A native New Yorker, Terry Winters graduated from Pratt Institute in 1971, focusing on painting. Through the 1970s, while studying nature, especially molecular level life forms, Winters honed his craft as a drawer and a painter until he was ready for his inaugural exhibition in 1982 at the prestigious Sonnabend Gallery. Later that same year he began his first foray into printmaking at Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) on Long Island. Winters became one of the leading printmakers in the U.S. At first, he was leaving his Manhattan studio one day a week to work with the master printers at ULAE, and that later escalated to up to four days a week. As art historian Richard Axsom wrote in “The Philosophers’ Stone: The Prints of Terry Winters:”

Printmaking is a forum whose procedures and collaborative protocols have allowed Winters to explore the expressive nature of his drawings. For an artist whose cardinal subject is protean form, printmaking encourages a changing image through the various proofing phases that lead to an editioned print. A print reflects a progressive history of alterations. It is a record of mutation, an accumulation of discrete changes that has no exact counterpoint in drawing or painting.

Over the years, Winters’ paintings, drawings, and prints have been featured in major retrospectives at the Boston Museum of Fine Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Three things motivate and shape my work: pure pleasure, challenge, and the attempt to engage in a visual and critical dialogue with other painters, past and present. The pure pleasure I derive from painting is just that: complete and utter expressive gratification, akin to faith in its steadfastness. The challenge comes in many forms, particularly in not knowing exactly where a work is going to go. My conceptual dialogue may best be understood in the context of a child who may be structured and guided by his parents when he is young, then follows his own path, independent of his parents but still shaped by them as he grows I was shaped and guided by those before me (Motherwell, Diebenkorn, and Pollock, among others), giving me a solid foundation — studying, copying, experimenting, then working more independently. As this relationship grows, it allows me to follow my own path, all the while enjoying their continuing influence through an evolving dialogue with them, as well as with my contemporaries working in the same bent. My work is an expression of this dialogue, a spontaneous intuitive reaction that is itself a sort of conversation with my medium. I agree with Jackson Pollock when he said, “I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them.” My physical reaction comes from my intuition, both ordinary and esthetic. Clement Greenberg clarifies that distinction in his essay Intuition and The Esthetic Experience: “The intuition that gives you the color of the sky turns into an esthetic intuition when it stops telling you what the weather is like and becomes purely an experience of the color.” My work challenges viewers to use their own intuition to experience the essence of these essays of a silent medium.

Open to the Public

Thursday – Saturday 11 – 4

Private Appointments Available

Featuring works by: 

Afton Lin | An Ha | Bowie Ma | Chaneryna Thach

Diane Sung | Esther Lee | Kathy Nguyen

Lucky Moe | Lucy Hodges | Sarah Manuel 

Featured work by Diane Sung | Photography by Max Wagner

Asian-American is an identity that exists in multiplicities. We are simultaneously assimilated and yet always remain in the liminal space as ‘other’. So, who are we? How is it that we can be a part of the whole and also apart from the whole?

Asian-American Pacific Islander students of the Kansas City Art Institute across disciplines come together to share their stories, lived experiences, and express and celebrate these multiple identities in “[a]part”.

We continually move through time and space, but never-the-less humans continue to try to stop this fluctuation. Our desire to construct a sense of home, through architecture, objects, habits, and rituals are acts of distraction where we can find relief in regularity. This new body of work, Midwestern Green/Western Blue, addresses the idea of home not as a static or singular habitable place but rather as a dynamic experience, found in multiple locations.

For me, the marrow between each place often leaves a great sense of missingness and ache. I recognize this feeling as a desire to keep a thing, a place or experience, in my grasp. While painting, in the studio, internalized and past experiences are called up. These memories have been embossed onto my psyche and are realized as color, as paintings. Great green caves of trees, turquoise waves of water, the first green shoots of life pressing out of frosty earth or the hot yellow / orange / sky with black-shaped silhouettes of palms carved into that brief sky, inform these paintings. The title and work in this exhibition explore the extravagance of being able to move between Spring / Summer in Kansas/Missouri and Fall / Winter in California, and the sense of longing for each while away from the other. I suppose, as the saying goes, the grass is greener, and the ocean is blue-er while on each respective side of the geographical fence. 

• Anne Austin Pearce, 2023

Anne Austin Pearce, a Midwesterner all her life, is now pulled by two opposite forces, her love of teaching and nature in California, and her family and sense of belonging in Kansas/Missouri. Pearce has always been adventurous and has traveled the world to experience nature and culture in remote, often endangered, and beautiful locations. In her paintings, mostly abstract, Pearce has always sought to express the transitory state of the natural world, its beauty and fragility. She leads with her heart and never more so than in her current exhibition, Midwestern Green/Western Blue.

Anne Austin Pearce’s paintings can be found in the permanent collections of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, OP, KS; Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, KS; Museum of Art and Design at Miami Date College, FL; Tucson Museum of Contemporary Art, AZ and others. She has participated in numerous artist’s residencies and received a 2015 Lighton International Artists Exchange Program Grant and a 2012 Charlotte Foundation Visual Artist Award.