Exhibition runs through August 30, 2025

Participating artists:

Amy Abshier

Stanley Bielen

Rich Bowman

Stephen Dinsmore

Joe Ramiro Garcia

Emily Johnson

Lisa Lala

Susi Lulaki

Lisa Noonis

Kelly Porter

William Rainey

Tuesday Schmidt

Hunt Slonem

Teresa Stanley

Blue Gallery turns 25 this year — and to celebrate this milestone, we’re bringing back one of our most beloved exhibitions: FLOWER.

Reimagined as FLOWER II and curated by founder and director Kelly Kuhn, this invitational features 14 artists from across the country. Some are known for their deep connection to floral subjects; others are exploring this new terrain for the first time.

Together, they offer fresh and compelling takes on nature’s most timeless muse — each engaging with pattern, spirit, and surface in richly personal ways.

We’d love for you to join us in honoring these 14 unique voices — and this meaningful moment in the gallery’s history.

With love,

xo, Blue Gallery

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE EXHIBIT

Step out of the heat and into something electric.

Cézanne Event Space & Art Gallery invites you to a night of bold expression and creative curiosity during First Fridays in the Crossroads. We’re teaming up with KC Synth Collective for an immersive evening featuring live synth performances and an interactive Q&A with the artists.

🎶 Live performances by:
Novist · Iocene · Whelmed · Metrus
Learn how these artists craft their sound and break it down live during the Q&A — perfect for synth enthusiasts and curious minds alike.

🖼️ Also on view:
Energy, Passion, Ecstasy – A vibrant, emotionally charged exhibition by Jim Sajovic, known for his decades-long impact on the KC art scene.

✨ Free entry
📍 Cézanne Event Space & Art Gallery – Crossroads KC
🕕 6 – 10PM

Grab a drink, explore the gallery, and engage with art and music in a whole new way.

Threshold brings together the work of Kevin Demery & Andrew Pequeño in an exhibition that explores the passage between memory and material, presence and absence, rupture and repair. Both artists engage with personal and collective histories shaped by displacement, incarceration, and generational trauma, constructing visual worlds where the remnants of the past linger — ghostlike, tender, and unresolved.

Andrew Pequeño’s mixed media works, rooted in the Chicano carceral tradition of paños, use soft, unconventional materials to reframe inherited narratives through gestures of care and transformation. His dreamlike figures exist in liminal spaces, suspended between loss and longing.

Demery’s sculptural and installation-based practice reactivates historical artifacts and symbols of Black American life, recontextualizing them within poetic and fragmented environments. Through acts of assemblage, he creates sites of both mourning and resistance.

Together, their work speaks to the weight of what we carry across generations — and the thresholds we cross to remember, reimagine, and heal.

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Kevin Demery

Artist Statement

I’ve always found poetry in objects that convey multiple histories, objects that, through context and placement, drastically change meaning. For this reason, I use a wide variety of media rooted in traditions of assemblage. My practice triangulates intimate examinations of childhood, racial subjugation, and autobiography. I employ a kitsch-like aesthetic that often veils the weight of the subject matter intentionally. I traverse a multitude of applications and presentations to draw the viewer into an environment with each piece. This is done as a means to evince the power of the materials and imagery used to evoke curiosity into the narratives that lie within them.

An example of how I employ these methods is work that exemplifies my process, Gardens of Night, 2020. In this work, I have a coffin-like cross box that I crafted by hand, outfitted with acrylic neon tubing. The box rests atop a worn, repurposed church pew. The neon illuminates the exterior, creating a rich black void that obscures a glass bottle holding a miniature military-grade American flag that is meant to sit beside gravesites. The impetus behind making this work was to create a miniature monument to the black body laid to rest in the name of American and Christian ideals that have not sought to serve or uplift a community inextricably tied to its histories. If read to scale, the coffin would only fit the body of a child.

Many of my works reference history independent from a particular narrative and speak as a form of poetry to larger cultural experiences. I make these objects to interrogate Black historical narratives, acting as a haunting specter to the sociopolitical backdrop in which I find myself. I’m drawn to the arrangement of symbols to illuminate further the nuances of the histories I awaken. In this, I find links between the objects I create and my experience growing up as an African-American youth amid atmospheres riddled with political inertia, poverty, and violence.

