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Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art’s seventh annual Atrium Project, Pepe Mar: Rising Sun, features a monumental fabric painting by Miami-based artist Pepe Mar (born Reynosa, Mexico, 1977). This installation highlights the signature fabric featured throughout Mar’s recent practice—a medium-weight textile printed with images sourced from his 15-year career archive—stretched across the expanse of the main atrium wall.

During site visits to Kemper Museum, Mar researched the Permanent Collection and encountered Rising Sun (1958), a work by modernist painter Hans Hofmann (German American, 1880–1966). An example of abstract expressionism, the painting is composed of swaths of bright colors—oranges, blues, yellows, and greens—applied gesturally upon the surface of the canvas, creating irregular shapes with defined and unblended boundaries. Hofmann’s juxtaposition of discrete colors in many ways mirrors collage practice, where elements are brought together but remain distinct. It can perhaps be said that Hofmann collaged paint, resonating with Mar’s collaging of his own archive across his fabric works. Taking inspiration from Hofmann’s technique and palette, Mar stained the fabric to approximate the colors of Rising Sun. In so doing, Mar creates a place for himself in the lineages of art history and addresses his own stylistic and material inheritances.

As part of the Atrium Project installation, Mar has also created a new large-scale assemblage work depicting the newest iteration of the artist’s “Paprikas”: characters, or alter egos, that recur throughout Mar’s works. Their bodies, made from the influences that surround Mar in his studio and objects culled from antique and thrift shops, reflect the artist’s Queer, Latinx experience. Pepe Mar’s work is a layering of histories and materials capturing his overall ideas in a single monumental installation.

Pepe Mar: Rising Sun is organized by Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, curated by Erin Dziedzic, director of curatorial affairs.  

Artist Talk | Pepe Mar

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Pepe Mar: Rising Sun

Installation view, Pepe Mar: Rising Sun, August 19, 2022 - July 30, 2023, Atrium, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Photo: E. G. Schempf, 2022.

Christian Ruiz Berman Exhibition Checklist_FINAL_10-04-2022.pdf

New York-based artist Christian Ruiz Berman (Mexican American, born 1982) draws from personal histories of migration and adaptation in his intricate paintings. His stylistic influences are wide: perspectives and the mood of Japanese ukiyo-e printing; the direct and tragicomic nature of mariachi ballads and Mexican folklore; and the confrontation of Indigenous, European, and Tibetan Buddhist symbology. He remixes traditions of abstraction, realism, and trompe l’oeil into joyous compositions that teem with color and vitality. He draws from personal backgrounds in graphic design and architecture, his Mexican heritage, and narratives of adaptation and migration to create dynamic packed scenes. These guides support Ruiz Berman’s layered methods of working with abstraction and iconography. His work encourages viewers to examine what is exotic and what is commonplace, what is authentic and what is fabricated.

Ruiz Berman is fascinated by what philosophers like Donna Haraway and Karen Barad call “tentacularity,” an ontology of actions and connections rather than hierarchies of objects. The paintings in this series challenge anthropocentrism (human primacy), and feature mischievous animals that spin connective threads. We are reminded of the interdependence of living organisms, objects, and histories, as well as all the other entangled elements from which reality is constructed. Ruiz Berman’s work is highly influenced by the writing of Gabriel García Márquez (Columbian 1927–2014), who is known for writing in the style of magical realism, where magical or supernatural phenomena are presented as real. Ruiz Berman’s paintings blur the line between supernatural and the natural, familiar world. They bring fables, folk tales, and myths into contemporary social relevance, engaging in a form of visual archaeology that aims to question human progress and hierarchies of visibility.

The exhibition title Hortus Inconclusus references the Latin hortus conclusus, an enclosed garden, which traditionally symbolizes both paradise and purity. While an attempt to put brackets around nature, Ruiz Berman’s paintings align with the prefix “In-“ of “Inconslusus” suggesting a push against confinement. Their entwined shapes, animals, and natural imagery move the viewer’s eye around to forms, shapes, and textures that maintain a constant flow, making them less “enclosed” and instead navigable toward an array of formal and conceptual influences.

This exhibition is organized by Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.

Artist Talk | Christian Ruiz Berman

Christian Ruiz Berman: Hortus Inconclusus

Christian Ruiz Berman (Mexican-American, born 1982),The eyes have it (Verte que te quiro verte), 2020, acrylic on paper on panel, 12 x 9 inches, Collection © Christian Ruiz Berman.

Tensile Strength Exhibition Checklist_FINAL_10-27-2022.pdf

Tensile strength, in science and engineering, is the resistance of a material to breaking under tension. Engaging with this definition, this exhibition displays a selection of works from the Kemper Museum Permanent Collection that embrace material fragility and/or endurance. The art featured in this gallery is stretched, snapped, salvaged, worn, assembled, and transformed either by human intervention or by forces of nature.

