Say A Prayer For What Has Been examines the objects and rituals used and practiced by women in the black church. Women’s bodies within these spaces are used as tools to uphold patriarchy, while flattening women’s autonomy. Although the black church provides a sacred place for freedom of expression and refuge from an at large racist American society, it can also be a suppressive environment. Expressions such as clothing are often the only ways black women, regardless of age, can exercise their autonomy. Through clothing and accessories, black women in the church can adhere to patriarchal expectations while safely letting pieces of themselves slip through.

The works in this show explore how artist Leah Clemons navigates her own relationship with religious deconstruction. Through the various sculptures presented as anthropological objects, she tells the story of her own upbringing within the church, as well as her ongoing relationship with her maternal grandmother. The process of deconstruction, which is a rejection of the beliefs one is brought up within, yields an untethered experience. This newly found assertion of independence can feel both daunting and freeing at the same time. Engaging with her grandmother’s experiences in the Southern Baptist Church, Clemons explores oppression as it exists both inside institutions that are considered safe and within the context of a society that continues to oppress.

Artist Statement 

Leah Clemons achieved her BFA in Fiber at the Kansas City Art Institute with a minor in Entrepreneurial Studies. Her work comprises multi-media installations that utilize processes such as surface design, beadwork, sewing, and papermaking. With these materials, Clemons creates anthropological objects that are referential to her Christian upbringing. Raised in an African American, Southern Baptist community, her work pulls from stories and experiences from the women of her childhood church and family. Her objects are representational artifacts of her past. They are recreations of items she associates with the women she grew up around, such as jackets, hats and jewelry, and with herself. Throughout her work, her maternal grandmother, Gloria, reoccurs. Gloria’s presence is a shorthand motif that represents the ways black women carve their autonomy while they exist in an oppressive institution. Inspired by Gloria’s eccentric style and strong-willed personality, Clemons’ examines her own disintegrating relationship between them and the women she knew as a child. These objects discuss distance and disconnection making them only an artifact of the memories shared.

Clemons analyzes the ways black women, within the church structure, are politicized through their clothing. Clothing is often the only way black Christian women can safely express themselves. Clothing is also used to divide women into degrees of moral hierarchy. Growing up, women follow a strict dress code in the sanctuary. No pants, mid length skirts, stockings, and purses that match your shoes. Older women are used as tools to set an example for younger women within the congregation. The adherence to patriarchal ideals of femininity force women to play into rigid expressions of it to administer the status quo.

Materiality is used as a vehicle to analyze her personal relationships with women she is now disconnected from, while she questions her own relationship to the religion. After moving from her church community, the artist herself began a journey of self discovery and deconstruction. To re-examine everything you have been taught, to then reconsolidate into new ways of thought is a daunting, exciting, and vulnerable experience. The artist wants the audience to examine their own relationships with others within an institution that hails over their life. Allow yourself to rethink the ways clothing, material, or your environment enmeshes you to others and to a system. Then ask yourself, where do you agree and misalign from them? The artist wants her work to remind the audience to constantly reconsider their placement within larger societal structures. How do you contend between your autonomy and your community?

Bio

Leah Clemons is a candidate for BFA in Fiber with a minor in Entrepreneurial Studies from the Kansas City Art Institute. Originally from Housto, Texas, she resides in Kansas City, Missouri. She was raised in a tightly knit African American Southern, Baptist Christian community. She attended a small church called Mount Corinth where Leah observed intimate relationships between the women within the organization including her grandmother, Gloria Jean Skief, who also attended.

Clemons attended the Kinder High School of Performing and Visual Arts and received a YoungArts National Merit award in Visual Arts in 2020. Since then, she was a recipient of the Barbara Kuhlman Scholarship and has recently participated in Family Ties, a group show curated by KCAI BSU undergraduate students.

Growing up in a rigid and pious Catholic home did not leave any room for feeling comfortable with much of anything, let alone one’s body. You couldn’t like it, you were forbidden to touch it, for fear of mortal sin, and you certainly shouldn’t look at it. All information was kept under lock and key, just waiting for some unfortunate accident to happen, due to lack of knowledge.

I am drawn to female artists that explore women’s bodies in relationship to the cultural mores of their times. One of my favorites is Louise Bourgeois’ Femme Maison (Women House) series. These exemplified the realities of a mother tethered to her home with inescapable responsibilities.

In Louise Bourgeois: Drawing and Observations Lawrence Rinder states, “…the existentialists placed absurdity in a top hat and pulled out liberation. Bourgeois’s art depended on such comic-tragic paradox, the surprising ability of negative and positive to reverse”.

Now I can unashamedly have my cake — and eat it too.

Artist Statement

My name is Linda Jurkiewicz. A woman’s challenge of self-determination dominates my mind and work. I grew up on the cusp of the Second Wave of Feminism and I believed that I was on the tipping point of women getting their rights. I was sure that my generation was going to be the recipient of this new open-mindedness and fairness for women. Today, I continue to be reminded that the scale not only did not complete its tip but has reversed its course in many areas of women’s lives.

