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Kansas City, MO 64111

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

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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.

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New Acquisitions: In Celebration of Thirty Years of Kemper Museum

In 2024, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art celebrates its thirtieth anniversary. As the first collecting contemporary art museum in the state of Missouri, Kemper Museum is grateful to those who have helped grow and enhance the Permanent Collection through significant acquisitions. The exhibition New Acquisitions highlights a selection of acquisitions to the Museum since 2022, celebrating the artists who created them, recognizing their generous donors, and acknowledging Kemper Museum’s continued focus on collecting works by women and artists of color.

Ahead of Kemper Museum’s thirtieth anniversary, staff continues to deepen holdings by individual artists such as Frederick James Brown (American, 1945–2012) and Hung Liu (Chinese American, 1948–2021). Additionally, several new acquisitions are by artists who have had major exhibitions at Kemper Museum such as Aliza Nisenbaum (born 1977, Mexico City, Mexico), who created new works as part of the 2021 commissioned Atrium Project, and Natalie Frank (American, born 1980), whose major solo exhibition Unbound was presented in 2022. Kemper Museum also supports acquisitions by emerging contemporary artists including Reginald Sylvester II (American, born 1987) whose solo exhibition Green Gate at Kemper Museum in 2023 debuted new work. 

Since its inception, Kemper Museum has maintained its commitment to collecting and exhibiting work by underrepresented artists. The museum continues to fill gaps and broaden its Permanent Collection to include more works by women artists and artists of color. For three decades, generous donors have helped keep Kemper Museum on the leading edge of contemporary art in the region and beyond.

New Acquisitions is curated by Erin Dziedzic, former director of curatorial affairs of Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.

Featured Works

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.

Frederick James Brown, Untitled, 1974, oil and acrylic on canvas, 36 x 60 inches. Collection of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri, To Arnold Thall, who recognized Fred Brown's talent early on, and was gifted this work of art, 2023.5. © Frederick J. Brown Trust. Photo: E.G. Schempf, 2023.

Lucía Vidales (b. 1986, Mexico City) engages drawing and painting media to explore and expand the lineage of traditional art historical subjects. In Hambre, her massive installation commissioned for Kemper Museum’s ninth annual Atrium Project, Vidales takes on the iconic Last Supper, a portrayal of the apostles’ reactions to Jesus announcing that one of them would betray him. Hambre both pays homage to and critiques historical imagery associated with the Last Supper, and addresses modern pictorial representations of a dinner scene, acknowledging the evolution of the genre, subject, and setting.

Vidales uses traditional painting and drawing as a window into the complex social, cultural, and historical layers of meaning within meal sharing, dinner parties, and gathering spaces, where eating and community are central elements. “The first time I lived in an international context, I noticed that Latinos and Latin Americans stayed long after meals to chat, have coffee, dessert, a drink, or a smoke at a leisurely pace,” Vidales observed. She added:

In Mexico, where I live, as in other parts of Latin America, mealtime and after-dinner conversations are culturally very important and privileged spaces for social life. The time spent cooking, preparing meals and all the activities that go into preparing a gathering are what is usually considered in the realm of female activities, and often part of unseen and unacknowledged labor. Those are also spaces for building close connections, solidarity, and enjoyment, gossip, confessions, and skill building. Lucía Vidales

In this new work for Kemper Museum’s atrium, the many layers of charcoal drawing that create the network of silhouetted figures beneath the painting honor those who make it possible for gatherings to take shape such as chefs, kitchen prep cooks, servers, and more. The painting of guests gathered around a table—while hung in front of the drawing—contains sweeping marks and washes that coalesce seamlessly with the background, emphasizing their connectedness.

For the first time in 2024, the Atrium Project is expanding to fill the entire central core of the museum. In addition to the commissioned installation, which has grown to span 22 x 25 feet, Hambre also includes preparatory drawings for the installation, providing insight into Vidales’s development of her surreal forms and adept use of color transitions. Her mural-scale painting Viendo Desde El Monte Calvario (2020) depicting a pilgrimage destination, the Christian site where Jesus was crucified, stretches her modernization of a historical subject across the space. Hambre means “hunger” in Spanish and here could refer to people’s hunger for some type of experience from a religious site. It also alludes to the artist’s hunger for contemporary depictions to broaden the scope and audiences of these religious sites, subjects, and scenes from visual culture. In this eight-panel painting, Vidales employs her unique mark making to evoke the blurred boundaries between human, animal, and spiritual place. The result is Vidales’s forming of a new mythology from past visual, folkloric, and spiritual histories.

