Event Calendar
Education is at the heart of Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. Throughout the year, Kemper Museum offers more than 60 educational programs free to the public.
The Museum hosts artist talks, performances, film and video series, lectures, concerts, workshops for aspiring artists of all ages, and other creative programs designed to both entertain and challenge.
Thursday, January 24, 2019
Exhibition Opening Reception
Join us in celebrating the exhibition, Waiting for the UFOs (a space set between a landscape and a bunch of flowers), featuring new work by artist Polly Apfelbaum. Raise a glass with the artist and kick-off Kemper Museum’s twenty-fifth anniversary year!
Thanks to Tom’s Town Distilling Co. of Kansas City for generously sponsoring cocktails, with complimentary beer and wine provided by Café Sebastienne.
RSVP on Eventbrite:
https://kempermuseum-apfelbaum-opening.eventbrite.com
In 2004, Kemper Museum hosted a solo exhibition of Apfelbaum’s famous floor works that she describes as “fallen paintings,” hybrid works of rare beauty that exist somewhere between painting, sculpture, and installation and are arranged on the floor, spreading around corners in indeterminate shapes. Apfelbaum’s oeuvre is the very essence of transformation, innovation, and brilliance, accomplished with bold initiative.
Friday, January 25, 2019
Artist Talk with Polly Apfelbaum
Polly Apfelbaum introduces her newest work while discussing major themes present throughout her career. Best known for expansive polychromatic installations, which coalesce the radical and the beautiful, Apfelbaum’s sensibility is informed by an encyclopedic knowledge of the applied arts, art history, and popular culture.
RSVP on Eventbrite:
https://kempermuseum-apfelbaum-talk.eventbrite.com
Active since the mid-1980s, Apfelbaum uses found materials associated with craft traditions to create sculptural objects and sprawling, floor-based installations. She has referenced the aesthetics and principles of the Italian Arte Povera movement, French Supports/Surface movement, and First-Wave Feminist art – utilizing accumulation and dispersal as her preferred tools for installations.
With awareness of how her floor-based installations draw from classic traditions of fine art, Apfelbaum defines staining and dyeing as acts of painting; cutting, a way of drawing in space; and assembling the cut pieces a sculptural practice. Expanding in recent years to focus on the site specificity of her work, Apfelbaum creates immersive environments that continue her interest in the cultural aspects of color and multi-sensory experience, transforming entire spaces with correlated objects including painted walls, wallpaper, ceramic wall plaques, hand-woven rugs, and intimately scaled and suspended ceramic beads.