My insights are transmitted through personal narratives, mine, and others. I want the viewer to be reminded of the daily conflicts experienced by women in our culture; unequal domestic expectations, unpaid roles as caretakers, sexualization and exploitation of women and girls, and generational struggles with body image.

I explore these serious issues thoughtfully, with my own sense of humor. By using repetition in my work I symbolize the importance of continued planned action to create change in one’s life. I utilize found objects and repurposed cloth to stress that anyone can work with what they have.

Cloth itself holds human history within its tactile experience. It is omnipresent in our past and present lives, our homes, and our cultural way of remembering. By using stitch as mark-making on cloth I can tell a story with gesture and imagery to a contemporary audience. My art form honors the collective work of women and seeks to call out an essential reminder of our importance in this world and the struggles that continue to be unheard.

Bio

Linda Jurkiewicz lives in Kansas City, Missouri and began working with fiber in 2005. She credits her upbringing as a first-generation Ukrainian-Croatian for her “make-do” attitude and her delight in upcycling repurposed materials, especially “woman’s work” such as dish towels, household items, and clothing. Her consequential fiber work incorporates soft sculpture, wordplay, idiom, embroidery, wall hangings, plush form, sequential dioramas, and installations which delve into the cultural roles of women in America over the last century. She pushes viewers to reexamine these roles that are changing, to trade nostalgia for empowerment.

Jurkiewicz’s work has been shown in four solo shows in Kansas City galleries since 2022, with her most recent show, The Top-Half Bakery: Ode to the Prudish Mother at the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center. Her work has been juried into numerous exhibitions locally. Nationally, her work has been included in The Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, Delta Triennial, Little Rock AR (2024), Woman Made Gallery 24th International Exhibit, Chicago, Illinois (2023), Intersect Art Center Blue Hour, St. Louis, MO (2023), Amarillo Museum of Art Biennial-600: Textile/Fiber, Amarillo, Texas (2019), Raw – The Exhibition at Indiana University (2018), Sacred Threads in Herndon, VA (2017 and 2019), The Blue Show at the Core New Art Space (2017) and The Engaged Object at the Foothills Art Center (2016), both in Denver, Colorado, and Welcome to My World: Mental Health Awareness through Art at the MIRI Gallery (2016), Salt Lake City, Utah. Jurkiewicz is a member of the Kansas City Artists Coalition.

“The subtle thread that binds us is also a literal thread — fiber binds us.”

We are three friends with a shared history in the fiber arts. Our collective work is best defined as mixed media and includes printmaking, encaustic, collage, and sculpture, among the fiber processes. There is a subtle common thread connecting us and our work, with a devotion to sensitive explorations and careful execution. A shared aesthetic draws us to one another.

We have had an interest and involvement with planning experiences for the fiber community, online and in-person, such as course studies, curating and organizing exhibits, and fiber-related events through Missouri Fiber Artists, Surface Design Association, and other organizations. We are educators, sharing knowledge of art and fiber techniques with the aim of building support for fiber artists.

Our goal is to create a thought-provoking and diverse exhibition, “Common Ground,” which centers around the concept of layered imagery. Layered work shows the history of the making. Past and present may be seen in the same view. What is below the surface is the foundation that the rest is built upon; nothing is left behind. Like a metaphor for our lives, we build upon the layers and produce our creative vision.

The imagery was produced by utilizing layering processes. Techniques used include stitching, painting, encaustic, surface design, sculpting, mark making, printmaking, and collage. We work in 2D and 3D. Each of us will approach and depict the concepts of layering individually, according to our own sensibilities. One layer informs the next. Our work reflects a reference to the layered aspects of our lives.

FEATURED ARTISTS

Kiki Serna

Marylu E. Herrera

Carlos Salazar Lermont

Sumire Skye Taniai

Alej Martinez

Samantha Haan

P.S. is an exhibition that explores the potential of text-image with artists from the region. The artists are working across an expanded field including, photography, video, sculpture, painting and poetry. 

Text and Image are used together in an increasingly flexible fashion and many disciplines and areas of study are now attempting to understand how these combinations work. This exhibition explores and analyzes the various approaches to multimodality and offers a broad, interdisciplinary survey of the text-image relation. This visual communication leads viewers into looking at the number of approaches that are used. It also brings out the strengths and weaknesses of the text-image showcased by artists. 

Visual communications include advertisement language by Skye, plain text use by Alej, ornamentation of the body with photographs by Carlos, statistics and data by Yashira Davalos, language theory by Samantha and language objects by Marylu. 

The Kansas City Woodworkers’ Guild welcomes the Kansas City Clay Guild for a Joint Exhibition and Sale. This special event is Friday, July 5, 2024, 5 to 9 PM at the Woodworkers’ Guild shop, 1717 Washington St., Kansas City, Mo.