The past three decades have seen an unprecedented period of growth in Kansas City’s cultural sector, with the creation of new institutions and organizations and the expansion and professionalization of existing ones in music, theater and the visual arts. In celebration of Women’s History Month, we take a look at the many women arts leaders in Kansas City who have played a key role in that growth, shaping the cultural landscape here for a decade or more and into the present. These women are committed to what ArtsKC leader Dana Knapp describes as “the profound and positive impact creative and artistic expression has on our human condition.” They are visionary, determined, collaborative and, among their signature achievements, they have been a great force in the diversity, equity and inclusion efforts vital to the vibrant cultural life that Kansas Citians enjoy today. — Alice Thorson
MARIA VASQUEZ BOYD
Maria Vasquez Boyd grew up in South Kansas City, one of four children whose grandparents were Hispanic immigrants. She wanted to become an artist, but “That was not a track that seemed open to me,” she said in a recent interview.
In her 20s she built duplexes and rental property with her husband, Steve Boyd. After she turned 30, with the help of scholarships, Boyd went to the Kansas City Art Institute, where she graduated at age 34.
Like many artists, she multitasked. She worked at Hallmark Cards, taught art at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, lectured in design at KCAI, and became a mentor for students of color at the art school, which she continues to do.
While teaching and exhibiting widely — including in Mexico City — Boyd became increasingly involved in the local Hispanic community. She learned about Folklorico, traditional Mexican dances, and enrolled her daughter Whitney in a small Folklorico dance ensemble when she was 5. Boyd made costumes for the group and helped create sets. (Boyd’s 5-year-old granddaughter Luna continues the family tradition and recently performed at the Nelson-Atkins Museum’s Day of the Dead ceremonies).
Having written poetry since childhood, Boyd also founded the Latino Poets Collective in 2006. “I got tired of going to poetry readings, looking at the lectern and never seeing anyone who looked like me,” she said. The group has published award-winning anthologies, and Boyd has published one poetry chapbook and is writing another.
Since 2012 Boyd has worked at the Mattie Rhodes Art Center, which serves the underprivileged and the Hispanic community in Kansas City, as a volunteer on numerous projects, including the Day of the Dead altar for the Nelson-Atkins Museum. When the new Mattie Rhodes Center was built several years ago, after interviewing many in the local community Boyd designed specific papel picados (traditional Mexican paper flags) for the outside of the center. Currently she is working with the group as they collaborate with renowned Mexican sculptor Betsabeé Romero to create a unique sculpture for the upcoming World Cup in Kansas City.
For 13 years, Boyd has been the volunteer producer and host of ArtSpeak every Wednesday on KKFI, Kansas City’s community radio, where she is also one of the hosts for the station’s Friday MidCoast LIVE show. As with most of her projects, Boyd finds artists, writers, poets, musicians and dancers who are too often overlooked in the region and has helped them navigate their careers, vital in a city where there is little arts coverage in the local newspaper.
For years Boyd has worked helping the children of immigrant farmworkers, and in 2025-26, she worked with Miguel Morales, who received a Rocket Grant to work with children to help them create their own personal chapbooks.
Recently she started serving on the National Museum of Toys and Miniatures’ Learning and Engagement Committee. She also exhibited her extraordinary collection of Mexican folk-art dolls at that museum. She is currently doing research for a book on these unique and overlooked objects. At 68, Boyd is more of a whirlwind of arts activism in Kansas City than ever, while also planning five exhibits of her art in 2026. — Elisabeth Kirsch
NATASHA RIA EL-SCARI
“I’ve always been comfortable in my skin. I didn’t know that was a gift until people started pointing it out,” says Natasha Ria El-Scari, poet/author/educator/gallerist and director of the Women’s Center at UMKC, whose activities have enriched the community for a quarter century. “My theory is that every single Black woman is a feminist. Because I don’t know how you survive in this country without it.”
El-Scari is always quotable. Her “feistiness” started early, she says. “I was always around readers and writers, but I never fit completely into the nerd group. I never fit completely into the fast girls group. Or the mothers’ groups. It was like all these different groups I didn’t fit in. And that’s actually my superpower.”
After earning a degree in English and education at Jackson State University, El-Scari spent a semester in Wisconsin, then returned to Kansas City with a new baby. At UMKC, she completed a master’s degree in liberal studies and ran the university’s Upward Bound program from 2000 to 2012, helping prepare low-income high school students for college success.
But academia wasn’t the only outlet she found for flexing her way with words. Poetry, both written and spoken, soon thrust her into the spotlight. Poems like “100 Girls, “Fear” and “Ode to My Body” popped off the page, but landed even harder when delivered in her strong, melodic voice.
“When we get an audience, that is a gift,” she says. “We should be grateful that someone is before us and they’re listening. So we should leave them with something that is thoughtful and artistic and insightful. And sometimes hits them over the head.”
To date she’s published five books (there’s another one on the way), plus a CD with her husband, musician Kevin Church Johnson. In 2017 El-Scari chose to point her entrepreneurial skills in a bold new direction. Distressed by how few places existed for people of color to exhibit and sell artworks, she created Black Space Black Art. The grassroots initiative put paintings and sculptures by local artists into barbershops, beauty parlors, restaurants and retail stores that catered to a Black clientele.
A year later, she pivoted again, cofounding the El-Scari Harvey Art Gallery with artist Warren “Stylez” Harvey on 39th Street inside the Center for Spiritual Living. Its first show included paintings by her grandmother, whose largely unshown work had inspired El-Scari for decades. In 2020 the gallery became a solo venture with a new name, Natasha Ria Art Gallery.
