Please join us for an exhibit featuring Kate Fromm, an outstanding graduating senior from the Kansas City Art Institute Fiber Department.

Who Makes You? presents a series of works that reflect on the influence of the artist’s professors, peers and friends during the past four years at The Kansas City Art Institute. Brimming with color, her large scale works on silk panels combine intuitive mark making and employ a less traditional approach to shibori resist dyeing. Fromm relates these stratified compositions to her engagement with the learning process where she considers time, memory and relationships. In the long term, four years is a blip in time, but in the short term it can be a time of unimaginable growth and expansion. Reflecting on her last four years, Fromm’s works consider her influences and poses a question back to the viewer. Who makes you? 

Artist bio: Kate Fromm grew up in a small town outside of St. Louis where she was able to explore rural landscapes. There she documented the world that surrounded her before moving to Kansas City to pursue a Bachelor’s degree at the Art Institute. Once in college Fromm found a need to work with more hands on materials after taking a screen printing elective, thus prompting her to major in fiber arts. As a fiber major she began to explore color interactions through weaving and large scale works on silk panels. Her works focus on color, scale, time and movement. 

May Art Exhibition & Artist Talks — All My Relations, featuring father and daughter, Phillip J. Pursel and Sydney Jane Brooke Campbell Maybrier Pursel. Curated by Daniela Failla

We will be open First Friday, masks and social distancing required.

More info

Phillip J. Pursel

Sydney Jane Brooke Campbell Maybrier Pursel

Explosive energy dominates the work of Sarah Krepp and Olivia Petrides. Krepp locates a powerful gesture in found materials, in blown-out shredded tires which are gathered from highway debris. Blow-outs force the wires, embedded in the rubber, into writhing gesticulations of accumulated stress. Petrides utilizes simple tools and the basic element of drawing – the line — to enact roiling abstractions of overwhelming natural forces into baroque masses. Both artists see aggressive marking as an emblematic carrier of immense forces within urban and natural environments. Petrides and Krepp achieve a linear complexity, referencing turbulent atmospheres and tangled social workings, thus posing questions about the relationship between human actions and nature’s limitations.

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My drawings are immersive large-scale abstractions based on travels to magnificent natural phenomena such as volcanoes, icebergs, glaciers, caves, and the aurora borealis. I am interested in how nostalgic evocations of the transcendent resonate with contemporary social pressures on the environment: What is awe and wonder when saturated with guilt and regret? Me images utilize dramatic Romantic suggestions of the infinite and the sublime, which then collapse into shifting tensions that mirror our current uncertain engagement with nature. — Olivia Petrides

With these visually complex, sometimes compacted, sometimes expansive works, I strive for a different kind of communication where a poetic dynamic is felt before the content is understood. It becomes twofold. In some works, the bending and almost lyrical tire forms I couple with needlepoint stitches in the shadows and interstices. With this I look to set up an interplay between the brute/power of the road and the delicate/vulnerability of domestic handicraft. Retread blown-out tires are representative of the all-American landscape. I seek to question our indulgent contemporary society as well as present an aesthetically dynamic experience. — Sarah Krepp

Spectrum is a collection of artworks produced nearly entirely in Kansas City, Missouri over the last decade. This exhibition is intended as an immersion, a memoir, and a thank you to this place.

I have habitually brought the past into a contemporary context as an opportunity to reflect, to heal, and more often than not, as an American, to beg forgiveness. This thrilling moment we inhabit in history provides an opportunity for reconciliation with our collective story in order to imagine a future that functions more fully for every one of us. The newest work explores these same interactions in a more personal way. The pandemic forced a quiet space for deep reflection, forgiveness, and gratitude, as well as illuminating the path to an ongoing conversation around personal responsibility. — Christel Highland