We are pleased to present XOXO, a March exhibition featuring works by Anna Kincaide, Stanley Bielen, Rich Bowman, Lisa Noonis, Lisa Lala, Susi Lulaki, Melissa McCracken, William Rainey, and Hunt Slonem.

This exhibition brings together works by artists inspired by nature, music, beauty, whimsy and humanity — united by a deep passion for the creative process and the act of making.

Glass blowing demo: First Friday, March 6 from 6 pm to 8 pm at the Belger Glass Annex.

Free artist talk: Tuesday, March 10 from 6 pm — 7 pm at the Belger Crane Yard Gallery.

Join us for a FREE Artist Talk and glass blowing demonstration with Visiting Artists, Ekin Deniz Aytac and Joshua Davids.

The Aytac Davids Collective is the artistic partnership of husband and wife Ekin Deniz Aytac and Joshua Davids, whose work fuses disparate cultural and geographical influences into new forms of glass art. They draw inspiration from global travel, diverse cultural heritage, and their shared experiences of the past decade.

These programs are in conjunction with Aytac Davids’ Masterclass, Advanced Color Application – Additive and Subtractive Methods. Only a few class slots are available. Sign up today!

of sight, of mind is a site-specific installation featuring architectural constructions by Alejandro Acierto and three collaborators.

This project organizes new and ongoing works shaped by artists invested in making visible the unseen operations, architectures, and mechanics of US-based carceral systems. 

Highlighting the impact prisons have on people, communities, and cities, particularly with the increase of policing and militarization, state surveillance, and data extraction, the works of this exhibition contend with contemporary expressions of capture that challenge the function of the broader criminal justice system. 

While remaining cautious around the politics and effects of visibility – conditions integral to increased rates of criminalization historically – this installation instead insists on a refusal to ignore the specifics of state violence, to keep these occurrences in the present at the top of our consciousness. As exhausting as it is, we cannot afford to look away.

Doors of Deception is an exhibition of the transportive potentials of abstraction in the work of Harper Newell and Max Crutcher.

The opening reception is on First Friday, March 6, (6 – 9 PM) at Vulpes Bastille.

This exhibition presents the distinct methods that each artist uses to create hypnotic and illusive visual spaces. Through weaving and drawing, the artists employ formal elements to create an optical push and pull between surface and image, inviting the viewer into their work. 

Newell’s weavings form highly saturated, gradient color fields, which offer the viewer an escape from the hyper stimulation of modern everyday life. Inspired by the idea of portals, her works provide glimpses of another world, a serene plane of existence made of only color and space. 

Crutcher’s oil pastel drawings use overlapping organic forms to create shifting spaces that entrance the viewer. Shapes collide and align to suggest new forms, while negative spaces emerge and recede to create a precarious visual space for the viewer.

These interactions create a persistent disorientation as the artist playfully conspires to subvert the viewer’s perception. There is a sublime rhythm in the sweeping gradients of color and shape-shifting spaces the artists create, and they act together to form vibrant worlds of beauty and illusion. 

Doors of Deception asks you to explore the pathways these artists have forged, to escape your surroundings, if only momentarily, and to move through the gallery filled with texture, shape and color.

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Vulpes Bastille is an artist-run space in Kansas City’s East Crossroads that houses twelve studios and hosts monthly exhibitions selected through an open call. Located in a 100-year-old renovated dancehall, Vulpes Bastille offers an expansive platform for the community to create and display work, with an emphasis on experimental projects, emerging voices, and students. Vulpes Bastille has remained a fortress for Kansas City’s creative community since 2012.

We are proud to present Marc Chagall and the Bible, a collection of biblical lithographs from 1956 and 1960, on loan from Bowden Collections.

Marc Chagall (1887 – 1985) has been called the quintessential Jewish artist of the 20th century, and one of the foremost visual interpreters of the Bible. With wit and joy, he has given us marvelous depictions of the stories we know so well from the Old Testament. His art is filled with his own recurring symbols drawn from visual memory and imagination.

Chagall said that he did not see the Bible, but he dreamed it, even as a child. He wrote, “Our whole inner world is a reality, perhaps more real than the apparent world.” Chagall’s vision of the Old Testament combines his Jewish heritage and upbringing in Vitebsk, Russia and modern art in rich images with multiple meanings.