museum in Kansas City, Missouri that presents global contemporary art.

Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art

Accessibility

Exhibitions

Exhibitions & Collection

Calendar

Groups & Tours

Volunteer

Public Programs

Programs

Mission

History

Architecture

Leadership

Community Partners

About

Give

Memberships

Legacy Society

Gala

Annual Report

Support

Cafe

Museum Shop

Special Event Rentals

Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art acknowledges it resides on the ancestral territory of the Osage, Kaw, and Otoe-Missouria, among other tribal nations forcibly moved to the region such as the Shawnee, Wyandot, Delaware, Potawatomi, Sac and Fox and Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo) nations. We recognize and support the continued vibrancy of Native communities and cultures today who continue to thrive, as well as the inherent sovereignty of tribal nations. We are compelled to serve and advocate for these communities in accordance with our public mission.

Kemper Museum acknowledges and respects the diversity of Native people connected to this land today. Many recognize the land and all beings who live within it as relatives. We acknowledge the earth we inhabit, the waters of the Blue River, the Kansas River, the Missouri River, and the plants, animals, and people supported by them. 

We acknowledge our responsibility to be good caretakers of the land we occupy. 

Click here to learn more about our land acknowledgment process.

Land Acknowledgement

Join

Celebrate

Shop

Stan Douglas (Canadian, born 1960), Luanda-Kinshasa, 2013, single-channel video projection, 6 hours 1 min (loop), color, sound, overall dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner. © Stan Douglas. Courtesy the artist, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner. 

Stan Douglas: Metronome

Stan Douglas (b. 1960) is a Canadian artist whose work investigates the intersection of technology, image-making, and collective memory through the mediums of film and photography. For Stan Douglas: Metronome at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, three major video works are showcased, each focused on the theme of music. As an audiophile and former DJ, Douglas uses music as a metaphor for social and political conditions and a means for global cultural exchange. By intertwining historical moments with the present, his work highlights themes of memory, social unity, conflict, and the complexities of cultural interaction.

The featured works in Stan Douglas: Metronome include ISDN (2022), which connects rappers from the UK and Egypt through the now-obsolete ISDN technology, exploring social struggles and aspirations. Luanda-Kinshasa (2013) imagines a historic jam session at Columbia’s 30th Street Studio, creating a utopian musical space where different nationalities come together. Douglas’s early work, Hors-champs (1992), features Black expatriate musicians improvising a "free jazz" session, while his photographic series Disco Angola (2012) and 2011 ≠ 1848 (2022) delve deeper into themes of collective memory and cultural transference. Through these pieces, Douglas blends narratives and geographies, challenging binary thinking and reimagining both history and the present.

Stan Douglas: Metronome is organized by the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, and curated by Kevin Moore. It is supported by a major publication, Stan Douglas: Ghostlight, published by Dancing Foxes Press in collaboration with the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS), Bard College, Hessel Museum of Art. The book includes essays by CCS graduate program director and chief curator Lauren Cornell, Kevin Moore, and other prominent scholars.

Featured Works

This playlist, inspired by Stan Douglas: Metronome, was created by Kara Smith, Education Programs Manager at the American Jazz Museum.

Exhibitions are always free thanks to the generosity of members and other donors. Join or donate today to support free access to contemporary art.

On view at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Andrea Carlson: Shimmer on Horizons considers how landscapes are shaped by history, relationships, and power.

Andrea Carlson: Shimmer on Horizons

Andrea Carlson (Grand Portage Ojibwe/European descent, b. 1979; based in northern Minnesota and Chicago, IL) considers how landscapes are shaped by history, relationships, and power. Her artworks imagine places that are “everywhere and nowhere,” visualizing these shifting yet ever-present dynamics. Grounded in Anishinaabe understandings of space and time, the works in this exhibition reflect on how land carries memories of colonial expansion and violence, as well as Indigenous presence and resistance.

Across painting, video, and sculpture, Carlson organizes imagined landscapes around one constant—the horizon. This line is reminiscent of her homelands on Lake Superior. It is also a significant art historical trope that artists have employed to depict territories as vast and vacant, ripe for the taking. Carlson’s prismatic works are not empty: they are densely layered with an abundance of motifs, making reference to the tactics of colonialism as well as her family and peers, Ojibwe culture, and Indigenous sovereignty. Confronting ongoing histories of erasure and dispossession, Carlson proposes that what appears to be lost can be remade, reimagined, or otherwise regained.

Andrea Carlson: Shimmer on Horizons is curated by Iris Colburn, Curatorial Associate at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The Kansas City presentation is organized by Jessica S. Hong, Chief Curator, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. 

A Preview of Kansas City’s 2025-2026 Arts Season

In addition to her visual work, Andrea Carlson has published numerous essays, statements, 
and interviews about the histories and themes that inform her practice. Kemper Museum has curated a selection of these writings as supplementary reading materials for the exhibition.

Further Reading Resources:
Andrea Carlson

Generous contributions of all sizes help keep the Museum FREE for all visitors.

At Kemper Museum there is no charge for admission, parking, special exhibitions, or programs. Your donation underwrites these expenses and inspires many thousands with contemporary art each year.

Installation view, Chicago Works | Andrea Carlson: Shimmer on Horizons, MCA Chicago. August 03, 2024 – February 02, 2025. Photo: Robert Chase Heishman.

Free contemporary art museum in Kansas City, Missouri

Kemper Museum is a leading presenter of contemporary art and ideas in Kansas City, Missouri. 

Welcome to Kemper Museum

Sing songs, read books, explore art, and make your own art with a Kemper Museum educator and Kansas City librarian.

