Michael Krueger’s “the distance of time (draws, and is charmed from moving)” can be seen on the Project Wall at the Kansas City Art Institute’s H&R Block Artspace through July 31, 2025. (H&R Block Artspace)
Visual Art Exhibition Highlights: Kansas City Metro
Low and Slow: The History of Lowriders & the Artistic Process, Kansas City Kansas Community College Gallery, June 17 – Sept. 19, www.masakc.art
Curators Erek Erazo and Shai Perry-McCallister examine the deep historical impact of the lowrider car on artmaking processes. The exhibition features large, colorful ceramics from Tommy Lomeli, vivid photography by Christopher Erazo and seven custom bikes by students from the Olathe Public School District. “Low and Slow” will culminate with a closing reception and celebration of Hispanic Heritage from 6 to 9 p.m. Sept. 13. —Emily Spradling
Project Wall: Michael Krueger, H&R Block Artspace at the Kansas City Art Institute, Aug. 2, 2024 – July 31, 2025, kcai.edu/hr-block-artspace/
A show of internationally exhibited Lawrence-based Michael Krueger’s magical color pencil and acrylic drawings sold out before it opened at Haw Contemporary in fall 2023. Now, anyone driving down Main Street can enjoy one, which has been mounted on the Project Wall at the Kansas City Art Institute’s H&R Block Artspace through July 2025. Titled “the distance of time (draws, and is charmed from moving),” The Project Wall piece is a 2024 addition to Krueger’s landscape-based series inspired by William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”; in this case, the moment “Prospero gives up his magic, his need for revenge, and bows out on a note of forgiveness, the tone that finally rules the play along with an affirmation of the essential goodness of humanity,” Krueger said in a statement.
The work’s focal point is a meteor entering the earth’s atmosphere — for Krueger, a metaphor for forgiveness. “From space time, geological time, inconceivable time to the instantaneous moment the meteor plunges into the ocean, here is a metaphor for the sometimes long and arduous process of forgiveness; on arrival everything changes, a transformation occurs,” he said. —Alice Thorson
Actions for the Earth: Art, Care & Ecology, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Aug. 9 – Dec. 8, www.nermanmuseum.org
This travelling exhibition curated by Sharmilla Wood, an independent curator based in Australia, features artists who reimagine the relationships between humans and their environments. The artists in the show, according to Wood, use approaches that “combine ideas around traditional knowledge systems and ancient beliefs with modern ecology in science.” At the emotional — and perhaps also practical — core of the exhibition is the idea of “care,” the unifying term between art and ecology. If the 20th century witnessed the collapse of the distinction between art and life, the 21st century seems to be urging on the hope that art, science and Indigenous practice can come together as a means of sustaining life, or at least as a means of speculating on how to do so. —Brandan Griffin
Gabriel Mills: Aunechei, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Aug. 9 – Dec. 8, www.nermanmuseum.org
Gabriel Mills, who earned an MFA in painting and printmaking from the Yale School of Art, New Haven, Connecticut, and a BFA in illustration and art history from the University of Hartford, Hartford, Connecticut, will bring the rich and vibrant offerings of his imagination to the Nerman this fall. Their colorful and densely textured abstract oil paintings are designed with a nod toward the metacognitive processes their viewers may experience in thinking about their internal responses to the work. According to JoAnne Northrup, the executive director and chief curator of the Nerman Museum, Mills “is onto something new, with a formal shift that gives their work an exciting, palpable energy.” —Matt Thompson
Emilio Villalba: Everything is Something, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Aug. 9 – Dec. 8, www.nermanmuseum.org
Emilio Villalba’s work addresses the challenge of finding meaning in that which we see every day. The museum’s executive director and curator JoAnne Northrup remarked, “I had this sense of discovery when I looked closely … and I wanted to share the work with the Kansas City arts community.” The paintings on view will showcase disorderly gatherings of mundane objects, leaving visitors to scrutinize and process the material at whatever pace and context they deem appropriate. The artist holds an MFA in painting from the Academy of Art University, San Francisco, and a BFA in animation from the Art Institute of California, Santa Ana. —Matt Thompson
Still Performing: Costume, Gesture, and Expression in 19th-Century European Photography, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Aug. 24, 2024 – Jan. 12, 2025, www.nelson-atkins.org
The exhibit’s press release promises a theatrical viewing adventure “starring a motley cast of pastoral peasants, pickpocketing street urchins, and classical characters” in a selection of 65 photographs (31 of which have never been seen at the Nelson-Atkins), by 36 photographers, including Julia Margaret Cameron, Charles Nègre, Roger Fenton, Lady Clementina Hawarden, Nadar and Oscar Rejlander.