In a way, she says, the gallery, which she closed in fall 2024 to focus on her full-time position as director of the UMKC Women’s Center, served as “a healing place” for artists and their families, one where group shows, in particular, helped build community. “People became friends,” she points out. “They started sharing ideas, creating things together.”
El-Scari has taught about the African American experience at the Kansas City Art Institute and led an “Art Works” class at the InterUrban ArtHouse in Overland Park. “I have the type of life where I feel like I’m able to do things that I deeply love, to be around the people I deeply love, and still help people. I believe that makes you rich too.” — Randy Mason
SIDONIE GARRETT
Sidonie Garrett, artistic director for the annual Heart of America Shakespeare Festival (HASF), founded
by Marilyn Strauss, has been part of the singular annual event since 1995.
In the third season Garrett, who had already established herself as a talented freelance director in Kansas City, was hired to assist guest director Melia Bensussen in a memorable production of “The Taming of the Shrew.”
“So that’s 31 years ago, which I can hardly believe,” Garrett said.
Early in her career, Garrett showed an affinity for dark, often violent material. Her shows had a way of seizing the viewer’s imagination by showing audiences images of cruelty they weren’t accustomed to seeing in local playhouses. One example: Ron Simonian’s “Thanatos,” a dark comedy set in motel room full of guns and bizarre characters, most of whom are dead by the final curtain. Originally staged at the Unicorn, the show went on to an off-off-Broadway production in New York.
So Garrett, who became HASF’s executive artistic director in 2002, was right at home with William Shakespeare’s tragedies and history plays, and applied her formidable talents with equal assurance to comedies and romances. During her tenure, the festival offered two plays in rotation for several seasons and staged its one and only play not written by the Bard — a stage version of the film “Shakespeare in Love.”
During Garrett’s time with the HASF, the main stage was repositioned, the electrical power grid was upgraded to accommodate more lighting equipment and individual body mics for most of the actors, costumes became more resplendent, sets became more visually detailed, and drains were installed to handle the run-off during rain storms.
Garrett said all of that was possible thanks to a skilled production team.
Attendance has ranged from 24,000 to almost 30,000 each summer. The best attended production during her tenure was the 2020 production of “Hamlet,” starring Nathan Darrow in the title role.
Garrett said she longs to bring back two-show seasons, but raising enough money is the perpetual challenge for nonprofit theater companies. The festival’s annual budget is $1.1 million.
“Costs continue to go up that do not match income,” she said.
The festival has wisely restricted the Bard’s titles to crowd-pleasing comedies, rousing histories and dark tragedies, many of them familiar to people who didn’t sleep through their high school English classes.
And what about Garrett? How long will she lead the festival? Is she retirement age?
“Let’s just say I’m older than 31,” she said. “I usually tell people I started with the festival when I was 12.
I think I’ll know when it’s time, when I’m not up for the work. But I’m very much up for this work. I do outdoor theater, and outdoor theater is not for the faint of heart.”
Translation: Garrett does not plan to retire in the foreseeable future.
“I have no desire to leave it at this time,” she said. “I’m passionate about our mission and I believe in the quality of the work we create. Is it a necessity? Yeah. It is to me. But to have something that is free, where you can walk through the gate with nothing and sit right on the grass and watch a professional production of a Shakespeare play is an amazing thing to have in your community.” — Robert Trussell
SARALYN REECE HARDY
For the love of Kansas, Saralyn Reece Hardy continues to leave her mark as the Marilyn Stokstad Director of the Spencer Museum of Art on the campus of the University of Kansas. It is little wonder, after earning two degrees at KU and beginning her arts career at the Spencer Museum, that she would return as its director in 2005. In between that time, Hardy earned access to the big picture as director of museums and visual arts for the National Endowment for the Arts, followed by a return to Kansas as director of the Salina Art Center, where she wore all the hats.
Under her leadership, the Spencer has undergone extensive capital upgrades to the exhibition spaces, added new educational spaces, refreshed hangings of the permanent collection and unveiled new acquisitions. Hardy also turned her talented curators loose, often with student assistance, to organize impressive special exhibitions that have been both relevant and challenging in a blue/red = purple (?) political pocket.
In these times of heightened emotion and political sensitivity in our public discourse, Hardy has proven to be a skillful leader, accustomed to navigating an art institution within larger university and state institutions, i.e., dealing with many bosses. With extra attention focused on the campus of the state’s flagship public research university, Hardy has weathered censorship battles and public art vandalism with aplomb, steering controversy into judo moves of open dialogue, critical thinking and authentic art education.
Another distinguishing aspect of her tenure has been her advocacy for interdisciplinary research scholarship through programming exhibitions and symposia but also supporting the work at an institutional level. She dedicated a curatorial position to it, and created the Arts Research Integration endowment, a forward-looking collaborative initiative bridging arts, sciences and communities into shared knowledge spaces. Recognizing the 21st-century turn to the emerging field of relational art, Hardy also established the Spencer’s first curator of public practice in 2022, signaling yet another new approach to shifting currents of art production and its public reception in art museums. — Brian Hearn
PAT JORDAN
Pat Jordan has dedicated herself to community development and strengthening the arts. “I’m in love with the arts, and I’m deeply committed to community development, particularly in distressed and underserved areas of our community,” said Jordan, who discovered this calling in her youth.
In college, Jordan experienced her first Black-centric play. “Until then I had no idea African Americans were playwrights, actors and producers. My experiences at Spelman College provided me with the cultural experiences I desperately needed and helped to fuel my ambition to support those efforts in Kansas City,” said Jordan.