Totally Tots

Totally Tots featuring "Stories in Spotlight"

In conjunction with the Kansas City Art Institute’s Current Perspectives artist talk, join us at Kemper Museum for a film screening of the award-winning documentary COLOR by interdisciplinary artist Alteronce Gumby

Alteronce Gumby: COLOR Film Screening

Join Chief Curator Jessica S. Hong for a casual gallery talk focused on Andrea Carlson: Shimmer on Horizons, and stay for lunch at the museum's new restaurant, Oil on Linen.

Curator's Gallery Spotlight

We are honored to host an exciting evening with Kansas City-area filmmaker and Oscar winning co-writer for BlacKkKlansman, Kevin Willmott! 

Reimagining History with Academy-Award Winning Filmmaker Kevin Willmott 

As a part of the UMKC Shutz Lecture Series, Kemper Museum and UMKC’s Department of English and Media, Art and Design are excited to invite scholar Gloria Sutton to present her ongoing project, Pattern Recognition: Contemporary Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.  

Marilyn T. and Byron C. Shutz Lecture Series: Gloria Sutton 

Dálida and Michael (Serennata del Tres Cubano)

Paintings

Carry III

Sculptures

Carbon, silver and gold

Works on Paper

Helen Frankenthaler and Alexander Liberman in her East 83rd Street studio, New York - 1967, with GUIDING RED

Photographs

Deck

Textile Installations

In Praise of Prairie Dogs

Prints

The Wedding

Film & Video

Untitled Escape Collage

Mixed Media

Keep admission, parking, special exhibitions, and programming free for everyone.

Home

Join us for a special Totally Tots featuring Stories in the Spotlight where reading comes to life through the arts in KC! 

Sing songs, read books, explore and make your own art with a Kemper Museum educator and Kansas City librarian. At this session, take a closer look at artwork in Andrea Carlson: Shimmer on Horizons, enjoy a tailored reading list provided by Turn the Page KC, and take home a free book and additional literacy activities! 

Turn the Page KC’s mission is to mobilize communities to ensure children gain the literacy skills needed to create a lifetime of opportunities. Stories in the Spotlight aims to foster growing readers through the Arts in Kansas City. 

Click here for information on how to get to the museum and where to find our free parking lots.

Kemper Museum programs are FREE thanks to support from members and other donors. Join today!

Public programs are always FREE for everyone only because they are supported by many.

In conjunction with the Kansas City Art Institute’s Current Perspectives artist talk, join us at Kemper Museum for a film screening of the award-winning documentary COLOR by interdisciplinary artist Alteronce Gumby; an audience Q&A with Gumby will follow.

COLOR investigates the cultural and material spectrum of color across the globe. Gumby’s practice spans painting, installation, and film, and his work is held in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the National Gallery of Art, and the Hirshhorn Museum. This event is free and open to the public.

Registration is required; seating is limited.

Public Programs are free, thanks to Kemper Museum members and other donors. 

Join Chief Curator Jessica S. Hong for a casual gallery talk focused on Andrea Carlson: Shimmer on Horizons, and stay for lunch at the museum's new restaurant, Oil on Linen!

Public Programs are FREE for everyone only because they are supported by many.

In partnership with the American Jazz Museum, Gem Theater, and Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, we are honored to host an exciting evening with Kansas City-area filmmaker and Oscar winning co-writer for BlacKkKlansman, Kevin Willmott! Please join us as he discusses his film repertoire through the lens of Stan Douglas: Metronome’s exhibition themes of history, global connectivity, socio-political unrest, and the power of protest. Registration is encouraged.

Kevin Willmott grew up in Junction City, Kansas and received his BA in Drama from Marymount College and MFA in Dramatic Writing at New York University, Tisch School of the Arts. He is an Academy Award-winning film director and screenwriter whose work often focuses on human rights and race issues including writing and directing Ninth Street, C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America, and Bunker Hill. In 2019, Willmott won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for the film BlacKkKlansman, which he co-wrote with Spike Lee, Charlie Wachtel, and David Rabinowitz. He worked with Spike Lee again for Da 5 Bloods (2020).

Willmott is currently a professor emeritus of the University of Kansas Film & Media Studies program.

Please refer to the map below for parking instructions:

Drawing on computational regimes of visuality including tracking and surveillance, Pattern Recognition pushes beyond screen-based modalities of spectatorship which have dominated current thinking about digital media within art history, film, and media studies. This talk traces the stealthy intrusion of artificial intelligence in everyday imaging apps that make distinctions between human and computer vision more difficult to discern at a time when representation is now being reconfigured as “datafication.” Aimed at a broad humanities audience, Pattern Recognition connects digitally-born artworks and the mass digitalization of analog artworks to Art History’s own unresolvable conflict with experiencing works of art simultaneously in real life and through reproductive image surrogates including prints, drawings, photographs, models and slides which have made art history dependent on the virtualizing force of pictorial representation from the very inception of the discipline.  

Registration required; limited seating available 

Gloria Sutton is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History at Northeastern University. Her scholarship has been supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation, the Terra Foundation for American Art, and the Getty Research Institute. She has been a scholar-in-residence at Harvard University’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts; held curatorial positions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; served as the inaugural editor of the College Art Association’s Art Journal Open; and was a founding board member of Rhizome.org. She is currently completing Pattern Recognition: Contemporary Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, which argues for a “latent space of art history” — mapping how computational models and machine learning reframe the production, reception, and historiography of contemporary art.

Image: Julia Scher, Delta Alexa, 2018 Alexa virtual assistants, green gel filter, MP3 players, cables Dimensions variable Photo © Simon Vogel