Dana Self

Dana Self is an arts writer who was a contemporary art curator for more than 13 years in Kansas, Wisconsin, Missouri, and Tennessee museums, including the Kemper Museum. She has organized about 100 exhibitions of emerging and mid career artists. She is currently marketing director for UMKC’s Conservatory of Music and Dance.

“FACE: Ed Blackburn · Archie Scott Gobber · Elizabeth ‘Grandma’ Layton · Douglas Miles · Carlos Vega,” Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art

We count on artists to interrupt the smooth narratives fed to us by conventional media. The artists in this small exhibition of work from the Nerman collection each face, or confront, a different figure, event, or cultural zeitgeist. Douglas Miles’ “Douglas Miles Jr. at the Fort” (2018) is a black and white photo of the […]

April 4, 2018
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Honors: Angelica Sandoval

Clay’s seductive challenges reward the risk-taker. The walls of a pot or sculpture can be too thin, heavy slip may collapse an object and bad chemical reactions and accidents in the kiln can break your heart. In her porcelain sculptures, Kansas City artist Angelica Sandoval embraces these potential problems and relies on wabi-sabi, the Japanese idea of accepting and embracing imperfection.

January 2, 2018
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“Charlotte Street Foundation Fellows 2017,” Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art

The 21st iteration of the Charlotte Street Foundation Fellows exhibition, which always focuses on Kansas City artists, includes Stephen Proski, Samara Umbral and Karen McCoy. The artists were selected by a national team of arts professionals, including Bruce Hartman, the Nerman Museum’s Executive Director and Chief Curator. Independent Curator Dan Cameron, who is organizing Kansas […]

December 19, 2017
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Honors: Laura Berman

Laura Berman’s monoprints and paintings on paper are luminous explorations of geological strata, topologies, and the atmospheric relationship of the land to the sky, executed with a dazzling yet earthy simplicity. This may sound like a contradiction, and, in many ways, her works fuse paradoxical ideas and imagery, such as depicting solid rocks and landscape as mutable translucencies.

November 3, 2017
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“Ricky Allman: Seven Simultaneous Sunsets,” Studios Inc Exhibition Space

Ricky Allman’s multisensory work evokes apocalyptic narrative and images from popular culture, science-fiction movies and books, and the inevitable cyborg. He writes, “The first 30 years of my life I was anticipating the imminent apocalypse; hoarding food, memorizing scriptures and warning the wicked. After leaving these ideas behind . . . my brain allowed me to […]

October 2, 2017
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Arts News: Outdoor Sculpture Exhibit Features Basque Master

We are stardust, born from the elements of the cosmos, which binds us forever to everything in the universe. Our galactic bodies share chemical elements with steel, which may, in some mystical way, draw us closer to the fundamental nature of Spanish Basque artist Eduardo Chillida’s fire-forged steel sculptures. Through Dec. 3 seven Chillida sculptures are on view in Kansas City, in an outdoor exhibit, “Chillida: Rhythm-Time-Silence.”

July 3, 2017
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