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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. 

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Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today introduces the work of more than twenty exceptional artists in conversation with one another for the first time. With works in a range of media, including painting, sculpture, printmaking, and drawing, the exhibition showcases a diverse range of unique visual vocabularies within non-representational expression. By highlighting these artists’ individual approaches to form, color, composition, material exploration and conceptual impetus within hard-edge and gestural abstraction, Magnetic Fields provides an expanded history of non-pictorial image and object-making. The exhibition not only celebrates these artists as leaders in the field, but also the enduring ability of abstraction to convey both personal iconography and universal themes.

The exhibition features a range of works, including early and later career examples, those of specific series, several exhibited for the first time, and the long awaited reappearance of iconic works such as Mavis Pusey’s large-scale painting Dejygea (1970) in The Whitney’s 1971 exhibition Contemporary Black Artists In America. Also drawn in part from the Kemper Museum’s permanent collection, the exhibition features Chakaia Booker’s rubber tire sculpture El Gato (2001).

Magnetic Fields marks the first U.S. presentation dedicated exclusively to the formal and historical dialogue of abstraction by women artists of color.

EXHIBITION ARTISTS: Candida Alvarez (b. 1955), Betty Blayton (b. 1937, d. 2016), Chakaia Booker (b. 1953), Lilian Thomas Burwell (b. 1927), Nanette Carter (b. 1954), Barbara Chase-Riboud (b. 1939), Deborah Dancy (b. 1949), Abigail DeVille (b. 1981), Maren Hassinger (b. 1947), Jennie C. Jones (b. 1968), Evangeline “EJ” Montgomery (b. 1930), Mary Lovelace O’Neal (b. 1942), Howardena Pindell (b. 1943), Mavis Pusey (b. 1928), Shinique Smith (b. 1971), Gilda Snowden (b. 1954, d. 2014), Sylvia Snowden (b. 1942), Kianja Strobert (b. 1980), Alma Thomas (b. 1891, d. 1978), Mildred Thompson (b. 1936, d. 2003), Brenna Youngblood (b. 1979).

Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today

Mildred Thompson, Magnetic Fields, 1991, Oil on canvas, 70 x 150 inches. Courtesy of the Mildred Thompson Estate, Atlanta, GA