Hangama Amiri @ Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City - "A Homage to Home" Exhibition

Hangama Amiri: A Homage to Home

Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City

January 25 – August 11, 2024

Hangama Amiri (Afghan-Canadian, born 1989) 

Departure, 2022 

Muslin, cotton, polyester, clear vinyl, iridescent paper, 

faux leather, chiffon, and found fabric, 68 ½ x 85 inches. 

Courtesy of the artist and T293, Rome. 

© Hangama Amiri. Photo: Jason Mandella.

Afghan Canadian artist Hangama Amiri combines painting and printmaking techniques with textiles, weaving together stories based on memories of her homeland and diasporic experience. Hangama Amiri fled Kabul with her family in 1996 when she was seven years old. Moving through numerous countries over several years, they immigrated to Canada in 2005 when Hangama Amiri was a teenager. Large-scaled with frayed edges, Hangama Amiri’s textile works are made from layering fabrics, piecing and sewing them together, so the fragments collectively characterize her home from a distance. Hangama Amiri’s work is centered on the lives of women. She often builds interiors that capture her protagonists within domestic and entrepreneurial spaces and amplify a collective struggle for women’s rights in Afghanistan and around the world. 

Hangama Amiri: A Homage to Home is organized by Amy Smith-Stewart, chief curator, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, where it debuted in February 2023.

KEMPER MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART

4420 Warwick Boulevard, Kansas City, MO 64111

www.kemperart.org

Julie Blackmon @ Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City - "A Life in Frame" Exhibition

Julie Blackmon: A Life in Frame

Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City

September 14, 2023 - January 7, 2024

Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art presents “Julie Blackmon: A Life in Frame,” an exhibition that focuses on the last decade of the artist’s photography. Julie Blackmon’s subject is the conflation of art and life—particularly everyday life in Springfield, Missouri. The works on view show scenes depicting family, community, and landscape deeply rooted in her Midwestern heritage.  

Julie Blackmon uses her surroundings to engage broader ideas of social and political issues, gender issues and family dynamics, and art historical references. While Julie Blackmon’s work celebrates the visual vernacular of an area of the country that many dismiss as culturally unremarkable, she positions it in conversation with a wide range of artistic references–including 17th century Dutch painters, 19th century Missouri-based artist George Caleb Bingham, and contemporary photographers like Diane Arbus. She applies these genres’ techniques to create uniquely playful and critical examinations of the modern family, feminism, and other social and political issues.

The 20 works on view demonstrate these conceptual and aesthetic themes that the artist has engaged over the past decade, as well as the deep collecting history of Julie Blackmon’s work in the Midwest. While her work is known and collected nationally – two of her works were recently acquired by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. – many of the works on view come from local collections, emphasizing the close relationship with Julie Blackmon and her work in the region. Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art was the first museum to collect Julie Blackmon’s work when it acquired four of the artist’s photographs in 2008. 

"The day my Chicago gallery called me to announce that Kemper Museum had acquired my work was an important moment early on, when I was first getting serious in my photography career,” said Julie Blackmon. “It felt like validation. But even better have been the years that followed. Many people have told me about encountering my work there, what it meant to them, and how they connected with it. It was the first time I got that kind of feedback.  It was just really motivating to get that kind of feedback."

JULIE BLACKMON (American, born 1966) is a contemporary photographer who has centered her life and career in Springfield, Missouri, and uses her surroundings to engage global ideas. Her photographs are inspired by being a part of a large family in what she calls “a generic town in the middle of the U.S.” While her scenes feature the artist’s family and are inspired by the realities of everyday life, her works are conceptual, fictitious, and highly directed, to commenting on broader themes in contemporary life. Julie Blackmon’s photographs are in many institutional collections, including The National Gallery of Art, Washington, Art Gallery, Seattle, WA; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO; Microsoft Art Collection, Redmond, WA; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH; Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC; The West Collection, Oaks, PA; and Walt Disney Corporation. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Fotografiska Museum in New York, NY; Chautauqua Institution, Chautauqua, NY; Houston Center of Photography, Houston, TX; the Hood Museum of Art in Dartmouth, N.H., and many other institutions.

