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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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Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois’s Spider is an enormous bronze sculpture of its titular subject lurking outside the Kemper Museum. Its head and body consist of asymmetrical rounded mounds of twisting forms. Its thick and roughly textured upper legs narrow into needle-like pointed shafts. Bourgeois sculpted spiders to help process psychologically her difficult childhood with an adulterous father and a complicated relationship with her mother. In a poem, Bourgeois described a mother who was “useful as a spider”—a comparison furthered by her mother’s management of weavers in the family’s tapestry repair business. Moreover, like a spider, Bourgeois’s mother wove a web of relationships that held the family intact, despite her husband’s transgressions. The Kemper sculpture’s impressive scale and coarse exterior visually express the intensity of Bourgeois’s mother’s power and toughness as remembered by the artist. 

– Rebecca Lampe, MA Student in Art History, University of Kansas, Fall 2025

Bebe and Crosby Kemper Collection

Spider

Spider, 1996, cast 1997Louise Bourgeois