KCAC JUNE Exhibitions + OPEN STUDIOS

3200 Gillham,Kansas City MO 64109

16 June, 2021

Description

Join us at the KCAC Galleries during the month of June for some incredible artwork and Studio Tours! KCAC will be exhibting Margo Kren and Jim Needham in the Main Gallery, and Brian Spies in the SNAP Space Gallery throughout the month of June, during gallery hours Wednesday-Saturday 11am-5pm, and Opening Night, June 4th 5-7pm. We will also be hosting OPEN STUDIOS in conjunction with the exhibition openings on Friday, June 4th 5-7pm where you can tour and meet our 12 studio residents. Please SIGN UP for a time to visit the show and bring along your face mask! More about the Exhibiting Artists: Margo Kren clipped drawings done by early masters that she had found reproduced in old art magazines. Now twenty years later she has found a use for these clipped drawings in my series To Be Human. She began by reproducing a drawing of a human figure done by an earlier master. She added one she found recently done by the contemporary artist Rappaport. She used my digital projector to display a special part of the drawing onto my canvas. She drew an image on the canvas in a way that gave enough room for an additional image of my own choosing. She was looking for ones that would invite a dialogue, foster a comparison, or beg a question of the first drawing. In the end she chose photos of my own that she had taken during my travels in Bhutan, France, China, Mali, Holland and Cuba and then went ahead and sketched them out on the canvas. Jim Needham, the artwork in his exhibit shows line, form, color, and texture. These are the four elements of design. The subject matter and content is widely varied. You will see strong women, antique, and classic autos, nature, and abstract art in this show. Throughout his art career he never got stuck with just one style or subject matter. Art is a visual experience for the public and a creative experience for the artist. Brian Spies, and their ongoing body of photographic works documenting the continued exploration of my identity as a gender non-conforming person living in a rural, conservative community, these photographs are a sort of diary of a language with which I am still beginning to express. Shot with a large format film camera (4×5) in studio settings that create a theatrical tableaux, these photographs explore the performative nature of self-presentation. This performance, although always present, is magnified in the lived experiences of queer individuals, like myself. Influenced in part by the writings of queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz, this body of work is a sort of documentary record of the guerrilla theatre, that for people like myself, is our lives. The Kansas City Artists Coalition was created to change the lives of artists living in Kansas City, Missouri. On March 5, 1975 a large group of artists gathered in the studio of local artists Philomene Bennett and Lou Marak to address “How the Artist Can Benefit from Centralization.” Overwhelmingly the group felt a self-initiated organization was the only alternative to isolation, elitism, apathy, and ignorance. The ultimate result of that meeting was the incorporation of the Kansas City Artist Coalition in August 1976. The Kansas City Artists Coalition (KCAC or Artists Coalition) is an artist-centered, artist-run alternative space that presents a variety of exhibitions of contemporary artists' work in its galleries.