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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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Melanie Johnson

Melanie Johnson (American, born 1978),Forest Dark II, 2020,
charcoal on Arches, 96 x 153 inches.
Courtesy of the artist. © Melanie Johnson.

Warrensburg, Missouri-based artist Melanie Johnson (American, born 1978) creates large-scale charcoal drawings that, with their immersive size, their array of meticulously rendered flora and fauna, and their astutely drawn perception of three-dimensional space, give the appearance of looking into a natural history museum diorama. Johnson emphasizes humans’ bonds with nature, including what she notes as an awareness of the “existential parallels and patterns” inherent in both by including depictions of human figures nestled seamlessly into the landscapes.

Seeing herself as the author of intricately drawn narratives, Johnson considers the marks she makes by layering, smudging, and shading with the charcoal as a record of time. Collectively these marks represent a “mining [of] the imagery of familiar landscapes [giving] form to a dissonant accrual of lived experiences, personal iconography, loss, and sense of place.” Much in the way Flemish landscapes of the seventeenth century informed the social and political climate of the times, Johnson’s imagery reveals a world of natural imagery encased within a psychological time-space. Perhaps more fantastical in the way she includes animals and humans not traditionally seen together, Johnson alludes to the perceptions of a new world or a hope of a new world where disparate species could cohabitate.