“Iro to Katachi” means colors and shapes in Japanese.

31 years ago my husband and I moved into an old rundown building in downtown Kansas City (now the Crossroads Arts District) which had a fading large geometric mural. I always admired it and when I found out 20 years later who created it it was serendipitous. 

It was by a local art cooperative called Art Research Center, started in 60’s by T. Michael Stephens, who was inspired by geometric art of De Stijl/Constructivism/Bauhaus artists. 

I also have been influenced by Bauhaus modernism and combine that with an innate love for Japanese minimalism and a never-ending fascination for organic forms of nature I have created various small collections for this show “Iro to Katachi (Colors and Shapes)”

Bio: Grew up in Tokyo, Japan, and attended Pratt Institute (BFA in Printmaking) with decades-long experiences in graphic design, fashion textile design, illustration, and furniture design, Rie Egawa has been creating art that blurs boundary between visual art, design, and architectural installation, in both small and large scales in Kansas City, Missouri. 

“Art is documentation and testimony to our very existence. Let it go and see what happens — it becomes a living record, an unfolding story of truth, emotion, and spirit. We release control, and in that surrender, the work reveals its power. It becomes more than just creation; it becomes a mirror to our deepest truths, capturing the essence of what was once unspoken and allowing us to witness the transformation of the soul.” ―Sonié Joi Thompson- Ruffin ©

Colour is not just seen — it is felt, resonating within my body, intertwined with sound, movement, and emotion. Each hue carries its own energy, guiding my creative process and shaping the way I experience the world. Through abstract painting, I capture colour’s dynamic energy, allowing it to flow freely, blend, and form spontaneous, organic compositions.

Colour is sacred — it is the language of the soul, transcending the visual to touch the very core of our existence. It shapes our emotions, perceptions, and memories, moving through us in ways both profound and subtle. In my work, I seek to unlock colour’s emotional power, giving it voice and presence. It is not merely an aesthetic choice, but a force that heals, disrupts, and transforms.

In my textile work, colour flows and intertwines with fabric, guiding every stitch and weave. It becomes an emotional language, creating layers of depth and texture that reflect the dynamic relationship between colour and form. Each piece is a living, breathing entity, telling its own story, just as abstract pouring does with paint.

Colour connects us to our past, our present, and each other in ways words cannot capture. It awakens memories, soothes pain, ignites passion, and shapes our identities.

This exhibition invites you to ignite your senses and revolutionize how you experience colour — remember, resist, rise — and hear the truths colour has already whispered to your soul.

Sonié Joi Thompson-Ruffin is a textile artist, author, abstract painter, and curator whose work explores the layered language of colour, cloth, and cultural memory. Her practice is rooted in sharing stories through fabric and abstraction, honoring ancestral legacies and elevating both personal and collective histories. Raised in Southwest Missouri, she completed the Henry R. Bloch Entrepreneur in Public Administration program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Guided by her experience of synesthesia — where sound, colour, and emotion intersect — Ruffin creates art that is both deeply intuitive and profoundly resonant. Her quilts and paintings serve as visual testimony, blending symbolic motifs, rich textures, and rhythmic compositions that evoke a sense of healing, reflection, and remembrance.

Her artwork has been exhibited in esteemed institutions including the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Spencer Museum, the Holter Museum, Mulvane Museum, David C. Driskell Center, Spiva Musuem for the Arts, Spelman University, Harvard University, American Craft Musuem. She is a Charlotte Street Visual Art Fellow, an Art Omi Fellow, USA Fellowship Nominee, 2023 – 24, Delta Sigma Theta Arts & Letters Award | Woman of Courage, Kansas Masters, and the 2000 Kansas Governor’s Choice Artist.

Ruffin’s artwork can be found in the permanent collections of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Spencer Museum of Art, 21c Museum Hotel Collection, American Jazz Museum, Bibbs Collection, William Gautreaux Collection, Tony Coleman Collection, Williams Collection, Malcolm Henderson, Britton Collection, D.L. Mitchell, Sprint, McDaniel-Hazley Insurance Co., Bell Corp, and Truman Medical Centers.

Beyond her studio practice her public art is visible and alive living at the Leon Jordan East Patrol and Lab, Pembroke Hall Family Foundation, Waldo in Brookside and Truman Medical centers.

She served as the former curator for the American Jazz Museum Changing Gallery for eight years. Sonié serves on the Kansas City Musuem Board, and is a founding member of AAACollective in Kansas City.

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.

Belger Arts is pleased to present More Than Meets the Eye, an exhibition of two- and three-dimensional artworks that push the boundaries of perception. The exhibition opens Friday, June 6, at the Belger Crane Yard Gallery (2011 Tracy Avenue, Kansas City, MO) and continues through September 6, 2025. An opening night reception will be held on June 6, 2025, from 6 to 8 PM.

More Than Meets the Eye features artworks by Cortney Boyd, Eriko Kobayashi, Dylan Martinez, Stephen Morrison, Gina Pisto, and Logan Reynolds. In addition, works from the Belger Collection by artists such as Charles Bell, Paul Dresang, Misty Gamble, Marilyn Levine, Bonnie Seeman, and Renée Stout will also be on view, providing a historical context to the realism movement, creating moments of connection and conversation throughout the exhibition that span time and material.

In a world where perceptions shape beliefs, More Than Meets the Eye serves as a reminder that all is not what it seems. From Charles Bell’s photorealistic painting, Gumball No. 6, to Dylan Martinez’s hyperreal glass sculptures, Water Bags, the exhibition encourages careful consideration and invites viewers to carefully inspect, question, and meaningfully explore.

In conjunction with More than Meets the Eye, the Gallery will host a pop-up series in the vein of the “Is it Cake?” Netflix television show where bakers create hyper-realistic replicas of objects. Three local culinary artists will create “replicakes” (replicas in cake form) of specific works from the exhibition. The public is invited to view and taste these “replicakes” and purchase tasty treats at the culinary artist pop-ups held on the following First Fridays during the run of the exhibition:

• Friday, June 6, 6 – 8 pm: Natasha Goellner, owner of Mulberry and Mott.
• Friday, August 1, 6 – 8 pm: Pastry chef Nichole Taylor.
• Friday, September 5, 6 – 8 pm: Kannika Costello, owner of Mooyuei Baker.