Serenity is defined as a state of being calm, peaceful, and untroubled. Many things achieve these feelings; beautiful landscapes, nature, calming colors, yoga, gardens, beaches, bodies of water, and whatever else makes you feel calm.

The “Serenity” art exhibition and benefit opens endless possibilities for artists to share their ideas of calmness through artwork! Subject matter may include anything that provides a sense of peace, calmness, or tranquility. This theme is open to your own interpretation and we can’t wait to see what artists will submit.

This exhibition is a benefit for Welcome House with 50% of sales going to the organization, and the remaining 50% to artists for their beautiful creations. Their mission is to provide a high-quality, moral, and open residential program to recovering alcoholics and drug-addicted men facing the difficult transition from treatment, incarceration, and homelessness, to reintegration to society as productive citizens.

Beco Gallery is pleased to present, Disconcerting Present… or was that a dream?, an off-site group exhibition hosted by Bunker Center For The Arts featuring Kristina Gabuardy, Adams Puryear, Sam Dybeck, Chelsea Smith, Lily Erb, Will Preman, and Sophie Stebbins, six artists living in the Kansas City region and one from the Chicago area. The exhibition features a wide variety of mediums, ranging from sculpture, painting, lit ceramics, and a site-specific installation by Lily Erb. The exhibition spans between two rooms, one with more reality and representational works, alluding to real life, heavy with a sense of anxiety and over- consumption. The other room departs from reality, with blue lights and works that seem out of a strange dream.

Summer Brooks solo exhibition, Sugar Spice features ceramic and spray foam sculptures many of which are embedded with mica and others embellished with gold leaf, hairclips, earrings, glitter, and even fired cubic zirconia. The works speak to the harmful beauty standards in the West, Brooks resistance to those standards, and her insistence to celebrate Black beauty. Brooks received the NCECA’s Multicultural Fellowship award, had her work exhibited in the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis, The New Garden Variety, and has shown at Art Saint Louis and the Albrecht Kemper Museum.

Media plays into colorism by primarily grandstanding lighter skinned women as more feminine and desirable while darker complexions are viewed as aggressive and unattractive. I want to create art celebrating the beauty of Black. I have not always appreciated myself and my history due to colorism and racism. Colorism and racism have not only been erasing my history, but it showcases what Black features are deemed “desirable.” Black is beautiful and should be presented as a spectrum, not a constraint.

Ceramics act as a vessel to not only touch my roots but to inject my work into the canon of ceramics. Pots are decorated with Black woman loving themselves. Sculptures are rejoicing their beauty through being comfortable with their afros, locks, braids and dark skin. Figures also represent the struggle I had to face from people touching my hair without consent, to being told my skin is too dark. Although struggles are shown, figures heal from the hardships and grow into their beautiful selves. — Brooks

I don’t think of my paintings as documentation, but rather an inspirational starting point for a painting. Edward Hopper said, “What I wanted to do was to paint the sunlight on the side of the house.” That quote captures my intent perfectly. I’m looking for a composition that makes me want to paint. I feel I have done that with this series of paintings. I feel that this is my strongest body of work I have completed over my many exhibition. –John Ferry, 2023

John Ferry’s recent paintings continue his lifelong inspiration and love of architecture and the built environment. The cities, that he has explored, from Detroit to Rome, are the catalyst for Ferry’s painted investigations of color, light, texture and space. Forgotten or overlooked urban spaces, such as alleyways or fire escapes, are shown in exaggerated vertical formats that express the very character of what is being depicted. This extreme format emphasizes the gesture of light and the narrow slice of sky between buildings emphasizes the tension of space in the city. Ferry’s use of format, as an essential design element, is equally successful in the long horizontal paintings of the mid-century modern Farnsworth house. Format and composition are paired in a variety of ways in the paintings of Rome. The Colosseum in Rome was the perfect subject to illustrate the grandeur and permanence of architecture shaped by the passage of time. In the Colosseum paintings, color and texture define light and shadow and the beauty of decay.

John Ferry is a Professor serving in the Illustration Department at the Kansas City Art Institute. Straight and Narrow is his 20^th one-person show. John Ferry’s paintings are in the permanent collections of The Wichita Center for the Arts, KS; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; H&R Block, KC, MO; Negro League Baseball Museum, KC, MO; Federal Reserve Bank; KC, MO; and others. John Ferry lives and paints in Prairie Village, KS with his wife Amy and two daughters Katherine and Paige.

This exhibition is a sample of ongoing discoveries within two separate themes. Thinking back on almost a half century of image-making there is diversity in what interests my heart and eye. The word beauty has been a central theme from the beginning. It may be an out-of-date word, but I will stick with it. Beauty elevates the soul and describes the inner state of being in a place of wonder. I have always looked for subject matter that has an inherent sense of rising above its commonly recognizable form and that lifts me to a place of deep satisfaction. I respond to things that are often in plain sight, yet possess a “WOW” factor that comes by looking intently and allowing the subject to reveal its inner beauty. Photography, for all its innate documentation, has the potential to carry us into a place where reality begins to border on another realm, where the unintended beauty of the subject actually becomes something very special. It is more than just what the eye sees, it is where the heart engages in things that words can only play with.

What struck me about the pairing of grain facades and quarry environments was that both subjects are easily recognizable yet offer that window of higher potential. Neither silos nor quarries are made for esthetics. They aren’t intended to be visually appealing; they are intended to serve a function. Yet I believe that both offer more. I became interested in quarries and grain facilities in the early 1990s. They were just part of my ongoing discoveries as I sought significant subject matter.

I remain active in making images, I think in part because I have remained inquisitive and love the positive pursuit of the elusive, always looking for something to reveal its potential. In a sense, I go out to take images; but maybe more importantly, they have come to me. It’s as if there is a space inside of me, kind of like a room, that loves to collect scenes of unintended beauty.

-Michael Schultz