As an arts leader, Jordan served on the boards of directors of the Kansas City Friends of Alvin Ailey, Theater League and Folly Theater. Driving past the once-rundown Gem Theater bothered her. Talk of demolishing the historic theater “appalled” and then spurred her to develop it into a community theater over an eight-year period.
“The African American community needed a place where productions and events could be staged easily and with affordability to everyone,” said Jordan, who led the theater’s redesign. “Not many people know that we didn’t renovate it. We knocked down all but the architecturally significant Art Deco-like facade and built everything behind it anew.”
As Gem Cultural and Educational Center president, Jordan connected The Black Repertory Theatre of Kansas City founder Damron Armstrong with the developers of the Boone Theater, where the theater company is now based.
Her Community Cares KC initiative seeks to launch a Small Scale Developers Fund for revitalization of city neighborhoods east of Troost. “My new vision is to utilize the arts, media technology, and real estate development as catalysts for crossing boundaries: racial, economic and geographic, and to encourage more collaboration. We need these things to happen now more than ever before,” said Jordan.
Jordan has also created opportunities for artists across disciplines. “I work in areas where there is a vacuum. I’ve operated four different galleries over the years. I noticed there were no African American art galleries, and majority-run galleries weren’t featuring Black artists at the time,” said Jordan.
She co-owned Producers Studio Four, established to produce commercials and training films. She also produced the one-woman show “Follow Your Dreams” about the first African American female airplane pilot Bessie Coleman. Jordan negotiated a lease/purchase agreement to buy the Old Fire Station No.11 where she operates Vine Street Studio and continues to exhibit African American artists. Her most recent venture is iSTEAMKC, a program at Vine Street Studio offering digital media & audio/video production workshops for late high school and college students to help set them on the path to creative technology careers. — Pete Dulin
DEBORAH SANDLER KEMPER
Deborah Sandler Kemper arrived in Kansas City in 2012. She is the first woman to serve as general director and CEO of the Lyric Opera of Kansas City, founded in 1958, and the third general director in the company’s history.
Prior to coming to Kansas City, Sandler Kemper served as general manager of the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, general director of Opera Theatre of New Jersey, general director of Kentucky Opera, and director of development and external affairs at the Kentucky School of Art at Spaulding University. She is originally from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and studied math and music at Temple University, with a master’s degree in musicology from New York University.
She was the founding chair of the Opera America’s Women’s Opera Network, which began in 2015, and, in 2022, Sandler Kemper was named one of the top 30 musical professionals by Musical America.
Under her leadership, the Lyric Opera has widely expanded its offerings. The company has presented groundbreaking work like “Dead Man Walking,” “Silent Night” and “Cruzar la Cara de la Luna,” and co-commissioned new productions such as Gioachino Rossini’s “Cinderella” and Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro.” The Lyric Opera has also brought to Kansas City important works by American composers, like the Gershwins’ “Porgy and Bess,” Laura Kaminsky’s “As One,” and Mason Bates’ “The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs.” The Lyric Opera production of “The Shining,” by composer Paul Moravec, was recorded by Pentatone and nominated for a Grammy Award, with Sandler Kemper serving as executive producer. With that nod, Sandler Kemper was invited to join the Recording Academy in 2025.
In the past 14 years, the Lyric Opera has created a variety of new programming, hosting intimate performances in their headquarters at the Richard J. Stern Opera Center and encouraging new, diverse work.
The company, under Sandler Kemper’s guidance, weathered the COVID-19 pandemic with an array of performances, including outdoor concerts in the Opera Center parking lot and video performances. They’ve also addressed issues of inequality with programs like “…When there are nine,” honoring the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment.
Committed to the education of artists and audience, Sandler Kemper and the Lyric Opera also began a Resident Artists program in 2016, supporting up-and-coming opera talent, who in turn perform widely in the community. These artists perform in mainstage productions, as well as at community events, and in family productions, such as “Amahl and the Night Visitors,” which was performed with puppeteers, “High Fidelity Opera,” emulating radio operas and radio sound effects, and “The Haberdasher Prince,” one of the new operas created by the Lyric Opera for all-ages audiences in touring productions to local schools and libraries.
Sandler Kemper is an inspiring and creative arts administrator, always in pursuit of artistic excellence and connecting that excellence with the community. — Libby Hanssen
AMY KLIGMAN
Amy Kligman served initially as the Charlotte Street’s artistic director and within five months led the nonprofit as executive director from 2015 to 2024, one-third of the arts organization’s nearly 30-year existence. Throughout her span, she guided the foundation through a significant period of growth and met the challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic. Most visibly, Kligman conceptualized and led the development of Charlotte Street’s permanent home. Supported by a successful $10 million capital campaign, CS moved into a new 24,000-square-foot arts campus in Roanoke Park in 2021.
“I like to be part of building things and manifesting something. At Charlotte Street, I had the opportunity to build on something that other people had done a lot of work to create, and I had the opportunity to keep it going,” Kligman said in an interview with Mid-America Arts Alliance (M-AAA), reflecting on her decision to step down from her leadership role with Charlotte Street.
Kligman’s 20-plus year career as an arts administrator, independent curator and organizer for artist-run projects reflects her longstanding involvement in the arts. In 2011 Kligman was one of a team of five artist-curators who established Plug Projects, an artist-run project space. Currently, Kligman and her husband Misha Kligman operate Special Effects Gallery in the East Crossroads. She is also a lecturer at the Kansas City Art Institute.
Her nonprofit leadership extends to service as a board member of the Latino Arts Foundation and Nonprofit Connect. Before pivoting to the nonprofit sector, Kligman worked at Hallmark as a creative leader on two of the greeting card industry’s most influential brands over 15 years.