Together, Vidales’s paintings and drawings encourage considerations of what we know of prescribed historical imagery and how that may have the potential to expand in contemporary art and life. 

Hambre is curated by Erin Dziedzic and organized by Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.

Lucía Vidales is a painter who lives and works in Monterrey, Mexico. She is currently an Art Professor at University UDEM and has been awarded three times with the Jovenes Creadores grant by the Secretaría de Cultura, Mexico. Vidales’s layered paintings engage themes of materiality, the body, and the consequences of historical and colonial imaginaries. The beings that populate her paintings suggest the potential for confrontation, but seldom follow through. Instead they play with humor or anxiety, or seek consolation from ancient wounds.

2014 M.F.A., National Autonomous University of Mexico, Faculty of Art and Design, Mexico City

2009 La Esmeralda National School of Painting, Sculpture, and Printmaking of the National Institute of Fine Arts, Mexico City

2021 Sudor Frío, PROXYCO, New York, New York

2021 Manoteta, PEANA, Monterrey, Mexico (20; 

2020 To cool the blue, Taka Ishii Gallery Ph / F, Tokyo

2019 Noche durante el día, Sala Gam, Galería de Arte Mexicano, Mexico City

2019 Come as you are, House of Deslave, Tijuana

2018 Cuerpo de esta sombra, Galería Alterna, Mexico City

2020–21 Four Women Painters at the Crossroads, Sapar Contemporary (at Piero Atchugarry Gallery), Miami 

2020 Murales para un cubo blanco, Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Mexico City

2020 Daichi Takagi, Lucia Vidales, Hiroka Yamashita, Taka Ishii, Tokyo

2019 City Prince/sses, Palais de Tokyo, Paris

An Artist Grappling With Mexico’s Cultural Legacy

Slow Bodies, Racing Hearts: Lucía Vidales’s Paintings of Our Changing Selves

The Atrium Project is an annual series of commissioned projects that presents the work of emerging and mid-career Hispanic and Latinx artists. Featured artists included José Lerma (2016), Firelei Báez (2017), Paul Henry Ramirez (2018), Angel Otero (2019), Joiri Minaya (2020), Aliza Nisenbaum (2021), Pepe Mar (2022), and Sarah Zapata (2023). These site-responsive projects involve artists visits to Kansas City, inspiration from which is often incorporated into the projects. This exhibition is organized by Erin Dziedzic, director of curatorial affairs, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.

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

Lucía Vidales: Hambre

Lucía Vidales (Mexican, born 1986), Viendo Desde El Monte Calvario, 2020, painting on canvas, 83 ¾ x 283 ⅜ inches, Courtesy of the artist and PROXYCO Gallery, New York © Lucía Vidales

Infinite Regress: Mystical Abstraction from the Permanent Collection and Beyond

Infinite Regress brings the past in dialogue with the present through selections from the Permanent Collection paired with works by contemporary artists exhibiting at the museum for the first time on the occasion of its 30th anniversary. The exhibition connects these works through a shared vocabulary of mystical abstraction that has both historical and contemporary resonance, engaging periods of extreme transformation in nature and technology.

In philosophy, the term infinite regress refers to an endless sequence of reasoning in which each new idea depends on the one that came before—a paradox of unlimited reformulation wherein the future is built on the past. Infinite Regress is also the title of a series of paintings by Eamon Ore-Giron in which each work is a slight variation on its predecessor. The series is intended to disrupt notions of stable or fixed knowledge, positing an idea of knowledge as cumulative, progressing by always looking to the past yet with new perspectives. Art and ideas advance by recycling their own histories.

Spanning more than a century, this exhibition addresses modern humankind’s search for balance within nature and technology. Artists Joseph Stella, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Marsden Hartley were inspired by spiritual concepts circulating during the early 20th century, leading many to choose abstraction over the material world. Today, contemporary artists such as Ore-Giron, Chelsea Culprit, and Shannon Bool, draw upon an even broader range of sources, including their artistic forebears, in their search for elevated meaning. Together, these works offer an intergenerational dialogue about art as a spiritual home in a beautiful and troubled world.

Infinite Regress: Mystical Abstraction from the Permanent Collection and Beyond is curated by Kevin Moore and organized by Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.

