Featuring words & images from Jeran Avery, Jenna Brack, Gregory Kolsto, Sandee Finley, Dylan Mortimer, Kelli Sallman, David Oakes, and Fredric Sims.

No human being experiences life without enduring grief and loss. Because grieving is universal, there is a particular kind of power to these shared experiences, shaping communities in profound ways. Loss can unite, bending us outward as we tend to one another’s wounds with care. It can also divide, turning us inward as we struggle to survive.

For all of human history, the arts have been an integral part of the rituals that aid us in metabolizing grief into something that has the power to nourish communities. In his beautiful book on grief, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, psychoanalyst Francis Weller explains grieving as a fundamentally creative process; “We are remade in times of grief, broken apart and reassembled.” Artists physically break apart and reassemble their materials into new creations, and when they turn toward subjects of personal or communal loss, the work of their hands can create spaces of authentic mourning, hope, and transformation.

In the midst of our grief, it is natural to wonder where God is and what his purposes are. Many might feel closer to God as they are broken apart and remade through loss. It is telling that the first two beatitudes from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount address spiritual poverty and mourning:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted…”

This proclamation that such people are blessed in the kingdom of God is an incredibly powerful promise that harmonizes beautifully with many other passages of promise and hope from the Scriptures. The exhibit title, Those who dream in the midst of sorrow, is inspired by Psalm 126. In times of grief, we must use creativity as we hope for healing – this is how we imagine a world that doesn’t yet exist. This transformation of tears into a nourishing harvest helps us believe the promise and hope in Jesus is not just a dream.

This exhibit opens during the longing of Advent, the retelling of the anticipation of God’s promised Deliverer. His one and only son Jesus came to earth in a human body and experienced the fullness of grief and loss. The exhibit will close during Lent when we groan together in anticipation of Jesus’ resurrection.

In Those who dream in the midst of sorrow, I have curated work from four visual artists and four poets to create a space to experience grief and glory together. These artists grapple with themes of illness, anxiety and depression, spiritual crisis and trauma, broken relationships, loneliness, deferred dreams, loss, and disappointment. Though these themes are heavy, the work of these artists shines with the glory of transformation, resilience, miracles, joy, and hope. Their acts of creation in the midst of loss remind us that we serve a God who gives life to the dead and calls into being things that do not exist (Romans 4:17). It is this truth that allows us to dream in the midst of our sorrows.

Featuring works by: 

Afton Lin | An Ha | Bowie Ma | Chaneryna Thach

Diane Sung | Esther Lee | Kathy Nguyen

Lucky Moe | Lucy Hodges | Sarah Manuel 

Featured work by Diane Sung | Photography by Max Wagner

Asian-American is an identity that exists in multiplicities. We are simultaneously assimilated and yet always remain in the liminal space as ‘other’. So, who are we? How is it that we can be a part of the whole and also apart from the whole?

Asian-American Pacific Islander students of the Kansas City Art Institute across disciplines come together to share their stories, lived experiences, and express and celebrate these multiple identities in “[a]part”.

We continually move through time and space, but never-the-less humans continue to try to stop this fluctuation. Our desire to construct a sense of home, through architecture, objects, habits, and rituals are acts of distraction where we can find relief in regularity. This new body of work, Midwestern Green/Western Blue, addresses the idea of home not as a static or singular habitable place but rather as a dynamic experience, found in multiple locations.

For me, the marrow between each place often leaves a great sense of missingness and ache. I recognize this feeling as a desire to keep a thing, a place or experience, in my grasp. While painting, in the studio, internalized and past experiences are called up. These memories have been embossed onto my psyche and are realized as color, as paintings. Great green caves of trees, turquoise waves of water, the first green shoots of life pressing out of frosty earth or the hot yellow / orange / sky with black-shaped silhouettes of palms carved into that brief sky, inform these paintings. The title and work in this exhibition explore the extravagance of being able to move between Spring / Summer in Kansas/Missouri and Fall / Winter in California, and the sense of longing for each while away from the other. I suppose, as the saying goes, the grass is greener, and the ocean is blue-er while on each respective side of the geographical fence. 

• Anne Austin Pearce, 2023

Anne Austin Pearce, a Midwesterner all her life, is now pulled by two opposite forces, her love of teaching and nature in California, and her family and sense of belonging in Kansas/Missouri. Pearce has always been adventurous and has traveled the world to experience nature and culture in remote, often endangered, and beautiful locations. In her paintings, mostly abstract, Pearce has always sought to express the transitory state of the natural world, its beauty and fragility. She leads with her heart and never more so than in her current exhibition, Midwestern Green/Western Blue.

Anne Austin Pearce’s paintings can be found in the permanent collections of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, OP, KS; Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, KS; Museum of Art and Design at Miami Date College, FL; Tucson Museum of Contemporary Art, AZ and others. She has participated in numerous artist’s residencies and received a 2015 Lighton International Artists Exchange Program Grant and a 2012 Charlotte Foundation Visual Artist Award.

In She’s Back, Patty Carroll’s most recent photographs in her Anonymous Women series, we find Carroll’s domestic heroine/victim, plucky and hapless as ever. With only a few bits of her visible, she succumbs time and again to her zest for décor in reimagined domestic interiors that range from the wild west to game night. She is both the victim of her obsessions as well as the invisible creator. She is sad and funny, silly and serious, slapstick and tragic, but always game for more.

Carroll’s slight-of-hand commentary on society is so skillful and her mastery of color, light and composition so convincing that the subversive quality of the work may at first fly under the radar. Who is this woman and why does she keep showing up for greater hijinks and eventual demise? Theatrical sets of puzzles and games in some photos echo the confusing information of our time and our heroine tries to make sense of it. In other images, a cabin refuge locks our gal away in a western myth. The keen observer soon becomes aware of a greater complexity, paradox and the deeper implications suggested at first laugh as dark humor.

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.