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.

“Paper Routes – Women to Watch 2020,” Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art

What the artist describes as “a community of naked, plush creatures called fumblys” populate Fuko Ito’s pastel-colored, psychedelic work, and I, for one, would like to go on record as saying I’m up for this adventure anytime. Ito’s two monumental watercolor and colored pencil on paper drawings illustrate her community of what appear to be […]

August 14, 2019
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Arts News: Longtime KC Artist Anne Austin Pearce Takes New Post in California

The prolific, down-to-earth and exceptional Anne Austin Pearce, a Kansas City artist for as long as I can remember, has departed for Aliso Viego, California, to teach at Soka University, a four-year liberal arts college. Our loss is Soka’s great gain. She’s leaving behind a narrative of artistic excellence, warmth, collegiality and a 20-year teaching […]

July 11, 2019
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When Women Ruled the World: An Interview with Egyptologist Kara Cooney

Egyptologist Kara Cooney’s March 19 talk at the Kauffman Center, “When Women Ruled the World,” begs today’s burning question: When WILL women rule the world? What do Egyptian queens have to do with women today, and how do we consider their rule in historical and contemporary context? If 2018 was the year of the woman, […]

March 12, 2019
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“Polly Apfelbaum: Waiting for the UFOS (a space between landscape and a bunch of flowers),” Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art

Polly Apfelbaum is an iconoclast, refreshingly devoid of bullshit, and known for her wildly exuberant installations in which the floor is as important, or more, than the walls. Her installation-based work always feels honest rather than coolly distant yet is layered with process and content. Las Vegas showgirls, the cartoon Powerpuff Girls, music, literature, film, […]

March 4, 2019
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Arts News: Nelson-Atkins Acquires Guerilla Girls Portfolio

The Guerrilla Girls are rock stars. I once saw them at a NYC College Arts Association conference riding the hotel escalator wearing their trademark gorilla masks and black clothing. I was hoping they’d do something radical, but maybe they were just on their way to a panel, or maybe they were buying art books. Or maybe I had missed an excellent protest. At any rate, they were cool.

November 2, 2018
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“Michael Rees: Pneumatopia,” Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art

Michael Rees is a modern romantic, his art lives in the spaces between science, philosophy, a kind of spatial mythology, visual and emotional pleasure (and sometimes frustration), and transitional relationships. In this sculptural, installation-based exhibition, we stand on a threshold, several in fact, of narratives and anti-narratives where time and space tend to open and close […]

August 27, 2018
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