Kligman’s art career includes solo exhibitions, public art projects and group exhibitions in Kansas City, Omaha, Sarasota, Detroit, Cleveland and other cities throughout the nation. Notable honors include receiving an ArtsKC Inspiration Grant and Charlotte Street Visual Artist Award. Kligman’s work has been acquired by the collections of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Hallmark Corporate Art Collection and numerous personal collections throughout the United States.
Looking ahead, Kligman told M-AAA, “I’ve only ever stepped away closer in the direction of my heart. That feels like something an artist does.” — Pete Dulin
DANA KNAPP
Dana Knapp joined ArtsKC as president and CEO in 2017. “Stepping into the leadership role at ArtsKC allowed me to focus my professional knowledge, my dedication to the Kansas City community, and the belief that creative and artistic expression is at the core of realizing a humane and resilient society,” said Knapp.
Knapp led ArtsKC through a pandemic, federal government funding cuts, and, more positively, nearly a decade of growth in regional arts and culture engagement. ArtsKC programs directly benefit more than 437,000 people and indirectly benefit more than 1.8 million people through ArtsKC-supported organizations. Knapp acknowledged the power of arts and culture to transform lives and connect communities in the face of collective “health, societal, and political challenges.”
ArtsKC remains focused on its mission, “Advancing Lives Through The Arts.” “We are all at risk of feeling like the pressures influencing our world are too complex and beyond our control, so it is important at ArtsKC to remain focused on our mission. We work hard every day to prioritize our service — first to the individuals and organizations that comprise the arts and culture ecosystem and then support our collective commitment to the quality of life of every individual in our community.”
Previously, Knapp’s 20-year career at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art “offered a comprehensive understanding of the role and influence of the national and international art and museum industries, as well as how these premier institutions best connect with and serve their local communities.”
As project director, Knapp led the design and construction of the Bloch Building. “There were so many complexities and challenges in a project of this magnitude, but it was proven time and again that a project team, funders, museum staff and community members dedicated to a shared vision could realize a project that seemed insurmountable many times over,” said Knapp.
Next, Knapp joined Mid-America Arts Alliance as a program director, where she “gained an understanding of the valuable role arts and humanities programming plays in connecting smaller and rural communities.” She emphasized the importance of funding from federal, state and public sources to support underserved communities.
“Throughout the duration of my nearly 40 years in service to the arts and culture ecosystem, I remain inspired by the profound and positive impact creative and artistic expression has on our human condition,” reflected Knapp.
As her commitment continues, Knapp is focused on “growing and more deeply integrating the arts and artists across sectors: healthcare, economic development, education and the built environment, to name a few.” — Pete Dulin
STEPHANIE FOX KNAPPE
Stephanie Fox Knappe joined the American Art department at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in 2008 after a curatorial stint at the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, where she earned her PhD in art history and was a classroom lecturer. Her doctoral studies in American and Western Art included a resident fellowship at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming.
Fox Knappe’s exhibitions have shown an appreciation for American art and visual culture on paper, regularly including the multiple glories of printmaking. Witness the important recent acquisition of the Lawrence Lithography Workshop Archive, donated in part by Dick and Evelyn Belger.
In addition, she has been a seasoned venue curator for major traveling exhibitions of American art visiting the Nelson-Atkins, and a versatile interpreter across centuries of production, from Native North American art to the unusual stripes of American modernism, to jurying the latest contemporary art award, show or residency.
While still assistant curator of American Art, Fox Knappe’s curatorial work expanded southward with “Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Masterpieces of Modern Mexico from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection,” which brought this work to the region for the first time in 2013. Meanwhile, the art world consolidated around the blazing cult of contemporary art throughout the 2010s. When the tumultuous 2020s arrived, museums across the board faced calls for responsiveness, renewal and reform from evolving audiences. Fox Knappe and company built on work with Kansas City-based community advisory groups who informed exhibitions like the “30 Americans” exhibit of the nation’s leading African American artists and logically leveraged the interest with local triumphs, “Testimony: African American Artists Collective” and “A Layered Presence / Una presencia estratificada,” part of the “KC Art Now” initiative.
As evidence of globalizing art currents and expanding responsibilities, in 2023, Fox Knappe was named the Sanders Sosland Senior Curator, Global Modern and Contemporary Art and Head, American Art, as well as curator of the Donald J. Hall Sculpture Park. That sounds like a mighty full plate, but Fox Knappe is well positioned to guide the Nelson-Atkins curatorial vision toward mid-century while cultivating meaningful connections to the Kansas City community. — Brian Hearn
ELIZABETH SUH LANE
When the Bach Aria Soloists released their first album in 2023, Audiophile Audition reviewer Fritz Balwit wrote that violinist Elizabeth Suh Lane, “should have any number of parks and streets named after her in this first-rate musical city.”
While she hasn’t quite reached Mary Lou Williams status (the only woman musician to have a Kansas City street named for her), Suh Lane’s Bach Aria Soloists has established itself as a mainstay of the Kansas City classical music scene, having passed the quarter-century mark and going strong.
Suh Lane grew up in Kansas City, starting violin when she was 4 years old, and studied at UMKC Conservatory, Yale and Tanglewood. As a young professional, she spent two years with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe before joining the London Symphony Orchestra.
But with a young family, the appeal of home brought her back to Kansas City. She started her chamber ensemble dedicated to the music and influence of Johann Sebastian Bach, performing “Hauskonzerts” in private homes.
As the ensemble’s reputation and fan base grew, BAS performed in larger and larger venues, including the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts. They’ve performed around the world, too, with concerts in Thailand and the Cayman Islands.
