Belger Arts is pleased to present Heartland 5, a juried exhibition of the Midwest’s finest glass art. The exhibition opens with two nights of programming at two Belger Arts locations:

• Opening reception on Friday, April 7 from 6 pm to 8 pm at the Belger Crane Yard Gallery (2011 Tracy Avenue, Kansas City, MO 64108). Artists whose work was selected as “Best in Show” and “Honorable Mention” will be recognized at 6:30pm.

• Free glassblowing demonstration on Saturday, April 8 from 6 pm to 8 pm at the Belger Glass Annex (1219 E. 19th Street, Kansas City, MO 64108).

The idea to host an annual “Heartland” exhibition began at Monarch Glass Studio in 2017. Since 2022 Belger Arts has carried on the tradition.

Glass artists from Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and Oklahoma were invited to submit work to Heartland 5. The exhibition includes selected works by: Miguel Alaniz, Shelby Allen, Katie Burkett, Megan Chalifoux, Kate Clements, Brian Corr, Ethan Crawford, Hannah Fine, Robert Flowers, Katie Hogan, Cole Kennedy, Ryan Kepler, Tyler Kimball, Sara Sally LaGrand, Cecilia Labora, Jeremy Lampe, Jessalyn Mailoa, Kayla Ohlmer, Mary Peterson, Nadine Saylor, Evan Seeling, Alison Siegel & Pamela Sabroso, Kat Weltha, Casey Whittier, Nicole Woodard, and Hoseok Youn.

This year’s guest jurors were Jessica Jane Julius, Associate Professor and Program Head of Glass at Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University, and Tera Hedrick, Curator at the Wichita Art Museum.

Amy Kligman’s first solo show at SLCA, OFFERINGS, presents a series of recent paintings that continue the artist’s ongoing interest in cycles and seasons, milestones and ritual. These paintings are offerings of intent and reflection.

In this series, I am thinking a lot about cycles and seasons, milestones, and ritual. How do we mark time, what do we celebrate. Why do certain gestures – like lighting a candle, seem to give importance to a moment? Many of these traditions are residual echoes from practices that were obscured and absorbed into patriarchal monotheistic religions to create palatable vehicles for control and power. While I personally do not cosign the dogma associated with these religions, I do recognize the power they hold and the impact the ritual and beauty has on people. I believe the impact of that ritual and beauty can exist in a space without dogma, without narratives of Gods and Monsters. These paintings are meditations in that space, offerings of intent and reflection.

I am also considering the oppression of the feminine – feminine gesture, feminine aesthetic, vulnerability, compassion, emotion. I think about women in history – in art history, in history writ large, whose work enthralls but whose stories trouble me. I think about Ana Mendieta, Zelda Fitzgerald, Henrietta Lacks, Sylvia Plath, Hilma of Kint. I think about the way I operate in the world and how long it took for me to understand how recently the freedoms I have now came to be. I consider how long it took for me to understand the barriers that still exist, perhaps better cloaked than before. I think about how many times I changed my natural inclinations or desires to fit what I thought others wanted – and by others I mean white, cis, heterosexual, men in places of decision making power. I think of how many times that worked, and I cringe.

For this reason, I embrace aesthetics and ways of mark-making that have not held the same esteem as others in the Euro-centric fine art canon that I know. I embrace folk art influences, that came from decorative practices that were the beautiful and laborious creative acts of anonymous women (including my own mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother). I embrace the color pink. I embrace nods to cake decorating, flower arrangement, quilt making, textile pattern and surface design, object collections, and the aesthetics of domestic spaces. I see these gestures as a sort of inheritance, from women in my own lineage living less than glamorous lives, attempting to bring light and beauty to the world in the practical ways the social and economical boundaries permitted.

Altars are created to manifest action, to create change, or to remember, to honor. My altars are no different, in that regard. They are pools of reflection, of meditation, of thinking about the way things are and the way I want to operate as a human moving forward.

Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art is pleased to present an ensemble of gallery artists and artists new to the gallery in SHARP-SIGHTED. The sixteen artists, that are featured, work in a variety of media, and with a range of concepts, but all share a keen sense of vision, creativity and purpose. They reveal art as an exploration of ideas and as a way to experience the world. For some, observation of the environment and nature is a source of inspiration. For others, the art process and the materials themselves, spark their creativity. Other influences are numerous, such as memory, emotion, geometry, pattern, spirituality, ornament, color and gesture. An indefinable mix of possibilities and passion propels these artists forward in their art practice day-by-day resulting in exceptional work in painting, collage, photography, ceramic and fiber. Each artwork is as unique as its’ maker.

