Amy Kligman: The Salon for Possible Futures installation view, March 28 – December 21, 2025, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, Kansas. Photo: EG Schempf
Nestled atop the second floor of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Amy Kligman’s “The Salon for Possible Futures” is both a sanctum and a remarkably executed interactive experience.
In an apparent homage to the social gatherings hosted by affluent, intellectually curious residents of Italy and France beginning in the 17th century, Kligman’s modern salon incorporates the virtues and warmth of its historical antecedents. Just like its European counterparts, this realm is conceived in a way to facilitate Socratic discussion, debate, daydreaming and a candid exchange of ideas.
The salon’s gallery space is relatively small, but the enclosed nature of the single room enhances the feeling of transporting to a special, protected domain where one’s imagination can flourish, unencumbered by the mundane burdens of existence. Walls adorned with stylized paper or painted a rich green complete the embrace, and visitors are welcome to make themselves at home upon vintage chairs and sofas. An array of cabinets, chests, and shelves flanks the main conversational arena, and within these repositories are a cornucopia of creative abundance.
In collaboration with dozens of individual artists, Kligman has stocked the salon’s furnishing with trinkets, books, art supplies, game pieces, small artifacts, zines and seed packets. And the final ingredient, inquisitive human beings, is what brings the salon to life. Visitors are explicitly encouraged to interact with the exhibition and make use of its treasure, taking and leaving relics of the time they spend there. The kinesthetic elements of this project delight children and those who may be unaccustomed to touching things in an art museum, as well as adding dynamic layers to the space as people leave their marks.
In a larger, societal context, “Salon” may remind visitors of the importance of the fabled “third places” whose gradual disappearance historians and sociologists have lamented. As humanity’s full-throated embrace of digital living continues unabated, time spent experiencing life with other people in a physical setting that is not home, school or work has tremendous social and spiritual value.
But arguably the most apt metaphor for “Salon,” given the times in which we live, lies with the Soviet-era apartments that proliferated during the 1950s and 60s. Hoping to improve the quality of life for millions of citizens who had shared overcrowded and substandard communal housing under Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev embarked on an ambitious campaign to enlarge and modernize Soviet dwellings. The resulting structures, known as khrushchevkas, were spartan by western standards of the time. But they marked a dramatic improvement in Soviet living conditions, as working-class families could now occupy their own individual apartment units, complete with a private kitchen and bathroom.
An unintended consequence of these new spaces, however, were the unprecedented opportunities they allowed for dissent and transgressive communication. While Khrushchev’s regime was relatively liberal compared to the brutality of his predecessor, Soviet citizens remained under the watchful eye of the authorities, and most forms of media were strictly censored. Yet within the newfound privacy of their kitchens, people felt more at ease to discuss forbidden topics with their close friends and neighbors. The conversations were raw, intimate and authentic in a way that social media feeds and text messages simply cannot replicate.
The Soviets even had their own version of the zines and homemade publications that fill Kligman’s bookcases — samizdat, which were underground pamphlets or copies of banned books that individual readers would pass along to each other, poring over them together in the sanctity of their new apartments.
Kligman’s vision in “Salon” is an optimistic portrayal of the importance of such spaces as venues for activism and discourse, as well as a reminder of our responsibility to vigorously use and protect them.
The future depends on it.
“The Salon for Possible Futures” continues at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, 12345 College Blvd., Overland Park, through Dec. 21, 2025. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday, Friday and Saturday; 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday; noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. For more information, 913-469-3000 or nermanmuseum.org.