European photographers of the period sought to “legitimize photography by aligning it with other fine arts,” drawing inspiration from the theater, opera, tableau vivant, and biblical, mythological and historical themes found in painting, drawing and sculpture. The images offer glimpses into the photographer’s studio, in which “props, backdrops, costumes, curtains, and controlled lighting converted otherwise ordinary portrait sessions into staged productions where photographers and their subjects created fanciful scenes for the camera.”
The exhibition is accompanied by a selection of works by contemporary photographers in gallery L11, including Wendy Red Star, Gregory Crewdson, Deana Lawson, William Wegman, Sandy Skoglund and Patrick Nagatani. —Heather Lustfeldt
Infinite Regress: Mystical Abstraction from the Permanent Collection and Beyond, Sept. 20, 2024 – Feb. 23, 2025, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, www.kemperart.org
Curated by Kevin Moore and organized by Kemper Museum,“ ‘Infinite Regress’ ” brings the past into dialogue with the present through selections from the permanent collection paired with works by contemporary artists exhibiting at the museum for the first time on the occasion of its 30th anniversary,” according to the museum website.
Centered on the philosophical notion of infinite regress — “an endless sequence of reasoning in which each new idea depends on the one that came before” — the show brings together a plethora of work created over the past century by artists variously engaging mystical abstraction in conceptual explorations addressing “modern humankind’s search for balance within nature and technology.”
With more than 40 artists featured, the incredible range of works “offers an intergenerational dialogue about art as a spiritual home in a beautiful and troubled world.” Artists in the permanent collection, including Georgia O’Keeffe, Julie Mehretu, Joseph Stella, Keith Sonnier and Romare Bearden, are joined by Eamon Ore-Giron, Chelsea Culprit, Shannon Boole and Isaac Julien. —Heather Lustfeldt
Atrium Project: Lucía Vidales Hambre, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Sept. 20, 2024 – July 13, 2025, www.kemperart.org
Kemper Museum’s ninth annual Atrium Project features Mexico City’s Lucía Vidales. “Hambre,” or Hunger, is a commentary on the social structures around meals, including depictions of Jesus’ last supper and Latin American mealtime scenes, from meal preparation through lingering after-dinner activities. Stretching 22 x 25 feet, “Hambre” also pays homage to the chefs, prep cooks and servers who make dinner gatherings possible. Notably, this year the Atrium Project will extend into the entire central core of the museum for the first time, featuring large-scale paintings and drawings from Vidales that bring historical imagery to the contemporary context. —Emily Spradling
Hokusai: Waves of Inspiration from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Sept. 21, 2024 – Jan. 5, 2025, www.nelson-atkins.org
While The Great Wave’s wild popularity and commercial exposure have made Hokusai if not a household name, then world-renowned, the image is just one in his poetic woodblock print series “Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji.” In this instance Mount Fuji — the tiny knuckle in this print’s lower center — is overshadowed by punchy graphic waves. The exhibition will include more than 100 works by Hokusai, showcasing his wide range of ukiyo-e subjects and demonstrating that the artist’s oeuvre deserves a deeper respect and understanding. Two hundred works by additional artists illustrate Hokusai’s ongoing influence radiating across time, countries and media. A LEGO recreation of The Great Wave promises to be an audience pleaser. —Dana Self
Allegories of Inertia, Charlotte Street, Sept. 27 – Nov. 9, charlottestreet.org
Sports and art sometimes intersect in Kansas City, but more often than not they seem to exist in parallel universes — though the recent debate over a certain proposed stadium in the Crossroads threatened to put them on a collision course. The title of this upcoming Charlotte Street exhibition, “Allegories of Inertia,” “is meant to be an allegorical reference to the 1996 Summer Olympics breaking infrastructural time in Atlanta, Georgia, as a way (of) foreshadowing the hyper development that will come to KC post FIFA,” according to curator Yashi Davalos, who is entering her second and final year as the Charlotte Street curatorial fellow. How exactly this exhibition will weave art, sports and the ever-present issue of development — along with “personal simulation and performativity” — should be of almost visceral interest. I expect this to be an intriguing, forward-thinking show. —Brandan Griffin
Charlotte Street Visual Artist Award Fellows · 2024, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Nov. 9, 2024 – Aug. 10, 2025, www.nelson-atkins.org
Charlotte Street partners with The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art to present the 2024 Charlotte Street Visual Artist Award Fellows: Kevin Demery (interdisciplinary), Juan Diego Gaucin (visual), and Aleah Washington (textiles). Each Fellow grapples with the haunting specter of their lived experiences — Demery’s interrogation of Black historical narratives, Gaucin’s figurative oil paintings of the migrant experience, and Washington’s quilted compositions resembling redlining maps of Kansas City. This showcase features artists at different career points, offering a powerful glimpse into established voices and the promise of emerging talent.