The exhibition is organized by Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.

KEMPER MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART

4420 Warwick Boulevard, Kansas City, MO 64111

www.kemperart.org

Virginia Jaramillo Retrospective Exhibition @ Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City - Virginia Jaramillo: Principle of Equivalence

Virginia Jaramillo: Principle of Equivalence

Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City

June 2 – August 27, 2023

Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art presents Virginia Jaramillo: Principle of Equivalence, the first retrospective exhibition by New York-based artist Virginia Jaramillo (Mexican American, born 1939). 

Virginia Jaramillo has been at the heart of influential movements in American post-war abstraction for decades. She was born in El Paso, TX, raised in Los Angeles, CA, and moved to New York City in 1966 after a year in Paris. When she settled in Soho at 109 Spring Street in the late-1960s, Virginia Jaramillo’s neighbors were artists Frederick James Brown, Mark di Suvero, Donald Judd, and Joan Semmel, alongside other influential New York artists, musicians, and writers. Throughout the 1970s and 80s, she participated in artist organizations and groups including the New York Feminist Art Institute and the 120 Wooster Street Collective. During this period, her work was included in group exhibitions at institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Mexican Museum in San Francisco, CA; and the California Museum of African American Art in Los Angeles, CA, among others. Notable examples include The De Luxe Show in 1971 in Houston, TX (considered the first racially integrated exhibition in the U.S. to gain national attention) and Women Artists of the 80’s, in 1984 at A.I.R. Gallery, New York, NY.

The significance of Virginia Jaramillo’s work has been affirmed in recent groundbreaking group exhibitions including Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980 (Hammer Museum, 2011); We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 (Brooklyn Museum, 2017); and Women in Abstraction (Centre Pompidou, 2021); yet there has not been a comprehensive presentation of the 84-year-old artist’s practice and impact before Principle of Equivalence.

Throughout her career, Virginia Jaramillo has explored earthly and metaphysical realms through abstract paintings and handmade paper works with such diverse interests as physics, the cosmos, mythology, ancient cultures, and modernist design philosophies. This exhibition presents more than 70 exceptional paintings and handmade paper works, including her breakthrough Curvilinear series and large-scale linen fiber work, Anonymous Site #1-603 (1990) from Kemper Museum’s Permanent Collection.

“This exhibition is a milestone in the artist’s career and serves as a reminder to look with intention toward those who have made important—if historically excluded—contributions to the history of American abstraction,” said Erin Dziedzic, director of curatorial affairs for Kemper Museum. “Tracing the impact of Jaramillo’s practice, the exhibition will feature early examples that pushed the depth of the painted surface to its very limits, innovations in the centuries-old practice of handmade papermaking, and recent large-scale paintings in which Jaramillo abstracts the architectural ruins of spiritual sites.”

Virginia Jaramillo: Principle of Equivalence is organized by Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri and curated by Erin Dziedzic, director of curatorial affairs. 

A full-color catalogue in conjunction with this exhibition is distributed by Yale University Press.

KEMPER MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART

4420 Warwick Boulevard, Kansas City, MO 64111

www.kemperart.org

Belkis Ayón @ Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City - Nkame: A Retrospective of Cuban Printmaker Belkis Ayón (1967–1999)

Nkame: A Retrospective of Cuban Printmaker Belkis Ayón (1967–1999) 

Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City 

January 25 - April 29, 2018 

Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art presents Nkame: A Retrospective of Cuban Printmaker Belkis Ayón (1967–1999). This landmark retrospective is the first in the United States dedicated to the work of Belkis Ayón—the late Cuban visual artist who mined the founding myth of the Afro-Cuban fraternal society, Abakuá, to create an independent and powerful visual iconography.