Bio

Kevin Demery’s work explores the interplay between U.S. history and signifiers of power, developing an artistic language that invites the viewer to move between the aesthetic of his work and recurring motifs of historical violence, surveillance, and childhood trauma. He uses sculpture as a vehicle to engage audiences with iconic elements such as children’s puzzles, wind chimes, and plaster-cast hands to refer to specific histories and poetically interpret them within larger cultural experiences.

Demery received his BFA from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, CA in 2014 and his MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, IL in 2018. He is a full-time professor at the Kansas City Art Institute in Kansas City, MO. He is one of three recipients of the 2024 Charlotte Street Visual Artist Awards and his work is currently on view at the Nelson Atkins Museum in Kansas City as part of the award exhibition. He also participated in the Delta Triennial at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Art in Little Rock, AR and Art Cologne in Cologne, Germany with Sakhile & Me Gallery in 2024.

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Andrew Pequeño

Artist Statement

As a Mexican American interdisciplinary artist, my practice investigates the intersection of trauma, cultural identity, and regional specificity — particularly how these forces shape the social and psychic landscapes of the South and Southwest United States. My work is grounded in narrative, drawing from personal memory, inherited histories, and familial mythologies to create visual languages that are both intimate and expansive.

Through drawing, installation, and material experimentation, I construct images and objects that occupy a space between the sacred and the everyday. Infused with spiritual symbolism and folkloric references, these works engage the ongoing effects of settler colonialism — its disruption of culture, language, and belonging — and the generational reverberations it leaves behind.

I am interested in what happens at the edges of identity: at cultural and physical borders, where displacement and assimilation collide. My work asks how home is remembered or reimagined, and what it means to carry both loss and resilience across generations.

Bio

Andrew Pequeño is a Mexican American interdisciplinary artist whose work investigates themes of displacement, cultural memory, and the shifting nature of identity. Born in San Antonio, Texas, and now based in Detroit, Mcilvaine explores how home, language, culture, and even one’s name can be fractured or redefined through migration, settler colonialism, and generational movement. His practice is rooted in the personal, drawing from familial narratives to examine the psychological terrain of loss, resilience, and belonging.

Pequeño earned his BA in Studio Art from the University of Missouri – Kansas City and later received his MFA in Painting and Drawing from Washington University in St. Louis. His work spans drawing, sculpture, and installation, often incorporating symbolic materials such as sand, Mexican iconography, and consumer objects like Nikes to navigate the layered complexities of personal and cultural transformation.

Mark Housel a Kansas native, currently in Parsons KS, has always drawn. He cannot recall a time he did not. Painting followed in his teens. Pottery came late for some reason, despite an interest in ceramics, it was only in 2022 that he began learning about clay. From the first there was a connection. The wheel, that took time.

Mark’s work is functional, everyday pottery. Working in porcelain and stoneware he is exploring the form along with the firing. Woodfiring, soda firing, and oxidation. What can each bring to the table. The community it takes to even make it possible is just as important. Mark has taken classes and workshops at the KC Clay Guild, and recently began participating in the woodfiring’s at Big Magic Anagama in Spring Hill Kansas. Mark has been minimizing glaze application to show off the clay body and environmental
reactions. There is so much to discover in each and Mark is excited to keep learning more.

Nicholas Clark’s work is a direct reflection of his optimistic personality. From vivid oranges to metallic silvers and golds highlighted by passionate reds, his art displays a mastery of color that cannot be taught. His mediums vary from acrylics to oils and focus on creating depth through layering and application of rich texture. As Clark notes, “I pull my inspiration from fashion family, friends and music and I love working with figures because they are always so challenging — the detail of a hand, the curves of a body and the capturing of natural movement and expression.

“My journey as an artist began with the simplest of mediums; blank paper, pencil, and pen. I quickly discovered my attraction to something I consider both cathartic and magical; the transformation of a blank sheet of paper into something aesthetically pleasing, a work of art, an 8 x 11” window of beauty in our oftentimes mundane world. Over time, the introduction of acrylics, oils, and watercolors into my work only further enhanced this process, and resultantly began my chromatic passion. Color is now the key to my creative process, and is something that remains constant throughout the continuous variance of my subject matter. Through the manipulation of color, both in its’ absence and abundance, I am able to most purely express myself and establish an authentic, personal connection with all of my artwork.”