Love Begets Love: Valentine’s Collection features exquisite porcelain artworks by Kim Brook, a ceramic artist and arts educator based in Lawrence, KS. A reception will be held on First Friday, February 7, from 6 to 8 pm, where artist Kim Brook will give remarks at 6:30 pm.

To provide an early Valentine’s Day shopping window, Brook’s work is now available for purchase online. Her work can also be purchased in person while Love Begets Love is on view at the Belger Crane Yard Gallery, February 7 through 28, 2025.

Brook’s passion for building and strengthening community is evident through her teaching, organizing community events, and serving on the Friends of the Art Museum board for the University of Kansas Spencer Museum of Art. She states, “Being a teaching artist feeds my soul in many ways. I mix my time in between a studio practice, teaching Art at a Juvenile Detention Center, facilitating Artist Inc. for Mid America Arts Alliance, teaching Korean cooking classes, leading community projects, and being a visiting artist to Satanta, Kansas.”

Her works are softly textured, quiet, and delicate in appearance, but strong in their utility.

Charlie Paynter was born in Kansas City in 1938 and graduated from Paseo High School. He was employed at the Kansas City Star for 55 years, where he worked in the mailing room and other positions, and for the 10 years before his retirement was in charge of supplies. He has won every employee service and customer satisfaction award that the Star provided.

He became friends with an art dealer, Susan Lawrence, and began accompanying her to museums, art galleries, openings and other art-related events. He had the opportunity to see what artists could do, and often said: “I could do that, or better.” He retired from the Kansas City Star in 2008 and began making sculptures from his vast (over 6000) collection of bottle openers that he had been collecting since around 1991.

He has made little character sculptures and two-dimensional wall pieces from bottle openers, wire, and found and recycled objects that he gets from friends and finds at thrift stores. He has made a series of local musicians. Whenever there is a wedding, he makes sculptures for the bride and groom. He has worked on a series of all the states. He has made a group of scenes from the Bible. He had made many building facades and a series based on the alphabet.

Featured Artists

Debbie Barrett-Jones | Suze Ford | Kristin Goering | Jenny Meyer-McCall | 

Holly Swangstu

Chromatic Conversations showcases the work of five artists — Debbie Barrett-Jones, Suze Ford, Kristin Goering, Jenny Meyer-McCall, and Holly Swangstu — who explore the relationship between the use of color and form. The exhibition highlights each artist’s unique perspective and the profound impact of color in both art and everyday life.

In my studio practice, the work tends towards reflections on environments I grew up in. My visual vocabulary might include flaking linoleum, astroturf, wormy tendrils of shag carpet, fistfuls of paper confetti, and other bits of middle American detritus. The content and approach to making is reflective of a mix of influences: my mother’s folk-ish ceramics/floral arrangements and crafts, high/low culture clash, the complicated character of the American Midwest, and the personal and cultural weight of everyday objects.

In my work I am oscillating between the very mundane and the uncanny, seeking a reflection of the very strange against the very normal. It is a reflection of the time and place that I have experienced as a person, and that I see in the world I observe from a physical and metaphorical “middle”.

In the past couple of years, I’ve been branching out from painting…and lately have interest in layered site-specific wall works and installation. I am beginning to especially appreciate the conversation between tangible material and painting. I’m fairly sure that I have my curatorial experiments to thank for this, and so consider my artist-as-curator role part of my practice as well. As an artist-curator, my interest is in seeing artists realize their specific artistic vision, and drawing connections in that vision to broader dialogue in contemporary culture.