—Alej Martinez
La Onda: Sana, Sana, Charlotte Street, Dec. 13, 2024 – Jan. 25, 2025, charlottestreet.org
La Onda, a group of up-and-coming Latinx artists in Kansas City who frequently exhibit together, migrates to the Charlotte Street gallery, showcasing contradictory experiences of Latinx identity. Artist Cesar Lopez shares the curatorial responsibilities with Silvia Fernandez and Silvia Abisaab, continuing the tradition of creating space for emerging artists. The exhibit at Charlotte Street will feature Isaac Tapia, Tommy Lomeli, Chantel Guzmán-Cupil, Jasmine Rodriguez, Angela Rangel, Dani Coronado, Paulina Otero, Victor Antillanca, Cesar Velez, Andrew Mcilvaine, Christopher Erazo and Valentina Trinadade. —Alej Martinez
Visual Arts Exhibition Highlights: Around the Region
Consume and Naturally, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Sedalia, June 27 – Dec. 17, www.daummuseum.org
The exhibits “Consume” and “Naturally” both display works from the museum’s permanent collection to explore their stated themes. Images of food and the idea of sustenance drive the selections in “Consume,” which “showcase the process of bringing food to tables, the people who make meals, and the places and objects we utilize to consume them,” according to the museum’s website. Through works in ceramic, fiber, landscape painting and abstraction, “Naturally” offers the Daum’s take on our relationship to the natural world, a theme undergoing broad re-examination at museums and galleries across the country. —Alice Thorson
Printing Beyond Borders: Contemporary Indian Prints at Kansas State University, Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, Kansas State University, Manhattan, Aug. 13, 2024 – May 31, 2025, beach.k-state.edu
Charles Stroh, the longtime former head of KSU’s art department, passed away in 2022, leaving a rich legacy as an artist and educator. Stroh was a seasoned printmaker who taught and exhibited works in intaglio, woodblock and lithography, as well as painting and drawing. In the 1980s Stroh was a visiting lecturer at some of India’s top art schools, where he interviewed and acquired the work of contemporary Indian printmakers. The Beach Museum’s latest exhibition celebrates this international artistic exchange with contemporary works collected by Stroh. —Brian Hearn
Dream Machine: Fantasy, Surreality, and Play, Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University, Aug. 26 – Dec. 7, ulrich.wichita.edu
Chalk it up to the strange days we’re living in, but surrealism is having a moment across the art world. Look no further than Wichita’s Ulrich Museum of Art, celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. Its “Dream Machine” exhibition is a deep dive into the human subconscious as the source of artistic ideation. Drawing from the museum’s permanent collection with key loans from around the U.S., the interactive exhibition connects the dots from the historical art movement to contemporary explorations of our collective dreams and nightmares, illusions and absurdities. —Brian Hearn
Native Fashion, Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Sept. 1, 2024 – Jan. 5, 2025, www.spencerart.ku.edu
Centered around themes of resilience, representation, resistance and relations, “Native Fashion” updates the fascinating lifeways of Indigenous wearable art to the 21st century. The exhibition includes contemporary garments — streetwear to couture, handmade jewelry, accessories — as well as prints, and photography from Native contemporary artists and designers alongside historical garments and tribal regalia from the Spencer Museum’s collection. The exhibition marks an important shift in how museums are foregrounding Indigenous voices and makers in the present moment. Wouldn’t you rather see a runway show of new Native fashion than a feathered headdress suspended in a display case? —Brian Hearn
photo credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY. gift of Lannan Foundation. 199)
Scott Burton: Shape Shift, The Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, Sept. 6, 2024 – Feb. 2, 2025, https://pulitzerarts.org/
Scott Burton was an American sculptor, performance artist and art critic who is best known for sculptures of chairs that challenge the boundaries between minimalism, utilitarianism, conceptualism, everyday life, high art and public space. Forty of Burton’s furniture pieces, alongside other documentation and archival pieces from his career, have been assembled for this upcoming retrospective at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation — the most comprehensive in the U.S. since Burton’s death from AIDS-related illness in 1989. Burton advocated throughout his career for the ability of minimalist and performance art to speak to emotions and lived experience, including the artist’s own queer identity; he wrote, “Art has been veritably invaded by life, if life means flux, change, chance, time, unpredictability.” Viewers will have the chance to enact this invasion again as they explore this multifaceted career in its full physicality. —Brandan Griffin
