Past Exhibitions
Artists exhibited include Polly Apfelbaum, Ken Aptekar, Christian Boltanski, Petah Coyne, Russell Crotty, Naomi Fisher, Till Freiwald, Jim Hodges, Alex Katz, Nikki S. Lee, Marco Maggi, Fairfield Porter, Lezley Saar, Shahzia Sikander, Do-Ho Suh, Robert Therrien, Wayne Thiebaud, Phoebe Washburn, Bruce Yonemoto, and many others.
Last 6 Months
This exhibition of works from the Permanent Collection of Kemper Museum is inspired by the poem “Water Music” by American poet and feminist literary critic Sandra M. Gilbert.
The poem describes qualities of water—clear, shapeless, changing—and its connection to our bodies. Just as the words of Gilbert’s poem elicit water’s connection to people, the paintings on view expand on water’s presence in the landscape.
For its participation in Open Spaces: A Kansas City Arts Experience, Kemper Museum presents a combination of new and older works by New York-based artist Kathy Butterly. Since the early 1990s, Butterly (b. 1963) has created distinctly evocative sculptures that contribute to and expand upon the tradition of studio ceramics. Through her practice, Butterly engages with concepts ranging from scale, materiality, and line to the history of the handmade vessel.
Worlds Otherwise Hidden features the work of three international artists who interpret the complexities—both beautiful and challenging—of cultures shaped by migration, immigration, displacement, and exile. Nevin Aladağ (b. 1972), Kimsooja (b. 1957), and Nari Ward (b. 1963) combine and transmute specific objects, designs, and symbols from divergent cultural contexts in their video and sculptural installations. They explore issues of fractured geography, creating new space for dialogue and revealing worlds otherwise hidden.
The BioNexus KC exhibition is Kansas City’s fifth annual Science to Art presentation of intrinsic images found in science. These works are often selected for display on the cover of medical research journals. The purpose of Science to Art is to provide a platform for regional scientists to display and describe their research through the visual arts. Each of these remarkable images tells a personal research story and poetically captures the fieldwork performed by the scientists and their teams.
Garry Winogrand (1928–1984), with his 35mm Leica camera, took to the streets of New York. Through his lens he captured the spirit of life, fashion, and energy of the city in the 1960s and 70s in thousands of black and white photographic images. Winogrand’s work has had an impact on the way street photography is perceived today and stylistic aspects of his viewpoint have had a lasting influence on the genre as well as others such as modern fashion photography.
Louise Nevelson (1899–1988) described her work as existing in “the in-between place”—somewhere between painting and sculpture, demonstrating stylistic influences from both Cubism (structure, form, and monochromatic palette) and Abstract Expressionism (movement, presence, and large-scale compositions). Using an array of found wood materials, arranged and painted in monochrome, Nevelson’s work appears to transform shadow into solid shape.
Kemper Museum debuts the second in a series of commissioned atrium projects: a solo site-responsive installation by Firelei Báez (b. 1981, Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic; lives and works in New York). To See Beyond Its Walls (and access the places that lie beyond) combines a large-scale painting of a female figure with a reimagined interior of Sans-Souci Palace (1813) in northern Haiti, tracing conflicted histories and current political contexts of Hispaniola (the shared island of the Dominican Republic and Haiti) and America.
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.
Past Exhibitions
2017
2016
2015
2014
2013
2012
2011
2010
2009
2008
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2005
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