From the Curator’s Statement:

“Cuban artist Belkis Ayón (1967–1999) died at age thirty-two, leaving behind a body of work of considerable importance for the history of contemporary printmaking. Her death remains a painful mystery for the national and international art community that had witnessed with admiration her successful rise to the most demanding artistic circles of the 1990s. Sixteen years after her death, the artist’s estate presents art lovers and researchers the first retrospective exhibition of the artist in the United States—Nkame—which gathers a wide selection of her graphic production from 1986 to 1999.”

Belkis Ayón, who was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1967, became interested in the Abakuá and their mysterious traditions in 1985, while pursuing art in high school. She was primarily drawn to the figure of Sikán, who according to legend, originally discovered the magic of Abakuá by accidentally trapping a fish who subsequently spoke to her, sharing a secret knowledge – but since women were banned from knowing the organization’s deepest secrets, Sikán was sworn to secrecy. The princess, however, gave in to temptation and divulged this forbidden knowledge to her fiancée; as a result, her life was sacrificed. In Ayón’s works, Sikán is brought back to life, and the myth and mystery surrounding this figure is brought to light, transformed through Ayon’s exceptional collographic prints.

A distinguishing feature of Belkis Ayón’s artwork is her signature use of collography, a difficult and labor-intensive printmaking process whereby materials in a variety of textures and absorbencies are collaged onto a cardboard matrix, applied to a plate that is inked, and then run through a printing press.

“Belkis Ayon’s large-scale prints are captivating in story and technique. We have an opportunity, through her vision, to create a dialogue with mythology, history, culture, and geography while appreciating her printmaking virtuosity,” says Erin Dziedzic, director of curatorial affairs at Kemper Museum.

 Curator: Cristina Vives

Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art 

4420 Warwick Boulevard, Kansas City, MO 64111

www.kemperart.org

Greg Rose: Paradise Redux, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City

Greg Rose: Paradise Redux 

Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City 

July 11 – October 5, 2003 

GREG ROSE 

Paradise, 2003 

Oil and alkyd paints on canvas on wood panel, 60 x 96 inches 

Courtesy of the artist and Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco, CA 

Photo: Gene Ogami

The exhibition Greg Rose: Paradise Redux brings together five large-scale paintings in which Rose finds a balance between contemporary art and traditional Asian aesthetics. The resulting paintings are both soothing and unnerving. The exhibition Greg Rose: Paradise Redux is on view at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art where Greg Rose is an artist in residence. 

 

Los Angeles-based artist Greg Rose makes landscape paintings that combine the flat, psychedelic-colored style of southern California painting with traditional Asian landscape painting. In Greg Rose’s works, viewers will see elements of ikebana, Japanese flower arranging, as well as mysterious Chinese landscape elements. His intensified phosphorescent hues and disquieting color combinations complicate any easy reading of his images. Rose’s paintings are places of reinvention, cultural blending, and promise.

Greg Rose: Paradise Redux is the artist’s first museum exhibition. It features five monumental paintings and a Chinese Ming Dynasty bench.

KEMPER MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART

4420 Warwick Boulevard, Kansas City, MO 64111

www.kemperart.org

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Wayne Thiebaud: Fifty Years of Painting, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City

Wayne Thiebaud: Fifty Years of Painting 

Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City 

June 6 – August 31, 2003 

For more than fifty years, California artist Wayne Thiebaud has enjoyed a prodigious career. Highlighting the work of this profoundly influential and inventive painter of landscapes, cityscapes, still lifes, and portraits, the exhibition Wayne Thiebaud: Fifty Years of Painting presents more than forty works from the past five decades. It also demonstrates Wayne Thiebaud’s contributions to American popular culture and art history

The exhibition has been drawn mainly from Thiebaud’s family collection along with works from Midwestern public and private collections. “This exhibition gives rare insight into what an artist decides to keep in his collection,” said exhibition curator Dana Self, curator of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibition’s forty canvases include Thiebaud’s signature still lifes, portraits, cityscapes, and landscapes from the early 1950s to today. 

