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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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References from Western art history provide points of engagement with Kansas City and Chicago-based artist Patty Carroll’s photographic images, which employ distinctly modern elements of décor and consumerist culture to reveal psychological threads of domesticity’s sometimes overwhelming tenor. Carroll’s photographs call to mind multiple art historical influences—Greco-Roman figurative sculpture and its distinctive treatment of draping done in marble, the opulent cascades of textile pattern in Northern Renaissance painting, and the still life genre—in related series in Still / Life exhibited together for the first time.

Using contemporary floral textile patterns to conceal human figures, Carroll’s images evoke questions: Who are these figures? Why are they hidden from our view? What does the composition reveal about the subject? What is the viewer’s relationship to the figure? Camouflaging their subject in this way “calls into question the apparent harmony of the scenes, subverting the viewer’s initial enjoyment of the color, texture, fabric, and composition, gradually to be replaced by greater awareness of the underlying complexity,” as noted by Naren Barfield in a recent essay written on Carroll’s work.

In her still life images that include bird figurines and synthetic floral materials, the focus from above transforms these three-dimensional objects into two-dimensional patterns. Together with the figures, these square format works create shifts in depth perception and give focus to patterns found both in nature and in consumer culture, that coalesce the two series.

Patty Carroll, Pink Parrots, 2017,
 from the series Flora and Fauna
 digital print, 23 x 23 inches
 art and photo © and courtesy of the artist and Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri

Exhibition Preview

Still / Life

Patty Carroll, (American, born 1946), Out of the Woods, 2004,
 from the series Anonymous Women: Draped
 digital print on paper, 38 x 35 inches
 Collection of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri
 Gift of the artist, 2018.05.01
 art and photo © and courtesy of the artist and Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri