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

{not} Quiet on the Western Front includes work by west coast artists from the Belger Collection who helped define the Funk Art movement. Funk came onto the art scene like a car wreck with its anti-formalist aesthetic, tongue-in-cheek commentary, irreverent character, and humor. Invoking a sense of cathartic release to the violent times of the 1960s, it was an alternative to mainstream art that made political commentary on war, gender, racial tension, and other social threats palatable. While its point of origin can be traced to 1950s northern California, the attitudes and approaches of Funk artists spread to other parts of the country and lives on in work by contemporary artists today.

Artists in the exhibition include Robert Arneson, Clayton Bailey, Viola Frey, David Gilhooly, Robert Hudson, Ed Kienholz, Ed Massey, Ron Nagle, H.C. Westermann, and William T. Wiley.

This exhibition is dedicated to William T. Wiley, a founder of the Funk Art movement, and a core artist of the Belger Collection. After a long and successful career, which included teaching at the University of California — Davis, he died on April 25, 2021, at the age of 83. He will be missed.

Visual Manna artist Sharon Jeffus will deliver a lecture on African-American artists and conduct two workshops in the New Life CityChurch auditorium for those interested in creating their own artworks. The lecture will be free; each workshop, limited to 15 participants apiece, will be $10 (cash only) to cover materials.

The first workshop (7 PM) will re-create a canvas painting by Henry Ossawa Tanner, and the second one (8 PM) a folk-art painting by Horace Pippin.

There will also be a showing of various artworks by Sharon’s students in the main hallway and youth room of the church.

‘Geheimnis’ is a body of work painted by Kansas City artist Kelly Kruse. It is an extended meditation on mystery, mortality, and glory and is inspired by the book of Ecclesiastes.

From the artist:

Art-making, by nature, presses into the bittersweet sensation of having one foot in a tangible world that passes while having another in the world of the unseen. In early 2018, as I finished work on an exhibition dealing with human suffering and the stations of the cross, it became clear to me that I wanted to do an extended meditation on mortality and transience through the book of Ecclesiastes, which is utterly unlike much of the rest of the Hebrew bible in its tone.

I could never have imagined then that I would open an exhibit of this work on March 8, 2020, just days before the COVID-19 pandemic would dramatically alter daily life in the United States. In the midst of this crisis, there has been a collective wail of loss and grief rising up around the world. We are not living in a time of conceptual instability and loss. No matter what our worldview, we do not need to be convinced that we stand on shaking ground, or that what we thought was secure was in fact just passing.

The voice of the teacher in Ecclesiastes echoes our fears. We will not find hope by burying our heads in the sand, or by clinging to the things that pass away. If the earth is shaking, we need to find something steady to cling to. Through this work, I offer an extended meditation on these ideas, which have resonated in all seasons of history and in any kind of grief or loss. More information about this exhibit can be found here.