In part, this exhibition calls upon the history of assemblage and the found object, popularized by avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century such as Dadaism and Conceptual art. These influential movements developed as a result of the immense trauma of global war and rapid industrialization. Following in this legacy, the artists on view utilize everyday materials—tar, rubber, glass, soap, flora, and computer parts—or create works that approximate everyday life by combining materials in unexpected ways, such as the sculptural replica of a weathered building, House at Christmastime, Greensboro, Alabama (1993–94), by William Christenberry (American, 1936–2016). In doing so, these artists respond to their environments, breathing new life into the materials that they have carefully sourced and animated.

This exhibition arrives at a moment of deep social tension and infrastructural adversity in the United States. Tensile Strength marks our current state of fragility by focusing on the impermanent but lasting materials within our everyday lives. These materials, which often serve as apt representations of our lived experiences, wear and break under duress, but nonetheless persist through steady care, collection, and reinvention.

Tensile Strength is organized by Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and curated by Krista Alba, assistant curator.

Tensile Strength

Chakaia Booker (American, born 1953), El Gato, 2001, rubber tires and wood, 48 x 42 x 42 inches. Bebe and Crosby Kemper Collection, Museum purchase, Enid and Crosby
Kemper and William T. Kemper Acquisition Fund, 2004.12.01. © Chakaia Booker. Photo: E. G. Schempf, 2017.

Third Person: Storytelling as Cultural Construction

Third Person Exhibition Checklist_FINAL_10-05-2022.pdf

The art of storytelling has been passed down for centuries through oral tradition, music, literature, theater, cinema, and visual art. A good storyteller can illuminate, warn, impart moral lessons, and raise questions about the nature of life. Third Person: Storytelling as Cultural Construction evaluates how narrative art—a form of storytelling by which an artist communicates historic or fictionalized accounts—can impact our collective consciousness through vivid imagination or a restaging of events.



In his 1936 essay “The Storyteller,” philosopher Walter Benjamin suggested that our society is struggling to pass along the art of storytelling or to tell meaningful stories due to the explosion of information and modern mass media. While “The Storyteller” is a contentious essay, particularly because of its critique of forms such as the novel and film, Benjamin’s analysis of information overload continues to prove timely in the age of internet and social media. This exhibition highlights visual artists whose use of narrative tactics slows us down, focuses our attention, and allows us to construct cultural meaning through strategies of illustration, imagination, and dramaturgy. 

Third Person: Storytelling as Cultural Construction is organized by Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and curated by Krista Alba, Kemper Museum assistant curator.

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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.

Leonard Pryor (American, 1924-2015), Paper Boy, 1949, oil on canvas, 42 x 29½ inches. Collection of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri, Gift of Renée Pryor Newton and Craig Pryor in loving memory of their parents Leonard and Maxine Pryor, 2022.1.1. © Renee Pryor Newton and Craig Pryor. Photo: E. G. Schempf, 2022.

This exhibition presents thirty years of expressive paintings and drawings by Cornwall, UK–based artist Denzil Forrester MBE (Grenadian-British, born 1956). Taking inspiration from London’s dub reggae culture and clubs of the 1980s, Forrester’s working process is analogous to creating versions or reconfigurations of the same music track. Forrester’s numerous sketches from this period, made in the semi-darkness of urban dancehalls, continue to inform his paintings today. References to the diaspora, dub reggae, and the policing of Black cultural expression in Britain reverberate like a refrain throughout his practice. These figures and expressions read like a visual dub mix, echoing one another, and reconstituting themselves while projecting the transformative energy of the music.

Duppy Conqueror explores four themes that evolve throughout Forrester’s practice, circulating around ideas of ancestry, family, the aura of the reggae club and music scene, and the violence inflicted on Black communities.

Originating in Jamaica at about the time Forrester moved to East London in 1967, dub reggae speaks to his memories of the Caribbean while representing a vibrant cultural community in the UK. Works such as Rave On (1991), capture the energy of the dancing crowds and the idiosyncratic styles the clubbers wore. While such images express a sense of joy and freedom, paintings such as Brixton Blue (2018), also hint at the oppression of Black cultural life in Britain. Inspired by the death in police custody of the artist’s friend Winston Rose, this work exposes the physical, social, and emotional brutality inflicted on the Black body.

Duppy, an African word that evokes spirits and ancestors, is related semantically to dub, or the altered recordings of familiar songs made anew. This idea mirrors the dynamic of a music that echoes the past, speaks in the present, and anticipates the future. Key paintings in the exhibition Stitch Up (2017) and Reading with Ma Pets (2018), reveal the convergence of timelines that similarly defines Forrester’s work, from his childhood memories of Grenada to his experiences of London as a young man.

