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
Marcus Jansen (American, b. 1968) finds inspiration in the world around him. Regarded as a pioneer of “urban landscape painting,” Jansen uses his upbringing in both the United States and Germany, and places he was stationed during his time in the army, as influence for his paintings. Drawing inspiration from New York Abstract Expressionism as well as graffiti, Pop art, and Surrealism, Jansen employs practices from these art forms to create paintings that make social commentary.
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, in cooperation with the Kansas City chapter of National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA), is proud to host Paper Routes—Women to Watch 2020. This exhibition series features emerging or underrepresented artists from the states and countries in which NMWA has outreach committees.
BioNexus KC’s annual Science to Art exhibition is a presentation of intrinsic images found in science. 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. These images were submitted by scientists from Columbia, Missouri to Manhattan, Kansas.
Lexicon: The Language of Gesture in 25 Years at Kemper Museum celebrates artists who have shaped the exhibiting and collecting history of Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art since its founding in 1994. For twenty-five years, Kemper Museum has presented ambitious exhibitions guided by an artist-centric spirit while fulfilling its mission to enrich lives through the experience of contemporary art.
Child’s Play: An Exploration of Adolescence situates contemporary works of art from Kemper Museum’s Permanent Collection in conversation with concepts brought forth by neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (Austrian, 1856–1939). Freud suggested that humans can trace their compulsions back to their childhood. From this idea, Child’s Play explores artists’ depictions of children, their relationships with those around them, and with the world.
Sweet On is a site-responsive installation by Texas-born, New Jersey-based artist Paul Henry Ramirez. Ramirez drew inspiration for this work from a quotation attributed to R. Crosby Kemper Jr. (1927–2014) in the anniversary publication Marking 20 Years: Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art: “Joy is to be surrounded by beauty.”
Color Application presents select works of art from Kemper Museum’s Permanent Collection in a companion exhibition to Polly Apfelbaum: Waiting for the UFOs (a space set between a landscape and a bunch of flowers), currently on view in the Charlotte Crosby Kemper Gallery. Color Application explores artists’ methods of incorporating color, relating them to Apfelbaum’s succinctly colorful works, and creating a direct conversation between the works in the two exhibitions.
Abstracted Wonders: The Power of Lines presents a selection of abstract works from Kemper Museum’s Permanent Collection. The featured artists employ artistic approaches from kinetic art, geometric abstraction, Color Field, and Op (optical) art. Geometry and patterns in geography like those made by land and water inform horizontal, vertical, and perpendicular lines in these two- and three-dimensional works.
Past Exhibitions
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