Belger Arts is pleased to present Second Skin: Exploring Adornment as an Extension of Self, an exhibition that invites viewers to discover how objects worn on the body express personal stories, cultural lineage, and intimate narratives.

Through an array of materials and technical approaches, artists in the exhibition bridge fine craft traditions with contemporary perspectives, revealing how adornment becomes a visual language that shapes identity. Each work serves as an invitation to reflect on the personal journey behind its creation, fostering a deeper connection between maker and viewer.

Second Skin features work by Cheryl Eve Acosta, Shae Bishop, Hadley Clark, Mona Cliff, Patrycja Grzesznik, Kit Paulson, and Rob Stern. In addition, work from the Belger Collection by artists including Kate Kretz, Ellen Greene, and Renée Stout, will be on view.

This exhibition is in partnership with Handwork: Celebrating American Craft 2026, a nationwide Semiquincentennial initiative to showcase the enduring importance of the handmade throughout history and in contemporary life. Belger Arts is proud to participate in the year-long initiative that includes over 250 museums, art centers, organizations, educators, and makers to celebrate the diversity of the crafts that define America, bringing compelling stories and underrepresented art and artists into the spotlight.

As a member of the initiative, Belger Arts will celebrate handwork through a variety of programs that provide visitors opportunities to discover and experience craft. Stay tuned to BelgerArts.org for more information.

In his skull imagery, Jim Leedy bears witness to the human cost of war and genocide. Referencing the Holocaust and twentieth-century conflicts worldwide, these paintings transform skeletal forms into enduring symbols of collective memory, loss, and moral reckoning.

Artist Statement

Jim Leedy is an international artist in terms of his interests and achievements. He is an artist who crosses boundaries between materials and genres, representation and abstraction, art and music, creativity, and scholarship. His diverse and unique talents have led him to a lifetime of accomplishment in clay, painting, public art, works-on-paper, prints, assemblages, installations, and performance.

Eyewitness to the birth of the New York School, Leedy’s paintings emerge from Abstract Impressionism, with a sense of materiality, surface, structure, and veiled figuration. With a graduate study of Asian art history at Columbia University, he created a hybrid of Abstract Expressionism and Oriental pottery which is central to his oeuvre in clay. Chinese tripod bronzes and Japanese folk pottery were reinterpreted with an informal American twist that established him as an early leader in the American Clay Revolution.

Never satisfied with the status quo, his career has been a lifetime of exploration and chance-taking that has occasionally put him on the outside of major art movements, while often anticipating them. He continues to break ground in processes, materials, and subject matter that is unique to his times and personal life.

“I try to forget everything I have learned, and attempt to flow with nature.”

Adapted from Jim Leedy: Artist Across Boundaries, by Matthew Kangas, University of Washington Press, 2000.

Biography

Jim Leedy was an artist who crossed boundaries between materials and genres, representation and abstraction, art and music, creativity and scholarship. He began making art as a very young child. While still in high school, Leedy began working with the Bluefield (WV) Telegraph newspaper as an artist and photographer. After two years as a military photographer, he entered the Richmond Professional Institute of the College of William and Mary in Richmond, VA as an art major of the G.I. Bill.

Leedy was an international artist in both interest and achievement. His diverse and unique talents have led him to a lifetime of accomplishment in clay, painting, public art, works-on-paper, prints, assemblages, installations, and performance. Jim has shown his work, lectures, and does workshops at home and abroad and his works are held in numerous museums and private collections around the world. Noted art critic Matthew Kangas recently wrote a book on Leedy’s career entitled Jim Leedy: Artist Across Boundaries. 

A longtime professor of sculpture at the Kansas City Art Institute, Leedy was a devoted teacher. He earned degrees from The College of William and Mary, Michigan State University, and Southern Illinois University, with post-graduate work at Columbia and Ohio State Universities. Among his many honors, Jim has received grants from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the Carnegie-Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has also received the Kansas City Art Institue’s Distinguished Achievement Award and the Governor’s award for teaching excellence, as well as being named an Honorary Member of the Council of the National Council of Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA).