Brendan Fernandes: In Two, The Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, Sept. 6, 2024 – Feb. 2, 2025, pulitzerarts.org
If you can time your trip to the Scott Burton retrospective at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation right, you can also view choreographer Brendan Fernandes’ response to the show. Fernandes is an artist working at the intersection of dance and visual art — often through site-specific interventions — to interrogate themes such as transnational identity and queer subjectivity. Fernandes will respond to Burton’s furniture sculptures as well as Burton’s performance piece “Individual Behavior Tableau” (1980), in which an unclothed performer enacts a series of highly abstracted, socially coded gestures at a great distance from the audience. Fernandes’ pieces will engage with gay cruising culture and include other curtains and props to be installed in the gallery. —Brandan Griffin
Shinichi Sawada: Agents of Clay, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Sept. 6, 2024 – Feb. 9, 2025, camstl.org
The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina, have joined forces to present 18 works by the Japanese ceramicist, Shinichi Sawada, in his first American solo museum exhibition. Sawada began working at a social welfare facility for artists with disabilities; his creations are often figurative but may include various parts of animals, insects or birds along with surfaces that have been manipulated with patterns, lines or other inventive additions. “Agents of Clay” also addresses aspects of traditional pottery-making in the mountainous area of Japan where he works. —Nan Chisholm
Design Agendas: Modern Architecture in St. Louis, 1930s–1970s, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, Sept. 13, 2024 – Jan. 6, 2025, www.kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu
Modernism’s dominance of the 20th century left behind some bitter fruit that deserves forensic hindsight. A penetrating exhibition at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis digs into the design agendas behind now infamous modernist architecture like the Pruitt-Igoe public housing project that displaced thousands of African American residents of St. Louis in the 1950s. Through the lenses of architecture and urban planning we can understand how systemic racial segregation extended into the modern built environment while failing its utopian social ideals. —Brian Hearn
Knowing the West: Visual Legacies of the American West, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, Sept. 14, 2024 – Jan. 27, 2025, crystalbridges.org
The American West might call to mind national parks or Hollywood stereotypes, while the historic, devastating legacies of European settlement and 19th-century Westward Expansion go forgotten or unchallenged. “Knowing the West: Visual Legacies of the American West” claims to be the first major traveling exhibition to examine how diverse groups of people saw and experienced the West. Through the overlooked art of Native Americans, women and immigrants, emerges a more inclusive picture of people, place and past. —Brian Hearn
Ann Resnick: Something to Divine, Salina Art Center, Sept. 25 – Dec. 29, www.salinaartcenter.org
Inspired by Rodney King’s poignant question, “Can’t we all just get along?” the artist Ann Resnick has utilized previously created hand-drawn stencils as the basis for large, spray-painted images to challenge individuals’ perceptions and analyses. While her abstractions will encourage varying interpretations, the artist is hopeful that “Tell Me What You Think of Me Part One: Something to Divine” will stimulate a conversation about how we might actually perceive things in a similar fashion. Data will be collected for a future expanded exhibition slated for 2026. —Nan Chisholm
Draw Closer: Ruthie Ingram, Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art, St. Joseph, Sept. 21 – Nov. 3, albrecht-kemper.org
Kansas City-based Ruthie Ingram presents an exhibition of works created exclusively for her artistic journey outside her professional career as an illustrator. Ingram’s realistic depictions in charcoal, pastel, graphite and paint delve into themes of culture, ethnicity, time and place. The realism within each piece is punctuated by emotional layers that bring each moment to life. —Emily Spradling
