Category: Articles
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“Faces of Change”: From Despair to Hope
A photography exhibit, titled “Faces of Change,” is coming this fall to the Kemper Museum. The images are by Nick Vedros, a KC-based photographer with a glittering list of corporate clients, including Apple, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, DuPont and Sony. The faces belong to Kansas prison inmates.
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Collectors Corner: Roberta and Elton Gumbel, Jr.
When Dr. Elton Gumbel died in 2006, he left behind hundreds of paintings and drawings. Many people knew Gumbel as an optometrist. He was the first black optometrist in Kansas City and the first licensed black optometrist in the state of Missouri. But he was also a prolific self-taught artist, who never had an exhibit or any other public exposure of his work.
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Honors: Carlos Perez
Transgenderism is more mainstream than ever in 2015, if only because of unprecedented media coverage surrounding the transition of Bruce Jenner to Caitlyn Jenner. Local writer Carlos Perez stands to benefit from the trend with his new transgender stage drama, In Hyding, although he wasn’t influenced by the former Olympic champion and reality TV star coming out as female.
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Sharing the Wealth: American Jazz Museum Exhibits Hale Woodruff Family Collection
Hale Woodruff (1900-1980) is “one of the most important figures in 20th-century African-American art,” according to the authoritative reference work, African Americans in the Visual Arts, and this fall, Kansas City-area art lovers will have two opportunities to experience his accomplishments.
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Eastward Ho for “Missouri’s Artist”
Next to Thomas Hart Benton, George Caleb Bingham is probably the best-known artist of Missouri and the first major American painter to be based west of the Mississippi. He was born in 1811 in Virginia and moved to Boon’s Lick, Mo., as a young boy. Even as a child, Bingham was fascinated by rivers and all the activity on them.