“We just started expanding and featuring how versatile all the musicians were in the ensemble,” Suh Lane told KC Studio in 2020. “And I love collaborations, and that’s how we started evolving to be where we are now, where we do have the focus on Bach still at the heart of everything, but then we play the composers he inspired, which is pretty much everybody.”
From this Bach foundation, BAS performs music from many genres, including opera, jazz and tango, and has collaborated with international stars, like saxophonist Bobby Watson, pianist Helen Sung, and bandoneonist Héctor Del Curto. Bringing in a diverse range of performers is another hallmark. The group frequently performs with actors and musicologists; it has also featured music by women composers throughout the centuries and commissioned new work. They are also recording artists, with “Hausmusik” (2012) and “La Dolce Sirene (2023).
BAS has changed throughout the years but currently includes keyboardist Elisa Williams Bickers and vocalist Sarah Tannehill Anderson, who will make her final appearance with the group in April. Each concert showcases their individual and ensemble strengths, offering highly varied, exceptional programs, as they dig deep into Bach’s expansive catalog and his influence around the globe.
The intimate Hauskonzerts are still a staple of BAS’ season, and BAS is a staple of Kansas City’s classical music scene, all due to the enduring musicality and vision of Elizabeth Suh Lane. — Libby Hanssen
SHERRY LEEDY
Sherry Leedy has been a gallery dealer for more than 40 years — long before the word “gallerist” became fashionable. From 1985 to 1999 she was the director of the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center, which she founded with her husband Jim Leedy, an artist and professor at the Kansas City Art Institute. Together they helped develop what became known as the Crossroads Arts District in downtown Kansas City, a now historic presence in the larger art world.
After her divorce in 1999, Leedy opened her own two-story gallery, Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art. Greenlee Schmidt Architects designed its cutting-edge interiors, which allow for multiple exhibitions to be installed simultaneously. Leedy’s installations, with the help of Melissa Koch, are always notable. Frequently the disparate shows relate thematically, and the viewer ends up feeling immersed in a set of interlocking narratives.
Few small businesses are successful for 40 years, and art galleries have the highest failure rate of all. Leedy is modest about her ongoing presence in Kansas City, but she possesses the intangibles — the North Star — that all great gallery owners follow.
Besides her business acumen, she believes in the quality and value of the work of the artists she represents, many of whom, local and regional, have become personal friends. Judy Onofrio, Barbara Rogers, Jane Booth and Tom Jones have all had notable and continuing exhibits at the gallery over the years. Leedy has always represented ceramic sculptors, starting with Peter Voulkos and Rudy Autio, and that tradition continues with the work of Jun Kaneko, Cary Esser, Chris Gustin and John Balistreri. Leedy has also fashioned exhibitions of internationally known artists such as Hollis Sigler, as well as group shows of top American Indian artists.
Although Leedy shows art from all media, from the beginning she has had a penchant for representing artists who are best known for working in ceramic, glass, photography and textiles, art that suffered a country-cousin reputation as merely “craft” in the stringent hierarchies of the Western artworld. Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art has played a significant role in changing the mindset of the public as to why media does not define excellence.
Leedy’s savvy is no doubt also due to her personal artistic achievements. She graduated from KCAI in 1974 and received her MFA from KU in 1980. She taught classes in drawing at Johnson County Community College, the University of Iowa and KCAI, as well as receiving a National Endowment for the Arts artist grant. Besides running her gallery, Leedy has worked continuously as an artist, specializing in small to large still life drawings that display the reflection of light on glassware.
She is also an artisanal jewelry maker, whose boho-inspired peyote stitch bracelets and necklaces have been in numerous museum shows and art books. Besides these myriad activities, Leedy is also famous for her retinue of fabulous gallery dogs, all of whom have added to the décor of her iconic gallery. — Elisabeth Kirsch
STEPHANIE LEEDY
Whether you know Stephanie Leedy or not, if you live in Kansas City you’ve encountered her handiwork in one form or another. You’ve seen her sculpted neon signs broadcasting the name of the Uptown Theater on Broadway, The Majestic Restaurant downtown, the Gem Theater at 18th and Vine, and other glittering signs on various historic facades throughout the city.
Leedy’s nickname is “Our Mother of the Crossroads” because of her 30-year management of the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center, forerunner of Kansas City’s downtown art establishments, where she manages the 30,000-square-foot, former Folgers Coffee warehouse that presents four to six exhibits at a time. She inherited that monumental task when her father, artist and Kansas City Art Institute professor Jim Leedy, could no longer both teach and deal with the building he bought that provided studio spaces for artists as well as venues for exhibitions.
Stephanie Leedy graduated from KCAI in sculpture and for more than 10 years was a glassblower, then owned and managed a neon shop and worked full-time as a neon artist. Her father is considered the person most responsible for the resurrection of the section of downtown Kansas City now called the Crossroads (some people still call it Leedyville), which has become an internationally known arts district.
Leedy says she “willingly gave up her own business” to take over running the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center. “It’s okay; I was tired of doing what I was doing,” she says.
Her first order of business was to stabilize and rehab the building and the artist studios, and she did much of this backbreaking work herself. Over the years she has had the walls, floors and windows repaired and installed new lighting systems. The center has also become a stalwart brick-and-mortar exhibition space, focusing on shows by regional artists as well as hosting shows by independent curators, and offering space for a variety of local performing arts, theater groups and 501(c)(3) charitable organizations. The Kansas City Ballet, Friends of Alvin Ailey, a variety of musical companies, Fiber Art Now, suicide prevention groups and multiple societies for people with disabilities are just a few of the groups that have used LVAC for their fundraising benefits over the decades. There have been any number of student shows, including the Black Student and Asian Pacific Unions from the Art Institute, as well as juried high school art exhibits.