Jim Leedy has worked tirelessly for decades as a passionate champion of the arts in Kansas City. The Leedy-Voulkos Art Center, founded in 1985 and still directed by Jim, is currently home to 6 different galleries. In 2000, the Kansas City Star recognized Jim as one of the 150 most influential living Kansas Citians for his role as the founder of Kansas City’s Crossroads Arts District and the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center. In 2001, the Governor and the Historic Kansas City Foundation both recognized his efforts with awards for historical preservation and for his role in founding the Crossroads Arts District.

Never satisfied with the status quo, Jim’s career has been a lifetime of exploration and chance-taking that has occasionally put him on the outside of major art movements, while often anticipating them. He continues to break ground in processes, materials, subject matter and community development in a way that is unique to his times and personal life. 

Partially adapted from Jim Leedy: Artist Across Boundaries, by Matthew Kangas, University of Washington Press, 2000.

Belger Arts is pleased to present Mathew McConnell: These Things Take Time, a survey exhibition bringing together a selection of ceramic objects produced over fifteen years of sustained inquiry into creative appropriation and artistic influence. Spanning the years 2010 to 2025, this exhibition unites pieces from multiple bodies of work that share the usage of dark (often charcoal-black), light-absorbing surfaces.

The exhibition includes works from significant moments in McConnell’s career: early raku-fired pieces produced while living in New Zealand; works from his widely praised installations from the mid-2010s that cemented his signature approach to mold-making and surface development; and recent explorations produced during his 2024 residency at Belger Crane Yard Studios in Kansas City. Despite their varied origins, these works are united by their insistence on a particular aesthetic — the negative, the substitute, the object that both reveals and withholds.

This exhibition is in partnership with Handwork: Celebrating American Craft 2026, a nationwide Semiquincentennial initiative to showcase the enduring importance of the handmade throughout history and in contemporary life. Belger Arts is proud to participate in the year-long initiative that includes over 250 museums, art centers, organizations, educators, and makers to celebrate the diversity of the crafts that define America, bringing compelling stories and underrepresented art and artists into the spotlight.

As a member of the initiative, Belger Arts will celebrate handwork through a variety of programs that provide visitors opportunities to discover and experience craft. Stay tuned to BelgerArts.org for more information.

ou, the Turk, the Arab, the Swede, the German, the Eskimo, the Scot,

You the Ashanti, the Yoruba, the Kru, bought,

Sold, stolen, arriving on the nightmare

Praying for a dream.

Here, root yourselves beside me.

I am that Tree planted by the River,

Which will not be moved.

– From Maya Angelou’s poem “On the Pulse of Morning” (spoken at the first inauguration of President Bill Clinton on January 20, 1993)

In these challenging times, “We Shall Not Be Moved” echoes the sentiments of the iconic Black American protest anthem rooted in Negro spirituals. I desired this exhibition to walk humbly in the footsteps of Maya Angelou, John Coltrane, Alvin Ailey, Faith Ringgold and countless others who have utilized artistic expression to speak Black creative truth to destructive systemic power. The staff of Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art and myself spent many hours perusing images and discussing ideas to select a carefully curated body of work that, like trees planted by the waters, is cultivated from my personal commitment to expressing that creative truth.

As Black narratives not in alignment with the current rewriting of American history are being removed from federal spaces under direct order of our current administration, I believe that it is of timely importance to fearlessly share these narratives in the spaces we still have left. In the words of famed actor Michael B. Jordan, “When they erase, we replace.”

Each work in this exhibition, from scenes derived from iconic Black films to reimagined Art in America magazine covers to paintings inspired by the many stray dogs in the urban neighborhood I grew up in and currently reside in, speak to the Black experience as I see it.

The Black experience is not monolithic and neither are the works in this exhibition. From the colorful to the monochromatic and from the fringes of abstraction to neo-expressionist figurativism, these works reflect Blackness as I have experienced it…like a tree planted by the waters of resilience, its roots absorbing courage and hope, its leaves capturing the warm rays of faith and love, and the branches of its undying trust in the dream of humanity and justice for all continually reaching towards the endless sky.

This tree of Blackness will continually bear fruit.

It will not wither.

And whatsoever it doeth, will prosper.

-Harold Smith

Jan 31, 2026.