“Dr. King’s policy was that nonviolence would achieve the gains for black people in the United States. His major assumption was that if you are nonviolent, if you suffer, your opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to change his heart. That’s very good. He only made one fallacious assumption: In order for […]

Ryan Wilks’s new exhibition, “Heaven,” at the Smalter Gallery, is awash in flesh. One part indictment of organized religion and another part an exploration of the mythology of the afterlife, “Heaven” is a brooding meditation on Christianity’s obsession with the human body and a lamentation of institutionalized religion’s frequent marginalization of the LGBTQ community, a […]

I’m not real, I’m just like you. You don’t exist in this society. If you did your people wouldn’t be seeking equal rights. You’re not real, if you were you’d have some status among the nations of the world. So we are both myths.” —Sun Ra While Sun-Ra claimed to be from Saturn and passed […]

When I hear the word crochet, I envision the vintage cloths known as antimacassars that used to reside on the backs of chairs to protect their fabric from being stained by men’s hair oil. Thankfully, Gerry Trilling has provided us all with a new visual repertoire to replace those outdated images in “Memory Ponds,” her […]

According to the late Ruth Bader Ginsberg, “women belong in all places where decisions are being made. It shouldn’t be that women are the exception.” In a project of timely and provocative clarity, Danish artist Christine Buchholtz has created an alternate universe of global power that channels the Supreme Court Justice’s sentiment. Transforming the Todd […]

In the last few years in museums and galleries across the nation, figurative portraiture by Black American artists has been enjoying a renaissance and long overdue attention from curators, academicians, and collectors. Kansas City is not absent in this renaissance, and one of the artists we can thank for that is gifted painter Kwanza Humphrey.