The center’s community outreach has touched almost every notable organization in the city. “My dad loved First Fridays in the Crossroads even if only one person showed up,” Leedy says. “He wanted to get everyone involved in art.”
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. — Elisabeth Kirsch
JENNY MENDEZ
Jenny Mendez, cultural arts director at the Mattie Rhodes Center, has been serving the community and the center with knowledge and enthusiasm for almost four decades.
“Certain families and certain students that were kids at one point will come back and see me,” she said. “They say ‘I was wanting to sign up for a class at the Nelson. Should I go?’ Or they’re looking for advice on the next steps for their children who’ve been to our camps.”
Mendez often finds herself fielding calls from people looking for muralists, dancers or musicians. “I say I’m not the master of it all. But this is what I think. This is what I can share with you from my experience.”
Mendez grew up on Kansas City’s West Side. As a high school freshman, she helped paint one of the original murals on Cesar Chavez Avenue. At the Kansas City Art Institute, she studied painting with teachers including Warren Rosser and Michael Walling. They encouraged her to learn more about Frida Kahlo and to dive deeper into the Latino imagery she’d known since childhood.
Today, Mendez is still a working artist but admits that making art has taken a backseat to helping steer others toward their goals. She still plans to return to it. Someday.
“What’s cool about my job is that a lot of our really talented staff come from the Art Institute, because I have a personal connection with a lot of the heads — like Cary Esser from the ceramics department. So when we need a new ceramics instructor, it’s like, hey Cary…”
From the beginning, Mendez knew she wanted to teach. And on occasion, Mattie Rhodes still gives her that opportunity. But spearheading the community’s annual Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) festivities requires more and more of her attention. And she’s not slowing down.
“The only time that I feel like saying ‘enough’ is when we are at the end of the season,” Mendez said. “And we have done every workshop; we’ve done every field trip opportunity. We’ve brought in thousands of people to see our altars. We’ve brought in thousands of people to come to our festivals. And it’s kind of like, OK, I’m exhausted. I don’t want to see another skeleton for a while.” Then the new year rolls around and the planning process resumes. And she realizes she can’t wait to do it again. With new wrinkles every time.
“I love doing the work I do for the community. It’s natural for me to build these bridges between finding a resource for somebody — whether they’re going to go to art school or they want a job, or it’s a family that needs assistance. Those are the things that feed me, the things that feed my soul.”
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines “liaison” this way: “A person who establishes and maintains communication for mutual understanding and cooperation.” That’s Jenny Mendez to a tee. — Randy Mason
JENNIFER OWEN
I always wanted to be a choreographer,” Jennifer Owen says.
In the 20 years since she and her husband Brad Cox, a composer and musician, founded the Owen/Cox Dance Company, Owen has become an internationally recognized choreographer and one of Kansas City’s top art activists as well.
Owen/Cox began as a startup in the brutal world of small, self-supporting dance companies. But the outsize talent of its two founders, their combined work ethic, broad community outreach, and dedicated board and supporters resulted in not only their own yearly dance program, but performances with Charlotte Street, Ensemble Ibérica, Bach Aria Soloists, newEar Contemporary Chamber Ensemble, Mattie Rhodes Art Center and Art Gallery, Friends of Alvin Ailey, the Paseo Academy of Fine and Performing Arts, the Hyman Brand Hebrew Academy and The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, among many others.
Owen has received numerous awards over the years, including the 2020 U.S. State Department Public Diplomacy Grant to Ukraine.
As artistic director of Owen/Cox, Owen has created more than 70 new works for the company ranging from classical to contemporary, in tandem with Cox’s compositions performed with local musicians as well as internationally known singers such as Krystle Warren and Helen Gillet. Their brilliant, innovative take on “The Nutcracker” was an instant, iconic hit and will be performed again next year. The company has also performed around the country, including in New York and Washington, D.C.
Owen was a professional dancer for 13 years, and her deliberately diverse and peripatetic professional dance history helps explain the exceptional range of her choreography.
She grew up in Seattle and trained with the Pacific Northwest Ballet School, the San Francisco Ballet School and the Bolshoi Ballet Academy. She lived in Russia for four years and danced with the Russian State Ballet and the Moscow Renaissance Ballet. She also danced with the Hong Kong Ballet, BalletMet and the Kansas City Ballet and was a guest artist with the National Ballet of Turkmenistan. In Kansas City she was the lead in the great classical ballet “Giselle” and performed in works by George Balanchine, David Parsons and Merce Cunningham, among others.
Why did she choose to start her company in Kansas City?
“I danced here for many years,” she says, “and I love Brad’s music. There is an incredible group of musicians and artists in Kansas City, and I am inspired by their work; this city is such fertile ground.
Besides collaborating with local musicians, visual artists and poets, one of the company’s most celebrated commitments is to “Take the Stage,” a program that provides yearlong dance instruction to elementary school students in Kansas City.
“I always wanted to make a difference in my community,” Owen says, “and to build bridges with all the artistic talent here.” — Elisabeth Kirsch
KAREN PAISLEY
Even before Karen Paisley arrived in Kansas City in 2003, she already had a vision.
She and her then-husband, Bob Paisley, had outlined a plan for a small, independent theater company in the hope that someday, somewhere, they might make it real. They were in New York at the time.
Then Karen landed a job at what used to be called Missouri Repertory Theatre. According to Paisley, it was actually three jobs: literary manager, director of new play development and community engagements. After 17 months, she bade the Rep farewell. That was the first important step to establishing a new nonprofit company she named the Metropolitan Ensemble Theatre.
She viewed the turn of events not as a setback but as an opportunity.
