Crossroads Arts District

Kansas City's Creative Neighborhood

Stitches and Sacred Stories | the art of Sandra Scott-Revelle

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Artist Sandra Scott-Revelle weaves together storytelling and appliqué to feature individuals she refers to as “the lesser-known lights in the vast heavens of Black history.” Sandra researches the narratives of formerly enslaved people and prayerfully shapes their experiences into inspiring short stories, poems, and fabric art that “provoke thought and prick the heart.”

We will be hosting an opening reception on Friday, June 6 from 5:30 – 9pm, and a closing reception on Friday, August 1 from 5:30 – 9pm. At each reception, Sandra will be giving an artist talk at 6:30pm, followed by a time for audience Q&A.

Our gallery will also be open from 2 – 4pm every Saturday in June, July, and August, with the exception of July 5.

NEW WORKS : Hunt Slonem, Brooke Golightly, and Emily Johnson

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We are delighted to invite you to NEW WORKS, a vibrant exhibition featuring recent artworks by Hunt Slonem, Brooke Golightly, and Emily Johnson.

This show marks a special moment for the gallery, as we are pleased to announce formal representation of renowned artist Hunt Slonem. His exuberant, meditative works have long inspired collectors around the world, and we’re honored to welcome him into our gallery’s roster.

Please join us in celebrating these three distinctive voices — each exploring pattern, spirit, and surface in their own richly expressive way.

See you soon,

xo, Blue Galley

Open to the Public

Wednesday – Saturday 11 – 4

FEELIN YUCKY / RUBBER DUCKY

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This immersive exhibition invites you to reconnect with the carefree joy of childhood while exploring the emotional burdens we carry into adulthood. Through playful symbolism – yes, rubber duckies! – and interactive moments, we create a space for reflection, healing, and creativity.

The exhibition runs from May 2 to May 30. Feel free to return on Fridays and Saturdays to explore my crazy duck world again. Don’t miss our free community yoga session on May 24 at 12:30 PM- a chance to move, breathe, and get our ducks in a row together as we create space for joy, healing and connection.

Isaiah Vazquez — $10 Halves

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$10 Halves examines how memory can simultaneously serve and fail us. In my practice I am investigating what is gained and lost through recalling a memory. The works presented here serve as my attempts to hold on to and solidify some of these fragments as best as I can while also looking at them from a new angle. Because of this new perspective I am able to interpret new meanings from the past, one that is in a constant state of orbiting me. This process of excavation and discovery is present in the work on multiple levels, including the materials used and the processes by which they are applied to the substrates. 

The show will include two dimensional pieces that highlight the fragile nature of the past as well as sculptural works that present different methods of navigating through memories. For example in “Primos” I drew a family portrait in charcoal and then covered it with joint compound. After the joint compound dries I crack off fragments to reveal the image underneath. This process of cracking off the layers highlights the barrier that is between me and these memories and makes for works that develop and change overtime. I use my abstracted imagery of family photos to depict the memory of specific people and locations. In these newest joint compound pieces I have found a process to think about how people fill in “blanks” in their memories. My Exhibition $10 Halves will showcase how I’ve been investigating the forms of memory in my studio practice. 

Artist Statement:

I’m trying to navigate the present with fragments from the past. I work with various materials including tracing paper, joint compound, concrete, charcoal, sound, and video, transforming them into abstract sculptures, wall pieces, and works that slip in between disciplines and memories. I’ve felt the most love from my Dad when he cuts my hair. He taught me how to cut hair in college, and now I feel the most love for him when I cut his, noticing how he closes his eyes in the chair as I shave his head. When I was little my Mom would trace Pokemon characters for me to fill in because I wasn’t confident enough in my drawing skills. Tracing is still a major facet of my practice, as I trace old family photos onto my substrates. I felt the biggest as a kid cruising with my Dad in the Monte Carlo driving down National Avenue, when the music would be really loud and people would look at us, and show love as we passed by. From my archive of experiences I create works that attempt to solidify these fragments but they’re distorted, not as I experienced them initially. There’s a haze to it, the leftover residue that guides me now. 

Artist Bio:

Isaiah Vazquez is a multimedia artist from Milwaukee, WI who’s currently based in Kansas City, MO. Vazquez’s work examines ideas of reverence and maintenance, whether for materials, subjects, and memories. These interests began during Vazquez’s childhood upbringing during which he detailed cars with his Father and colored cartoon characters that his mother would draw for him. Art was a major part of his childhood, spending lots of time at the kitchen table drawing graffiti or various characters from cartoons. 

He was awarded residency at the Yale Norfolk School of Art, and has exhibited at the Lester Goldman Gallery at the Kansas City Art Institute, Runnels Gallery at Eastern New Mexico State University, and is a part of forthcoming exhibitions at the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art (MO) and 100,000,000 Space (KCMO). He will graduate from the Kansas City Art Institute with a BFA in Painting in the Spring of 2025.

Askia Bilal — Die B4 U Die

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Through a series of deconstructed portraits that I call Non-portraits, I explore different manifestations of “the self” as a means of probing Identity and the Human experience. Some of the larger themes I’m grappling with in these works are notions of death and rebirth, the boundaries between mortality and Eternity, the self and otherness, portraiture and iconoclasm. 

I combine drawing, painting, digital mark-making, sewing, and image transfers from select source material that I manipulate in a layered process that is cyclic. My interest in multiplicity and deconstruction drives me to take my own images apart, to reassemble, rearrange, and recycle them to use as a foundation to build new images. This enables me to explore different iterations of the aforementioned themes, while also reinforcing the cyclic nature of making and the dialogue between and within the works themselves. 


Artist Statement:
I use artwork as a tool to search for meaning — to make sense of myself, the world and the Human Experience. I weave together representational and abstract elements with a range of literary, historical and philosophical references to create narratives with overlapping meanings. This is embodied in my work through a motif called the Non-portrait. The Non-portraits started as a response to two competing impulses I felt to simultaneously reject and participate in portraiture. The Non-portrait is a way of drawing on aspects of my own lived experiences that are contradictory (for example feeling invisible and hypervisible at the same time), while also serving as an archetype with which to explore larger themes that connect to the broader Human Experience. 


Artist Bio:
Askia is a Missouri-based artist who was born in Queens, New York. Working between representation and abstraction, he employs a mixed media approach that combines acrylic, oil paint, dry media, digital media and collage elements to tell stories about the Human Experience. He graduated from Columbia College (Missouri) with a BFA and he received his MFA from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. Askia exhibits his artwork regionally and nationally. He also holds a Master’s in English and teaches at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

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