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
Featuring Artists: Nicole Awai, Elizabeth Huey, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Susanne Kühn, Robyn O’Neil, Lisa Sanditz
This exhibition brings together works from the Kemper Museum’s Permanent Collection that represent dream-like worlds cloaked in mystery. The artists make the familiar seem unfamiliar by distorting space and suffusing their fantastical scenes with characters seemingly caught between this world and another.
The inspiration for patterns is all around us—from concentric circles rippling from a stone thrown into the water to camouflaged bodies of plants, insects, and animals. Patterns provide elements of texture, elegance, drama, and style that illuminate an artist’s concept. The expressions of everyday life and vibrantly abstracted forms presented in Pattern Scheme evoke qualities of time, balance, repetition, focus, and design that emerge from the unique styles, subjects, and stories of each artist, connected through their varying use of pattern.
José Lerma, Spanish-born, Chicago-based artist, presents a commissioned site-responsive project for a prominent location in the Kemper Museum Atrium. Upon visiting the Kemper Museum and Kansas City, the artist found inspiration within the art upon the walls of the Museum and the architecture within the surrounding community.
Deconstructing Robert Mangold brings together an extraordinary range of conceptual, formal, and social connections between American Minimalist Robert Mangold (1937–) and other artists from the Kemper Museum’s Permanent Collection. Seven of Mangold’s original woodcuts, Untitled A through G (2000) and Curved Plane Figure III (1995), are presented in dialogue with works by his contemporaries: Immovable Iconography (1990) by Nancy Graves (1939–1995) and Roses and Roofs (1987) by Janet Fish (1938–).
Hail We Now Sing Joy features a new body of work by Chicago-born, New York-based artist Rashid Johnson, a chapter following his acclaimed exhibition Fly Away at Hauser & Wirth Gallery, New York. This exhibition includes Johnson’s Anxious Audience, large-scale panels of white ceramic tile covered with dozens of agitated faces scrawled in black soap and wax.
This exhibition focuses on a selection of works by identifiable figures of American Pop art, widely known for their signature styles that elevate the meanings of everyday symbols, signs, and subjects.
Past Exhibitions
2016
2015
2014
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2012
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