“Finally I was like, ‘Jump out of the plane and I’ll give you the parachute on the way down,’” Paisley said. “We had $1,000 and a plan.”
The MET moved around a bit before it found its current home in the historic Warwick Theatre near Main Street and Westport Road. Its first stop was the Bauer Building on 18th Street in the Crossroads District. Then the company moved into what appeared to be a former garage building with flexible space and high ceilings near 19th and McGee streets. Next, the company relocated to a retail space at 36th and Main. It was basically a mini-strip mall with a vast storage capacity and a stage that could be reconfigured to accommodate a range of productions.
Finally, they found what most likely will be the company’s forever home — the historic Warwick Theatre, a former movie house near 39th and Main, about a block from the Unicorn Theatre. It happens to be on the Kansas City streetcar route. But in early 2024, part of the theater was badly damaged in an overnight fire. Karen Paisley, in the meantime, staged shows at alternative locations. With $1 million in insurance money, the company slowly rose from the ashes.
“We lost lighting and sound,” she said. “The electronics were fried. That was our personal pandemic. Now it’s like moving back into a house after renovations. You’ll discover ‘Oh, they forgot (to build) a closet.’ But by and large we consider this … chapter done.”
Bob Paisley retired from the company to pursue his own theater projects but in November he was pitching in to help the MET through the transition. The company is preparing to stage a full 2026-27 season.
But now Karen Paisley is looking at the company’s long-term future. At one point in our interview she recited “Invictus,” the 1875 poem by William Ernest Henley. “In the fell clutch of circumstance/I have not winced nor cried aloud,” it reads in part. “Under the bludgeoning of chance/My head is bloody, but unbowed.”
That’s a fair description of Paisley, who has fought the odds throughout a big chunk of her professional life. These days, after Paisley’s up-and-down, reluctantly nomadic career, she’s confident about the MET’s next chapters but concerned about the fate of the country.
“I think we are in danger,” she said. “We need help but think at its core, the theater is like a lighthouse … and that’s what we’re trying to build here because lighthouses can’t give you all the answers. They just throw enough light on things where you can see it all and then figure it out.” — Robert Trussell
RAECHELL SMITH
Raechell Smith has been the director and curator of the Emily & Todd Voth Artspace (formerly H&R Block Artspace) at the Kansas City Art Institute since 1999. After completing her graduate studies at the University of Kansas and gaining curatorial experience at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Smith was in the right place at the right time to lead a dynamic new art space in a renovated warehouse just off Main Street near the Kansas City Art Institute campus. Over her remarkable tenure, Smith’s savvy sensibilities have kept her dialed into the pulse of 21st-century contemporary art. While deeply invested in Kansas City, her network extends far into the rarer air of the global art circuit. Smith’s magic has been weaving her wide-ranging perspective into the fabric of her curatorial practice, making Kansas City’s art scene magnificently richer because of it.
Smith showed an early affinity for moving image and digital media, particularly by women artists, among whom she has championed many, many superstars from/to/in Kansas City. Her exhibitions have nurtured underappreciated talents from ceramic and fiber artists to printmakers. Further, she has exhibited artists from virtually all continents. Smith perceptively recognized the steady rise of Chinese, Middle Eastern, African and African American artists as key voices of the global contemporary. She has maintained an openness and engagement with big ideas, and risky, relevant thematic material.
This has been a great boon for the students, faculty and alumni of KCAI who regularly exhibit in the unusual two-story vertical space. Smith has sustained a low-key but top-notch stream of artists, curators, art historians and collectors, visiting and sharing their work and perspectives with whoever happens to be in the gallery. Often these events are small, informal and highly interactive, with easy accessibility for all participants. Smith has gracefully juggled the roles and responsibilities of director and curator as well as educator and mentor to a generation of students and artists.
Smith has long proven to be a major ambassador for Kansas City’s art scene. As a reliable local collaborator with Charlotte Street, the organization’s always-interesting Visual Artist Awards exhibitions continue in the gallery’s rotation. Perhaps Smith’s biggest legacy is the wildly popular biennial, the Kansas City Flatfile + Digitalfile exhibition. Case in point, Smith established a fun, interactive, accessible exhibition platform with a high-quality mix of artists at all career stages. Steady as she grows. — Brian Hearn
SONIÉ JOI THOMPSON-RUFFIN
Acclaimed fiber artist, author, lecturer, curator and designer Sonié Joi Thompson-Ruffin co-founded the African American Artists Collective in KC in 2014. She and a group of artists met with Congressman Emanuel Cleaver at Gates Bar-B-Q to discuss the city’s African American arts movement. Conversation led to action. Since its founding, the Collective advocates for artists locally, nationally and globally and advances opportunities for professional development.
She also served eight years as curator-in-residence for the American Jazz Museum’s Changing Gallery, where she frequently exhibited works by Kansas City African American artists and was a co-curator in 2013-14 of “Convergence: Jazz, Films, and the Visual Arts,” a collaboration with the prestigious David C. Driskell Center. Her leadership extends to roles as vice chair of the Kansas City Museum Foundation Board and board member of the Leedy Foundation.
Thompson-Ruffin’s artwork bears witness to African American womanhood through a personal lens of identity, ancestry and resolve to endure and rise against challenges. “Art holds within it the ability to give testimony and document our very human existence,” said Thompson-Ruffin in an artist statement.
Featured in numerous permanent collections, her textile art has also been exhibited at the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery, Spencer Museum of Art, New England Quilt Museum, American Craft Museum in New York, and other institutions. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art acquired her “20 Odd,” a horizontal cotton fabric work that wrestles with the story of 20 enslaved men on the 1619 ship the White Lion bound for Jamestown, in the British colony of Virginia.
