Exhibit Events:

Artist Talk + Closing Reception: Saturday, April 23, 2 – 4pm

Exhibit Open Hours:

Saturdays 2 – 4pm: 3/11, 3/25, 3/30, 4/1, 4/22, 4/29
Thursdays 6 – 8pm: 3/23, 4/20, 4/27

About the exhibit:

In Healing Sanctuary, Kammy Downs blends drawing, natural dye, fiber, and needlecraft to create beautiful installations.

She uses her work to explore the connections between God and nature and the particular ways that the mysterious life cycle of plants reveals aspects of the hidden spiritual world. She creates and uses many natural dyes herself, and through this process she considers the role of plants as a God-given remedy for the healing of our bodies.

As one member of a multigenerational line of artists and seamstresses in her family, Kammy’s work also uses many familiar domestic materials and practices that have been passed down between women in families and communities throughout history.

About the artist:

Raised in rural South-Central Kansas, Kammy Downs enjoyed a supportive childhood that allowed exploration of creative pursuits and nature. Downs attended Emporia State University where she was inspired to teach art. Her love of the art-making process has deepened through the experience of teaching for 35+ years in a variety of institutions from Montessori to public schools in California, Kansas, and Missouri. She has had the privilege of creating several murals with students and has written public art grants, two of which included work with internationally known Kansas artists, Stan Herd and Shin-hee Chin.

Recent highlights of her work include participation in the 2020 Salina Biennial Exhibition, a Social Practice project called ‘Seeds4HOPE,’ which brings attention to resources for creating resilience in the midst of depression. Downs completed her Master of Fine Arts program at Fort Hays State University in 2022.

Downs and her husband, Gary, live in Kansas City and have five grown daughters and four grandchildren.

Gimme Ten, celebrates ten years of The Hand Magazine. The show features a dozen artists from the United States and Mexico. Their work spans a range of subject matter, topics, techniques, and visual styles. 

Raul Pineda Arce will be showing work in the United States for the first time. His expertly crafted mezzotint prints address violence and loss through beautifully rendered, haunting narratives. Haley Younce creates delicate intaglio prints on tissue paper that are, “inspired by the investigation of coping mechanisms throughout [her] mental health journey.” Jeanne Arenz, Andy Holiday and Lijun Chao, Locus Chen, and Patty deGrandpre use printmaking techniques to create abstract works that bubble and twist with color and energy. Steven Mastroianni’s large scale cyanotype prints combine drawing and cameraless photographic process to create “dream-inspired micro/macrocosms”. Stephanie Kolpy, Maureen Mulhern-White, and Matel Rokke use various combinations of print and photography in their works, all of which combine animal imagery with vibrant color, architectural forms, and hallucinatory landscapes. William Hays’ multi-colored relief prints are inspired by his memories and impressions of landscapes. Catherine Kramer is the youngest artist in the show. Kramer is an MFA student at the University of Miami. Her stunning intaglio prints are inspired by botanical illustration and her visits to botanical gardens.

Bio

Founded in April 2013, The Hand Magazine is based in Prairie Village, Kansas, USA. It is owned, published and co-edited by Adam Finkelston. James Meara is lead designer and co-editor. Together, Finkelston and Meara curate each quarterly issue from submitted images from around the world. The Hand Magazine is dedicated to the support and exhibition of hand-made artworks using mechanical or reproduction-based processes. The goal is to present the most innovative and unique contemporary photography, printmaking, and collage artwork in the world. “The Hand” is about connecting artists, serving as a resource for artists and enthusiasts, and building bridges across creative communities. Let’s join hands. More information is available on the magazine website: http://www.thehandmagazine.space…

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.

Edit

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.

Sharif Bey is a Syracuse-based artist and educator whose inspired by modernism, functional pottery, Oceanic Art and Art of the African diaspora. His works investigate the cultural and political significance of adornment and the symbolic and formal properties of archetypal motifs, while questioning how the meaning of icons and function transform across cultures and time.

The exhibition opens on Friday, February 3 and will remain on view through May 6, 2023 at the Belger Crane Yard Gallery (2011 Tracy Ave, KCMO).

BIO

Although I trained as an apprentice, in a state-of-the art ceramics facility, my current works evolve outside of conventional Western facilities. I primarily work at home (oftentimes with my children), firing in my back yard or fireplace, and resist the narrative that ceramic artists require expensive facilities, costly materials or concentrated periods of time. When professional demands or family life takes up my day, I often carve out a few hours (by way of multiple 10-minute settings), producing small clay components or rummaging through shard piles to reclaim and reconfigure. I employ a combination of traditional and nontraditional ceramics materials and processes to suit my lifestyle. For me, working outside of institutional structures not only affords me more time with my family but invites other material and aesthetic influences into my trajectory. I might use glazes in the ceramic studio but while working in my kitchen I cold-finish works with paste wax and cinnamon/turmeric or incorporate spray/auto body putty in the garage. My practice is informed by my numerous roles and my transient nature, resisting the conventions of ceramic production.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Inspired by folklore, functional pottery, modernism, natural history and my lifelong affinity for West African and Oceanic sculpture, my works investigate the symbolic and formal properties of archetypal motifs, questioning how the meaning of icons, objects and functions evolve and transform across cultures and over time. As a consequence of colonialism and conquest African and Oceanic ceremonial objects made their way into Western consciousness as looted artifacts, stripped of their original frames of reference, inspiring European modernists both for their aesthetic interests and perceived otherness. Specifically, I am interested in investigating how fetish, racism, science fiction and popular culture impedes interpretations of ‘non-western’ cultural objects. I play on “westernized conjecture” by producing works that suggest nonwestern utilitarian, ceremonial or ritualistic purpose but are ultimately designed for ‘display’ for the Western spectator/consumer. I ultimately seek to expose the interpretative deficiencies of the colonized mind and place them on display beside my work.