Judy Onofrio has always been in love with the stuff of the world. In the first three decades of her fifty-year career, she worked with clay, then built, painted, and often set on fire enormous sculptural constructions. For the past twenty years, she has told optimistic stories about strong women, lush gardens, and circus through her elaborately embellished figurative sculptures.

In 2008, when Onofrio was confronted by a serious illness, everything changed and she turned to her studio practice to process her experience of mortality, renewal and healing. The resulting series mirrored Onofrio’s own journey through illness to renewed health. Always a master of material, Onofrio began to subtly and organically integrate animal bones into her repertoire of sculpted, embellished and painted forms.

Then Onofrio took a leap of faith. The female figure, star of her work for decades, vanished. Sleek, vibrant color mutated into shades of slippery, creamy ivory, and bones became the material of choice. Onofrio’s increasing awareness of the physical and spiritual energy of life lived, held in the bones left behind in the earth, had a profound influence on her understanding of healing and enlightment.

In the series, Earth Bound, Judy Onofrio shows us a heartbreakingly beautiful, poignant and lush, delicate and seductive nature morte throbbing with life. Judy Onofrio’s baroque sculptures pulse with life and confirm that every death is essentially only a passage to a new beginning. Of this work, Judy Onofrio says, “To me, they feel like prayers.”

Onofrio has exhibited extensively nationally & internationally. Her work is in numerous private and public collections including National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; Frederick R. Weisman Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN; The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, MN; North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks, ND; Laumeier Sculpture Park and Museum, St. Louis, MO; McKnight Foundation, Minneapolis, MN; The Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Sedalia, MO; Hallmark, Kansas City, MO; Arabia Museum, Helsinki, Finland; Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York, NY; Decorative Arts Museum, Little Rock, AK; Greenville County Museum, Greenville, NC; Montreal Museum of Decorative Arts, Montreal, Canada; Museum of Contemporary Art, Voor Hedendaagsa Kunst Het Kruithuis, Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands; and others.

“My pastel drawings are based on direct observation and seek to tell a visual story about the beauty and depth of life around me, made precious by the truth of its transitory nature. I am interested in what is discovered and revealed during the process of slow looking over a long period of time, as the drawing evolves, creating itself, slowly, mark-by-mark.”

– Sherry Leedy

Sherry Leedy is best known for her day job as Director and Curator of Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art. Few know that she works the night shift drawing in her studio with soft pastels on paper.

Her drawings are connected to the long and rich tradition of Vanitas and the symbolic meaning of objects. Often loaded with personal meaning, the visual power of Leedy’s drawings resides in form, pattern, color, light, rhythm and line. Over the 30 years that Leedy has owned her gallery, this is her first one- person exhibition in the space she calls her own.

Leedy holds a BFA degree from the Kansas City Art Institute and a MFA from the University of Kansas. Her work is in the collections of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; the Los Angeles County Museum, LA, CA; University of Northern Arizona, Flagstaff; First National Bank, Columbia, MO; AT&T, Kansas City, MO and others.

Randy Bacon is a long-standing, acclaimed contemporary American photographer based in Springfield, Missouri. He has an extensive history in portrait and documentary photography, as well as, humanitarian work. At the core of his work is the ability to present emotive, authentic visual stories of the people he photographs.

Just As I Am, presents a series of large-scale black and white studio portraits and personal narratives told directly by the subjects Bacon photographed. Just As I Am invites us to view the world through the clear lends of someone living with Down syndrome; a lens of pure love, honesty and compassion. The exhibit’s aim is to create awareness and a better understanding of Down syndrome through intimate studio portraiture, raw, authentic narratives and short film series, as to change the way we see those with Down syndrome. These individuals are not deficient in any way; but are in fact “extra.” An extra chromosome gives those with Down syndrome an extraordinary ability to see the good, the joy and the beauty in this world that the rest of us often can’t see. This project challenges us to celebrate those with Down syndrome just as they are and to recognize the unbridled joy, genuine compassion and clarity in life they express every day of their lives.

Project in partnership with Down Syndrome Innovations and 7 Billion Ones.

ARTIST INTRODUCTION

ARTIST INFORMATION AND BIO

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.

{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.