Wayne Thiebaud has painted bountiful arrangements since the 1960s. Renowned for his images of cakes, pies, gumballs, and other confections, Wayne Thiebaud also explores color, lighting, and arrangement of mass-produced, commercial objects, including shoes, toys, flowers, and cosmetics. His still-life paintings celebrate the shapes and colors of what most of us perceive as ordinary, like the playful stack of bow ties in "Bow Tie Tree" (1969) or the culinary delights in "Cakes & Pies" (1994–95). Wayne Thiebaud experiments with his arrangements. Sometimes he makes one object monumental, and at other times, he places dozens of items in orderly rows.

Since the early 1970s, the rolling streets of San Francisco and its surrounding communities have captured Wayne Thiebaud’s attention. He has translated them into dynamic cityscapes, including "Intersection" (1973), one of his first cityscapes, and his recent "Valley Streets" (2003). Wayne Thiebaud exaggerates the steep hills and skyscrapers by featuring extreme perspectives of the city. This same exaggerated view is reiterated in Wayne Thiebaud’s fertile California landscapes. Visitors may study the plunging cliffs and sweeping landscapes of northern California in works such as "Heart Ridge" (1969) and "Green River Lands" (1998). 

Wayne Thiebaud also works with portraits like his contemporaries Alex Katz and Philip Pearlstein. He paints monumental portraits of family members and friends in settings where there no backgrounds and other forms of context. While the portraits are seemingly spare, viewers still find his dynamic palette of blues, yellows, reds, and pinks.

Wayne Thiebaud first began his career as a cartoonist and layout designer for Rexall Drug Company in the late 1940s. He began teaching in 1951 at Sacramento Junior College (now Sacramento City College). For nearly three decades, Thiebaud taught at the University of California, Davis, along with well-known California artists William Wiley, Manuel Neri, and Robert Arneson. Like his students, Wayne Thiebaud experiments. As a teacher and artist, Wayne Thiebaud draws influence from art history, including Dutch painter Jan Vermeer, French painters Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin and Edgar Degas, and American painter Edward Hopper. With more than fifty years of creativity, Thiebaud inspires future generations of artists. 

A catalogue for the exhibition Wayne Thiebaud: Fifty Years of Painting features color plates of works in the exhibition as well as an interview with Wayne Thiebaud. 

KEMPER MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART

4420 Warwick Boulevard, Kansas City, MO 64111

www.kemperart.org

Russell Crotty: Globe Drawings, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City

Russell Crotty: Globe Drawings

Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City

April 11 – July 6, 2003

California-based artist Russell Crotty combines his passion for astronomy with his art. The results are intricately drawn images of the nighttime sky, including star clusters, constellations, and planets, which he mounts on spheres. The exhibition Russell Crotty: Globe Drawings features several new works. Russell Crotty is an artist in residence at the Kemper Museum. 

Russell Crotty lives on 130 acres in the Santa Monica Mountains, where he built the Solstice Peak Observatory. From there, he studies nocturnal skies with a ten-inch f/8 Newtonian reflector telescope, taking extensive notes on his observations of different celestial bodies. From these studies, Russell Crotty makes his final drawings in his studio. He then transfers the drawings onto globes that he suspends from the ceiling. 

Unlike scientific satellite photographs, Russel Crotty’s images of planets and constellations are impressions of what he see through his telesclope. Since it takes thousands of years for light to travel to Earth from distant stars, what we see is in many ways a memory. He says, “On that ladder alone up there I actually feel creeped out. I feel like I’m looking at something I shouldn’t be looking at. That light, there’s something sacred about it. It’s traveled so far. It’s amazing, like eavesdropping.” (Artforum, September 2001) 

KEMPER MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART

4420 Warwick Boulevard, Kansas City, MO 64111

www.kemperart.org