To round out our fall/winter exhibition series, SLCA presents Animal House, a small group exhibition featuring works by represented artists that explore the playful relationships between humans and the animal kingdom. Through a variety of mediums including ceramics, paintings, and mixed-media sculptures, we hope these works invite viewers to reflect on the beauty and complexity of humanity’s relationship with the world around us.

Holiday Reflections, presented by BOK Financial, opens for the 2024 season on Friday, November 22, when it returns for a fifth historic season bigger and better than ever!

This spectacular indoor holiday experience fills Union Station’s massive Grand Plaza and features towering lights, dozens of decorated trees, giant forest creatures, colossal mirrored ornaments, 3‑D animated window displays, Santa appearances, animatronic displays, the award-winning Model Train Gallery with an expanded holiday model train layouts, a bigger-than-ever Rudy’s Wonderland where kids (under 48″) can ride the beloved Jones Store mini train, a holiday-themed VR ride, spectacular holiday-themed photo ops, and much more. PLUS, watch for sneak peeks of exciting new 2024 Holiday Reflections additions! It’s the most holiday family fun in Kansas City, and it’s all indoors with the unique beauty and history of Union Station included.

Pricing:
General Admission is $10
Children 12 months and under are free

Holiday Reflections Hours:
November 22 — January 1
10am — 8pm daily
Closed November 28
Open 10am-2pm December 24
Closed December 25

Nancy Newman Rice was born in New York City and was educated at Cornell University and at Washington University, where she earned a BFA with honors and an MFA. She has received awards that include a National Endowment for the Arts/MMA Fellowship for painting, and nominations for a Tiffany Award and an AVA Award in the Visual Arts. Rice has exhibited her work internationally and her work is included in private collections in the U.S. and abroad.

Using Euclidian geometry as the skeleton of the experience is an approach rooted in Art History; Poussin and Cezanne both seized upon this method of pictorial organization through subtle designs and simplified spatial effects. The Sacred Space oil paintings began as an attempt to define the interiors of identifiable architectural structures by inventing elaborate geometric scaffolding to map the space within the confines of each edifice. As the oil paintings evolved the walls disappeared, seemingly erased by time, and what remained was the skeleton of intangible space, in essence, geometry as a sacred artifact.

I consider these objects to be what is real, what we can hold onto in life, but in the reflections, there remains what we do not know, the mysterious, that which is unsettling and perhaps chaotic. I’ve always thought that my best work was right on the edge of disorder. I think it’s as much about disorder as it is about harmony and balance.

– Jeanette Pasin Sloan

Jeanette Pasin Sloan takes visible reality as a starting point for her paintings, drawings, and prints. She auditions primarily domestic objects; silvered cups or bowls, with curved reflective surfaces, to be the actors on her up-close fantastically patterned stage sets. With close cropping and careful manipulation, Pasin Sloan’s complicated compositions subtly pull the viewer in and add to both the sense of reality and abstraction in her tour de force works of art. Originally from Chicago, Pasin Sloan now lives in Santa Fe, NM and the cactus and flowers of the desert have become perfectly integrated with the cool reflections and pattern in her newest work.

Jeanette Pasin Sloan is also a prolific printmaker who has published numerous editioned works with Landfall Press over the past 35 years. Pasin Sloan’s work can be found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Art Institute of Chicago, Cleveland Museum of Art, Elvehjem Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Federal Reserve Board, Washington, D.C., Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, Indiana, Kansas City Art Institute, School of Design, Kansas City, Missouri, Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin , Minneapolis Institute of Arts , National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. , New York Public Library , David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago , Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana , Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut , to name a few.

My work in ceramics revolves primarily around issues of family and my Asian-American background. Cultural marginality and blending, tradition vs. Westernization, language and translation are key elements in my work. Since the birth of my son in 1987, I have been drawing inspiration from major events in my family’s history, the day-to-day challenges of parenting, and my own childhood memories of being raised in a minority culture in the United States. I use the image of a child as a symbol of innocence, potential and vulnerability. Often, I include references to water – swimming, drinking, spilling, drowning – as an element which can be at once healing and hazardous.

Much of my work is unified by the idea of being comfortable with being uncomfortable. This neither/nor state reflects my personal ethnic marginality – part American girl, part Good Chinese daughter. I have learned to be comfortable by choosing not to fit into mainstream cultures of either the US or of China. I have sought a hybrid aesthetic that represents a blending of cultures that is becoming more and more common as the boundaries between countries around the globe are blurred. I am combining the brush work of calligraphy with line work of cartooning, juxtaposing images of American t‑shirts and Chinese qi pao dresses, and tackling the issues of adoption and immigration.

– Beth Lo

Beth Lo was born on October 11, 1949 in Lafayette, Indiana, to parents who had recently emigrated from China. Much of Beth’s ceramic and mixed media artwork draws from themes of childhood, family, Asian culture, and language. She received a Bachelor of General Studies from the University of Michigan in 1971, and then studied Ceramics with Rudy Autio at the University of Montana receiving her MFA in 1974. She assumed his job as Professor of Ceramics there when he retired in 1985, and has been twice honored with the University of Montana Provost’s Distinguished Lecturer Award, 2006 and 2010.

Beth Lo has exhibited her work internationally. She was invited to make a new work for the Main Exhibition of the 7th Gyeonggi International Ceramics Biennale in Korea, 2013. She has received numerous honors including the $50,000 United States Artists Hoi Fellowship in 2009, a $20,000 National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowship Grant in 1994, a Montana Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship in 1989 and an American Craft Museum Design Award in 1986. Her figurative sculpture and pottery have been acquired by the Schein-Joseph International Museum of Ceramic Art at Alfred University, Harborview Medical Center, Seattle, WA, Microsoft Corporation, Cheney Cowles Museum of Art, the University of Washington Medical Center, Seattle, WA, the Permanent Collection, Yellowstone Art Center, Billings, MT, and the Hallmark Card Corporation Ceramics Collection