Past Exhibitions

Please note that Kemper East is currently closed to the public due to COVID-19.

All first-year medical students from Kansas City University participate in the Art, Observation, and Medicine (AOM) course at Kemper Museum. Guided by volunteer docents, students analyze select works of art using the Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) method. VTS uses research-based methodology prompting viewers to work together to solve complicated visual puzzles, beginning with the question, “What is going on in this work of art?” 

Abstract Expressionism is a form of abstract art developed by American painters in the 1940s and 1950s with several different subcategories, including Action painting and what would later be called Color Field painting. Pop art was an American movement that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, drawing inspiration from sources in commercial and popular culture. Dan Budnik (American, 1933–2020) photographed Abstract Expressionists and Pop artists in their studios during the height of these artistic movements.

This exhibition of the work of Chicago-based photographer and educator Dawoud Bey (American, born 1953) features selections from his recent black-and-white photographic series Night Coming Tenderly, Black. These images reimagine sites along the last stops of the Underground Railroad from Cleveland and Hudson, Ohio, to Canada, a free country for self-liberated African people. Bey finds inspiration for this series in the soft tones and significant subjects—African Americans and New York City jazz musicians among them—depicted by photographer Roy DeCarava (1919–2009).