Duppy Conqueror is organized by Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and curated by Director of Curatorial Affairs Erin Dziedzic.

Featured Artworks

Forrester is most well known for capturing the vibrancy and dynamicsm of 1980s London reggae and dub nightclub scene. Of his work, the artist says “I just wanted to draw movement, action and expression. I was interested in the energy of the crowd, particular dance movements and what the clubbers wore. In these clubs, city life is recreated in essence: sounds, lights, police sirens, bodies pushing and swaying in a smoke-filled room.”

1983 M.A., Fine Art, Royal College of Art, London, England

1979 B.A., Fine Art, Central School of Art, London, England

1976 Foundation, Central School of Art, London, England

2021 Itchin & Scratchin, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, England; travelling to Spike Island, Bristol, England

2021 Life Between Islands: Caribbean–British Art 50s – Now, Tate Britain, London, England

2019 Brixton Blue, TFL Commission, Brixton Underground Station, London, England

Denzil Forrester’s first major U.S. exhibition opens at Kemper Museum

A Painter Who Captured London’s 1980s Reggae Scene

In London, Essential Survey Shows Painter Denzil Forrester’s Full Range

Denzil Forrester's Paintings Celebrate Pre-Gentrification London Nightlife

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Denzil Forrester: Duppy Conqueror

Denzil Forrester (Grenadian-British, born 1956), Night Flames, 2012, oil canvas, 42 x 66⅛ inches, Courtesy of Tia Collection, Santa Fe, New Mexico. © Denzil Forrester. Courtesy of Tia Collection, Santa Fe, NM. Image courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London. Photo: Mark Blower. 

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

kemperart.org Jan 2023

Silent KC is back at Kemper Museum to celebrate the exhibition!

Silent KC x Denzil Forrester: Duppy Conqueror

Tots on Tuesday is now Time for Tots! Sing songs, read books, explore art, and make your own art with a Kemper Museum educator and Kansas City librarian.

Time for Tots

Join us for an evening of figure drawing inspired by the techniques and themes in the exhibition, Hortus Inconclusus by Christian Ruiz Berman.

Studio Night: Everyday Magic

From dance halls to dance styles, get in the groove with a lively, trivia evening inspired by the special exhibition,(insert Denzil’s exhibition title).

Rhythm of the Trivia Night

Join Kemper Museum Director of Curatorial Affairs Erin Dziedzic for a guided tour of Denzil Forrester: Duppy Conqueror.

Curator-Led Tour of Denzil Forrester: Duppy Conqueror

Tots on Tuesday is now Time For Tots! Sing songs, read books, explore art, and make your own art with a Kemper Museum educator and Kansas City librarian.

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Handmade scarves by artist Debbie Barrett-Jones

Join artist Debbie Barrett-Jones at Kemper Museum Shop from 1–4 p.m. for a trunk show featuring handmade scarves. 

Debbie Barrett-Jones Trunk Show at Kemper Museum Shop

Silent KC is back at Kemper Museum to celebrate the exhibition, Denzil Forrester: Duppy Conqueror!This uniquely orchestrated silent concert features a multilayered ensemble of Kansas City musicians and artist Warren 'Stylez' Harvey, who will visually interpret the music, inspired by artist Denzil Forrester's practice of sketching in London dub and reggae nightclubs.

Grab a pair of headphones and wander the galleries, enjoy a cash bar, or watch the artist and musicians performing in the courtyard.

Presented by 2 The Maxxe, Kemper Museum, and Silent KC.

Public programs are always FREE for everyone, thanks to support from members and other donors. Join today to support free access to contemporary art. 

Tots on Tuesday is back on a new day and with a new name! Sing songs, read books, explore art, and make your own art with a Kemper Museum educator and Kansas City librarian.

Each Time for Tots session will be held at the museum, now during open hours so you can stick around and explore as you please!

Join us for an evening of figure drawing inspired by the techniques and themes in the exhibition, Christian Ruiz Berman: Hortus Inconclusus. A local visiting instructor will guide participants in their drawing practice through instruction and live demonstration, making connections to Berman’s work as well as their own.

Materials provided. Drawing sessions take place at Kemper Museum. All levels of experience are welcome. Cash bar.

Capacity is limited! If your plans change and you can no longer make it, we appreciate you canceling your reservation to give someone else the chance to attend.

From dance halls to dance styles, get in the groove with a lively, trivia evening inspired by the special exhibition, Denzil Forrester: Duppy Conqueror.

Trivia will include five rounds of questions to test your skills, highlighting themes of art, music, pop culture, and more! Special guest Glenn North, director of inclusive learning and creative engagement at the Kansas City Museum will be our quizmaster, and complimentary snacks and drinks will be provided.

Register your team of 3–6 participants. Space is limited.