Artists from the Permanent Collection include

Artists from Beyond the Permanent Collection include

30th Anniversary Luminaries

Joseph Stella (American, 1877-1946), Dance of Spring (Song of the Birds), 1924, oil on canvas, 43 ⅜ x 32 ⅜ inches. Collection of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri, Bebe and Crosby Kemper Collection, Gift of the Enid and Crosby Kemper Foundation, 2003.03.01. © No known copyright restrictions. Photo: Mike Jenson, 2023.

As Kemper Museum celebrates its 30th anniversary, Executive Director Jessica May has spent her first year at its leader learning about the Permanent Collection. Director’s Cut offers a peek into her explorations. Every artwork tells a story; this exhibition bridges the stories of contemporary art and artists with the personal reflections of a dedicated art lover. Come reflect with us!

Director's Cut

Petah Coyne, Untitled (#887P-97), 1997, gelatin silver print, edition 1 of 3, 60 x 40 inches. Collection of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Anonymous gift in honor of Bebe and Crosby Kemper on the occasion of the 20th Anniversary of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. 2013.15 © Petah Coyne, courtesy of Galerie Lelong. Photo: courtesy of Galerie Lelong.

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

Kemper Museum is taking Silent Concert on the Streetcar!

Tracks on the Tracks: Kemper Museum Streetcar Silent Concert

Join us for an evening of creativity and community at the museum.

Open Drawing

Join the Kemper Teen Arts Council for a creative activity at the museum!

Teen Workshop: Storytelling & Comics with Benny Johnson

Kemper Museum members are invited to the museum for an evening of art, food, shopping, and good company!

Member Holiday Happy Hour

The Kansas City Music Teachers Association presents an area-wide student recital featuring holiday selections.

Musical Merriment with the Kansas City Music Teachers Association

Director's Gallery Spotlight

Celebrating 30 Years

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.

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Celebrate free access to public transportation and free access to contemporary art with a special Silent Concert on the Kemper Museum Streetcar! Watch live vocalists and musicians play their electric instruments silently, while listening through wireless headphones that channel the full musical production, allowing you to control the volume and take the music with you while riding the art-filled car through downtown Kansas City.

This event is presented by 2 the Maxxe, Kemper Museum, Silent KC, and the KC Streetcar Authority.

Click here for information on the Kemper Museum Streetcar.

Public programs are always FREE for everyone only because they are supported by many. Join today to support free access to contemporary art. 

Head to Kemper Museum the first Thursday of each month for an evening of community and creativity! 

Pick up a stool, drawing board, and provided drawing materials, or bring your own sketchbook and find a spot for open drawing at the museum.

All levels of experience are welcome. Cash bar. (Members receive two free drinks.)

Attendees are allowed to bring their own sketchbooks, paper, and pencil. Otherwise, please use the materials provided by the museum.

Please use only graphite pencils, colored pencils, and crayons in all areas of the museum.

Markers, ink pens, charcoal, paint, watercolor, etc. are NOT allowed (nothing that is liquid-based or highly friable) in any areas of the museum.

Larger drawing boards can be used in the Atrium, but please use standard or smaller size clipboards if you enter one of the galleries.

Folding stools can be taken into the galleries. No easels, tables or drawing horses in the galleries.

Set up a minimum of 6 feet from artwork in the entire museum, and please do not blow or swipe graphite dust or eraser debris toward artworks.

Please dispose of any pencil shavings or any other debris in trash cans provided.

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

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

Join the Kemper Teen Arts Council and local illustrator and comic artist, Benny Johnson for an evening of exploring the art of storytelling and comic-making. Workshop participants will learn about process and product all while exploring the craft and making connections to the works on-view in the museum.

Kemper Museum programs are FREE for everyone only because they are supported by many. Become a member to support free access to contemporary art and ideas today!

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

This month, all Kemper Museum members have two extra special opportunities to come together for art, food, shopping, and good company!

Enjoy two free drinks, wander the galleries, take care of holiday shopping at the Museum Shop, and try out the Thursday night dinners at museum's new restaurant, Oil on Linen, with your 20% member discount.

This special event is a benefit of Kemper Museum members.

The Kansas City Music Teachers Association presents an area-wide student recital featuring holiday selections in the Atrium of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. All ages and all instruments will join to make the season merry! 

Grab lunch at the museum's cafe and stop by the Kemper Museum Shop for last minute gift shopping!