Jeff Aeling | Laura Berman  |  Jane Booth | Marcus Cain | Angie Jennings | Kathy Liao  | Annie Helmericks-Louder | John Louder | Art Miller, | Nancy Newman Rice |  Nora Othic  | Barbara Rogers | Andy Ryan |  Sun Smith-Foret  | Harold Smith |  Shiyuan Xu 

A native New Yorker, Terry Winters graduated from Pratt Institute in 1971, focusing on painting. Through the 1970s, while studying nature, especially molecular level life forms, Winters honed his craft as a drawer and a painter until he was ready for his inaugural exhibition in 1982 at the prestigious Sonnabend Gallery. Later that same year he began his first foray into printmaking at Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) on Long Island. Winters became one of the leading printmakers in the U.S. At first, he was leaving his Manhattan studio one day a week to work with the master printers at ULAE, and that later escalated to up to four days a week. As art historian Richard Axsom wrote in “The Philosophers’ Stone: The Prints of Terry Winters:”

Printmaking is a forum whose procedures and collaborative protocols have allowed Winters to explore the expressive nature of his drawings. For an artist whose cardinal subject is protean form, printmaking encourages a changing image through the various proofing phases that lead to an editioned print. A print reflects a progressive history of alterations. It is a record of mutation, an accumulation of discrete changes that has no exact counterpoint in drawing or painting.

Over the years, Winters’ paintings, drawings, and prints have been featured in major retrospectives at the Boston Museum of Fine Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Lineages explores multi-directional histories through weaving and its site-specific environments, structures, associations, and temporal rhythms. Through a series of installations, weavings, sound, and video, sister artists Debbie Barrett-Jones and Kristine Barrett present kinship and cultural identity as a fluid process rather than a given: connecting, dissolving, and reconstituting through memory, practice, and relationship. This (re)membering relates to the act of weaving and textile practice itself: weaving disparate threads (or bodies, sounds, images, narratives, geographies, and names) into relationship with one another: sewing-severing-suturing. Other ‘genealogies’ emerge through this process that intersects, intervenes, disrupts, and further entangles.

Both Barrett sisters received their BFA’s at the Kansas City Art Institute, Kristine in ’01, and Debbie in ’07. Currently, each is in their thesis year of graduate school, as Debbie is pursuing a Master of Fine Art in textiles at the University of Kansas and Kristine is currently working on her second Master’s degree in Folklore at the University of California, Berkeley.

Textiles artist, Debbie Barrett-Jones left her small town in Iowa so she could pursue an education at the Kansas City Art Institute (KCAI) and since graduation, has exhibited her work throughout the United States, including the Kansas City area locations, such as; Children’s Mercy Hospital in North Kansas City, Truman Medical Center, Community Christian Church, Lead Bank in the Crossroads of Kansas City, and The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. And in late 2016, she collaborated with the Kansas City Ballet for an art installation and performance called Unspoken. Barrett-Jones is currently working on her Master of Fine Art at the University of Kansas focusing on textiles along with teaching weaving courses to KU undergraduates.

In 2016, she began to envision the “Healing with Weaving” initiative, to highlight the importance of how art, specifically weaving, can be a therapeutic tool for healing. The first Healing with Weaving Community Outreach Program’s pilot project at Children’s Mercy Hospital Adele Hall Campus in Kansas City, MO. The project provides 200 Healing with Weaving Frame Loom Kits with instructions to be used by patients, family members, and staff to explore the meditative and therapeutic benefits of weaving during the summer and fall of 2021. Currently, Barrett-Jones was one of nineteen Kansas City artists to be commissioned to make permanent public artwork for the new KCI Airport that will open in the spring of 2023.

Kristine Barrett is an American artist, composer, academic, and vocalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. After completing a double BFA in Studio Art and Art History from the Kansas City Art Institute, Barrett went on to study music composition with the legendary Fred Frith at Mills College, where she received an MFA in Electronic Music Composition and Recording Media in 2006. A storyteller at heart, Barrett’s work has been performed, exhibited, and featured in various galleries and media festivals throughout North America and Europe, and was recently featured on the NPR show The Thistle and Shamrock. In addition to her solo work, Kristine has performed professionally with several renowned musicians and ensembles, including the acclaimed Kitka Women’s Vocal Ensemble, Svetlana Spajić, and Trio Kavkasia, among many others. She has directed several community choirs throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, including the Temple of Light Georgian Community Choir, Headlands Community Folk Ensemble, and Sound Orchard’s West Marin Choir. Connecting folklore, textiles, and women’s vocal arts, Kristine is currently working on her second Master’s degree in Folklore at UC Berkeley. An avid hiker, bibliophile, lover of ancient literature and art; Kristine loves being in the non-human world, wooden boats, needlework, and sailing schooners. She currently resides on a houseboat with a myriad of plants, shrines, and animals with her husband in Sausalito, California.