Visionary: The Work of Michael Brantley installation view, Dec. 13, 2025 – May 3, 2026, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, Kansas. Photo: EG Schempf (“Seat at the Table” [center] collection of John and Sharon Hoffman, all other works courtesy of the artist)
“Visionary: The Work of Michael Brantley” at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art is the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition, and the biggest little show this critic has seen in some time. Assembling a perfect handful of dynamite paintings is hard enough; painting itself is already hard work.
The success of this exhibition owes as much to curator Harold Smith’s adept understanding of Brantley’s oeuvre as it does to the artist’s virtuosity as a painter and historian. (Be sure to seek out Smith’s excellent accompanying essay https://blogs.jccc.edu/nermanmuseum/visionary-the-work-of-michael-brantley/.)
With only six medium-scale oil paintings on canvas (two are tondos mounted on wood), Brantley mostly focuses on significant Black musical figures alongside other elegant portraits. The technique and presentation are stuttering, varying between dry and wet applications, refined and blunt renderings, and even varied formats: tondos, squares and rectangles.
Perhaps the most anomalous work in the show is “The First Lady of Song” (2012), the earliest of the artist’s paintings on view and the first you encounter. Depicting the indelible Ella Fitzgerald in a photorealistic style, it veers somewhat dramatically from the neighboring works. Beads of sweat double as tears, streaming down the face of the beautiful chanteuse, her left hand pressed to her ear as if the tune is too sweet for the teeth. She yearns in the same labored way she is painted. Though the execution is competent, the image may be too familiar to linger long in the memory.
“Yard Bird” (2025) presents Charlie Parker in a fitting black tondo, smiling with his Buddha-like countenance and lidded eyes which lands somewhere between the Man in the Moon and a child forced to cheese for a yearbook photo. The expression is weirdly vacant, saccharine, almost wooden. There is a rumor, apocryphal and possibly perfect if true, that Parker died laughing while watching a juggler on TV, and it is hard not to read the painting as an illustration of that story, his grin being tragically pulled into the abyss. The paint application is dry, a little scumbled, the pose somewhat stiff. Yet Parker appears relaxed, casually holding his “axe,” his figure cut from darkness with shimmering acrylic flakes that read like a star field viewed at an absurd cosmological magnification.
The exhibition’s gravitational center is “A Seat at the Table” (2021), a multi-figure composition featuring four Black women servers with modern hairstyles against a black background, flanking a Black man dressed as a waiter. A sixth figure — a white man — is partially visible, printed on the waiter’s shirt like a watermark. He appears seconds away from presenting the viewer with a cloche of unknown contents. Is it justice served cold?
A shock of red and blue interrupts the otherwise black-and-white palette in the form of an American flag draped over the waiter’s arm. Is America being asked, once again, to clean up the mess it will invariably make? Almost certainly. The figures’ expressions are uniformly blank, creating an atmosphere that feels uncannily cinematic — like something out of a Jordan Peele film — exacerbated by a strange facial adornment on the central figure resembling a Cronenbergian clown muzzle or surgical mask, suggesting containment, performance, silence, or all three.
The final, again divergent, and perhaps most poignant painting of note is “I AM A MAN” (2018). This black-and-white portrait retains the careful rendering of Brantley’s earlier efforts, but here with heightened socio-political urgency. A mandala of tiny protesters holding signs bearing the same mantra radiates around an impressive afro fitted with a black fist pick. The background is painted with a flurry of feathery black brushstrokes. Chained and pleading, the nameless subject’s cartoonishly enlarged hands bear numbered shackles, which seem to signify both nothing and everything. Is it a cryptic offering, a plea for understanding, or dare I suggest, reparations? Who’s to say?
“Visionary: The Work of Michael Brantley” continues at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, 12345 College Blvd., Overland Park, through May 3, 2026. 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.