“Art is the thread of the world’s civilization, from textile to architecture it is the inner stitching of community and cultural narratives. It strengthens our reserve, it allows us to realize the abilities and attributes from centuries-old wellsprings, which explores humanity through the crux of collective testimonies and documentations, creating a legacy for the entire world to engage in as we view and learn the complexities of our actual humanbeingness,” Thompson-Ruffin said in a Bridge Projects profile.
Accrued awards recognize her talent and life’s work, including a Charlotte Street Visual Arts Fellow, Art Omi Fellow, Kansas Governor’s Choice Artist, Kansas Master’s Artist, and ArtsKC Inspiration Grant recipient, among other honors.
Thompson-Ruffin broadened her audience through published books, such as “The Soulful Art of African American Quilts” and “Opening Day: Celebrating the Life and Times of Negro Leagues Baseball,” and coverage of her fabric collections “Drums of Afrika” and “My African Village” in McCall’s, Better Homes and Gardens Quilting, and Quilter’s Quarters. — Pete Dulin
ROBIN TRAFTON
Corporate art managers don’t get much attention, as their work may be curating private work spaces largely out of the public eye. Quite the opposite can also be true in the same job. Robin Trafton has been the fine art curator at Commerce Bank for 30 years. Though her responsibilities are essentially to acquire, maintain and present objects from a substantial corporate art collection, this bank happens to have more than 100 branches across six states. Imagine having to take care of the bronze sculpture in the lobby, the tile mural by the parking garage entrance, the large painting in the board room, and so on, times one thousand. In addition, she manages the bank’s archives, going back more than 150 years. So, the job is heavy on collections management and care for a demanding number of object types and installations.
From the late 1990s into the 2000s, the last gasp of the newspaper publishing era, Trafton contributed regularly as an art critic for The Kansas City Star, writing all kinds of smart exhibition reviews of local museums and galleries. That’s right, folks, not so long ago there used to be printed newspapers with art critics! Remember? While on both jobs, she added an M.A. in art history from the University of Missouri-Kansas City and she became a member of the Association of Professional Art Advisors (APAA).
Trafton applied her knowledge and experience of the Kansas City art scene when Commerce Bank opened The Box Gallery in 2011, a best-kept-secret art experience tucked away in a light-filled shopping arcade at Commerce Bank’s downtown Kansas City HQ at 1000 Walnut St. This 800-square-foot community exhibition space has been a great laboratory for connecting to larger Kansas City’s art, culture and history.
Trafton, as gallery director, has curated a surprising spectrum of media and content, including shows by many individual artists, collaborations with local artist groups, and displays of eclectic collections like comic strips, dinosaur fossils, LEGO architecture or cowboy bronzes. Box Gallery serves curious visitors from the downtown workforce, school and senior groups, and tourists visiting the central business district. Trafton’s impact on the downtown art scene is also felt in her longtime support as former director and board member for the Art in the Loop Foundation, a successful catalyst for engaging artists in the work of revitalizing and activating downtown Kansas City. — Brian Hearn
ANNA MARIE TUTERA
Anna Marie Tutera, director and chief executive officer of The Museum of Kansas City (formerly the Kansas City Museum) since 2014, draws on more than 25 years of experience working in the museum field as well as the nonprofit and public sectors. Tutera grew up in a family home on Gladstone Boulevard located two blocks away from the museum in the Historic Northeast. For more than a decade, Tutera has guided a pivotal period of redevelopment and growth at the museum.
Tutera and her family lived in the Midwest, West Coast and Southwest over a 22-year span before returning to Kansas City. Her previous experience includes work at the Chicago Children’s Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Habitot Children’s Museum and Santa Fe Children’s Museum. In 2012, she took the role of director of the Wornall/Majors House Museums. Her return home proved timely.
In the late ’90s, Union Station and the Kansas City Museum Association managed the Kansas City Museum. The Kansas City Parks and Recreation Department stepped in during a transitional period in 2013, enabling the museum to consider a master plan for its future. By the following year, Tutera joined the Kansas City Museum team under the Parks and Recreation Department. She led an ambitious restoration and renovation project of the mansion and museum. The museum property was originally built as Corinthian Hall, a private residence for lumber baron and philanthropist Robert Alexander Long and his family. Before redevelopment, Tutera collaborated with experts and formed critical bonds with Scarritt Renaissance Neighborhood stakeholders. Tutera intuitively understood that the museum and community shared a relationship.
Architect Eric Bosch, whose Kansas City Museum restoration work began in the mid-’80s, emphasized that Tutera was critical in the museum’s turnaround. “She doesn’t accept no for anything, and she thinks big,” said Bosch in a 2016 article about Tutera in The Pitch.
Today, The Museum of Kansas City operates as a 35,000-square-foot showcase of exhibits on three
floors, community programming, and more than 100,000 artifacts of local and regional history. Tutera also coordinated efforts to build the capacity of the Kansas City Museum Foundation, a nonprofit organization that now governs, manages and operates the Kansas City Museum.
“I would say that we knew from the beginning that we wanted the Kansas City Museum to be very forward and future-thinking. We wanted the Kansas City Museum not only to provide educational opportunities about the city’s history but also to create opportunities that would inspire more engaged citizens, especially youth. We wanted exhibits that are relevant and responsive, helping the visitor understand what they can do today to make an impact in Kansas City and that we are making history every day,” said Tutera in a 2022 conversation with the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation. “The choices that we make are important. Our individual personal stories are important. Where we come from is essential to who we are. We believe that creating programs that also focus on identity, belonging, and engagement is crucial for the residents of this city.” — Pete Dulin
