Beggars Table is honored to host Spiritual Rendering, a collaborative exhibition by Ben Parks and Kyle Selley.

Ben Parks works with large-scale canvas paintings to capture the essence of a soul. Each step and layer of paint mirrors a life experience and though not all layers of paint are visible, they affect the outcome of the whole just as the subconscious mind affects our outer lives.

Kyle Selley uses fireworks to create his current body of work. He is studying to understand why we are drawn to spectacles of light by approaching the composition in an exploratory way. The results simulate abstracted cosmic explosions, frozen in time.

Together their artwork is united through color, scale, and motivation. The deep and vibrant shades of blue allow for a cohesive curation of visual intrigue. These monolithic paintings are first recognized from across the room and progressively provoke engagement on an intimate level. The viewer begins to study the minute details within the vast amount of visual information provided and one begins to notice a subtle revealing of the artist’s process.

Please join us for a spirited and thought-provoking exhibition filled with large, colorful paintings. Brilliant portraits and fiery abstractions meld together gracefully and provide viewers with a transcendental space of contemplation.

Jonathan Christensen Caballero’s multi-media figurative sculptures are both personal and political. Inspired by familial ties, his work focuses on the immigrant experience and gives visibility to the struggles of the working class, including Latin American laborers in the United States.

Christensen Caballero uses a number of materials to create his life-sized sculptures, including red earthenware, recycled fibers, and fabrics, readymade objects, building materials, indigo, metal, and wood. His choice of materials is deliberate and layered with meaning and history. The red earthenware faces begin as life castings of people in the artist’s life. The indigo and denim used in the construction of his figures reference the history of labor. The reused tablecloths, bedsheets, and work tools that clothe and adorn these figures relate to specific objects that laborers work with today. Additionally, the iconography and artist’s choice of color palette acknowledge the pre-colonized art of the Americas.

Jonathan Christensen Caballero depicts moments of labor and struggle alongside feelings of love and joy. Poignant, hopeful, and rich in meaning, the works in this exhibition are a reminder of existing inequities, of our common bonds and interdependence.

Jonathan Christensen Caballero was born and raised in Utah. He graduated from Utah State University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in ceramics and sculpture and completed his Master of Fine Arts in ceramics from Indiana University in the spring of 2020. He is the current Interdisciplinary Ceramic Research Center (ICRC) Artist in Residence at Kansas University in Lawrence. He is a recipient of the International Sculpture Center Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award and was recently recognized as a 2021 Emerging Artist by Ceramics Monthly.

For high-resolution images, click here. Artist bio and additional images are available on our website.

Kris Schmolze has been working as a full-time visual artist and musician since 2016. Drawing inspiration from science, technology, and nature. Kris’s recent work is investigating abstract painting through the exploration of color relationships derived from imagery found in the natural world.

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It has been quite a year for however long. So many things happened and yet nothing did. Distancing, dying, isolating, masking, vaccinating, and all the while I was creating. Initially, I was paralyzed as COVID-19 kicked off. Elective surgeries were canceled as a fistula festered in between my mouth and sinuses from a botched dental extraction. I was granted two life-saving procedures by a pair of surgeons. My partner, our pet, and I decided to flee Kansas City as mask holes moseyed about.

We found safe harbor with her parents in her hometown for a few weeks until a derecho decimated Cedar Rapids. I had started the architectural portrait in pencil of the A T Averill house prior and painted it post in Grandview for three weeks at her grandmother’s home until power and internet returned. A room in the Averill house became my studio for this artwork and sheltered us from the storm.

Spent the remainder of the summer, autumn, winter, and into the spring working with color and composition wishing to open up into exploring abstraction. Once the new studio space was set up I began building dozens of large canvases just before another surgery to repair my foot from a car wreck. This put me on my duff for several months so I began drawing with alcohol-based markers filling whole sheets of archival paper.

It is usually good to have an idea to explore with your work while searching for multiple answers to questions you find interesting. Looking at images from electron microscopes and images from deep space telescopes I found these tiny and gigantic worlds enveloping our lives while reaching far from the world we live on. I found the coloring choices scientists make of these black and white images fascinating by helping to define these pictures of creatures and landscapes more clearly.

I explored how colors relate to each other through designs and patterns. Warm colors versus cool colors. Positive space versus negative space. The paints I use are fluorescent at times; some glow under black light and most have an ultraviolet light resistance, which allows them to remain vivid for decades. Initially, I was working very tight on smaller canvasses. Eventually, I became more comfortable opening up to the space provided by larger surfaces. Finally, things began to integrate and overlap.

No matter how bad I thought a drawing or painting was going I forced myself to complete it and then move on. Every one of these artworks went through a period of time where I felt it was ugly or not working out. It can be as frustrating as it is rewarding to make art. Not everything you make will be great. As an artist, you do not know how people will respond. Pieces I feel are strongest for me may not be the same for anyone else. You never know until you put it out there. Stopping when things are difficult assures your work will never get better. So why quit if you are behind when you can just keep making art and see where you end up instead?

Join the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center for two complimentary Solo Art Exhibitions by brother and sister Troy and Holly Swangstu, June 4‑July 31, 2021 in the main gallery space. Both artists will be showcasing new bodies of work produced over the last two years paying tribute to Jim Leedy’s legacy of fostering creative experimentation, as well as the artists, own personal histories, educational backgrounds, and artistic evolutions that forged them into the innovators they are today.

Holly’s showcase, entitled, Elemental Intentions, will focus on her signature use of fiber as a painting and drawing material to create evocative colorscapes, coupled with new and exciting divergences in mixed media.

Troy’s exhibit, titled Blankety Blank, Blank, will explore his viscerally expressive and symbolically potent images inspired by the day-to-day rigors of farm life. Troy’s installation will also include a special collaboration featuring multi-disciplinary artist, writer, teacher, and Kansas City institution, Jose Faus.

Both Holly and Troy are heavily inspired by the natural world, but neither allows the objectively referential to dominate their work, instead transfiguring the commonplace through the lens of memory, feeling, and the process of art-making itself. Though bound by shared experience as siblings and the heady influence of early days in the then fledgling Crossroads Art District, these artists have nonetheless undertaken wildly divergent paths. As these two solo shows will make clear, these paths, while sometimes meandering, always circled back to an unwavering core focus, Art with a capital A.

Summer Invitational

Annie Herrero, Annie Helmericks-Louder, Barbara Rogers,

Cathy Logan, Emily Sall, Jane Booth,

John Ferry, John Louder, Ky Anderson,

Marcus Cain, Mary Ann Strandell, Nicole McLaughlin,

Norman Akers, Patty Carroll, Rhonda Gates,

Rosalyn Schwartz, Sun Smith-Foret, Tom Huck,

Tom Jones, Vera Mercer