Steve Snell, Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art, St. Joseph, Sept. 21 – Nov. 3, albrecht-kemper.org
Artist Steve Snell spent nearly three months canoeing down the Missouri River from its headwaters in Three Forks, Montana, to its confluence with the Mississippi River in St. Louis, Missouri. In “From the Canoe,” Snell will anchor the exhibition with a two-hour, larger than life-size video projection of his journey, including sounds of wind, waves and his paddle slicing through water. Snell created numerous plein-air riverscapes on his journey, many of which will be on display. —Emily Spradling
Robert Peterson: Somewhere In America, Wichita Art Museum, Sept. 28, 2024 – Jan. 5, 2025, wichitaartmuseum.org
The Lawton, Oklahoma-based artist Robert Peterson will have his first major museum show at the Wichita Art Museum this fall. Peterson is known for beautifully rendered portraits of celebrities such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, James Brown and Mohammed Ali, but his perceptive likenesses of family and friends are equally magnetic. The exhibition, titled “Somewhere in America,” will showcase 30 recent works along with canvases from the past. —Nan Chisholm
Soo Shin, An Anthology of the Ocean, The Luminary, St. Louis, Oct. 11 – Dec. 14, theluminaryarts.com
The Luminary, a contemporary art venue in St. Louis that serves the community as “an expansive platform for art, thought, and action,” presents “Soo Shin: An Anthology of the Ocean,” the Chicago artist’s first major solo exhibition. Look for a new presentation of minimalist sculpture, ceramics and printmaking “in what (Shin) describes as an ‘anthology’ — mapping traces of a prolific and poetic body of work born over the last ten years.”
Poetic narratives imbue the work, as described in The Luminary’s press release: “Shin’s minimalist approach to sculpture is deeply sensitive to materials and the ways in which they share in the burden of making meaning. Her work maps the traces of the body, the ghostly threads of connections no longer tangible but felt, and the memories that leave lasting impressions across oceans and tides.” —Heather Lustfeldt
Narrative Wisdom and African Arts, Saint Louis Art Museum, Oct. 19, 2024 – Feb. 16, 2025, www.slam.org/
Considering the conversations of the present day, “Narrative Wisdom and African Arts,” an exploration of historical and contemporary African arts and the oral traditions they capture, may just be the ticket for this fall. Drawn from public and private collections in North America, Europe and the United Kingdom, the exhibit of sculpture, textiles, works on paper, photography, painting and time-based works from the 13th to 20th centuries provide a reflectively refreshing portal into the common humanity and narratives that we share, even in difficult times. —Harold Smith
Renoir: A Luminous Evolution, Museum of Art + Light, Manhattan, Kansas, Nov. 11, 2024 – Aug. 1, 2025, www.artlightmuseum.org
Manhattan, Kansas, unveils its innovative new digital art venue this fall with an inaugural immersive digital art production based on work from the museum’s collection. “Renoir: A Luminous Evolution” uses the latest projection-mapping technology and digital multimedia to evoke the artistic world of the French Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Presented as moving projections onto floors, walls and multiple large screens, the experience of physical artwork is supplanted by a rich visual array of paintings, paint surfaces and historic archival material such as photographs, films and letters from Renoir’s life. —Brian Hearn
Best in Show: Pets in Contemporary Photography, The Momentary, Bentonville, Arkansas, Nov. 23, 2024 – April 13, 2025, themomentary.org
“Best in Show: Pets in Contemporary Photography,” originally organized by the Fotografiska Museum in New York and on its way to Crystal Bridges Museum, deals with the irresistible subject matter of dogs, cats and birds as seen through the lenses of 25 internationally known global artists. William Wegman’s famous Weimaraners will be there, along with a bevy of cats as seen by Walter Chandoha, a former WWII battle photographer who fell in love with a homeless kitten in 1949 and then proceeded to take hundreds of feline photos during his lifetime. Animal activist Sophie Gamand’s celebrated pictures of wet dogs will also be present, promising not only a surfeit of visual joy but a lot to chew on as well. —Elisabeth Kirsch
