Lineages explores multi-directional histories through weaving and its site-specific environments, structures, associations, and temporal rhythms. Through a series of installations, weavings, sound, and video, sister artists Debbie Barrett-Jones and Kristine Barrett present kinship and cultural identity as a fluid process rather than a given: connecting, dissolving, and reconstituting through memory, practice, and relationship. This (re)membering relates to the act of weaving and textile practice itself: weaving disparate threads (or bodies, sounds, images, narratives, geographies, and names) into relationship with one another: sewing-severing-suturing. Other ‘genealogies’ emerge through this process that intersects, intervenes, disrupts, and further entangles.

Both Barrett sisters received their BFA’s at the Kansas City Art Institute, Kristine in ’01, and Debbie in ’07. Currently, each is in their thesis year of graduate school, as Debbie is pursuing a Master of Fine Art in textiles at the University of Kansas and Kristine is currently working on her second Master’s degree in Folklore at the University of California, Berkeley.

Textiles artist, Debbie Barrett-Jones left her small town in Iowa so she could pursue an education at the Kansas City Art Institute (KCAI) and since graduation, has exhibited her work throughout the United States, including the Kansas City area locations, such as; Children’s Mercy Hospital in North Kansas City, Truman Medical Center, Community Christian Church, Lead Bank in the Crossroads of Kansas City, and The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. And in late 2016, she collaborated with the Kansas City Ballet for an art installation and performance called Unspoken. Barrett-Jones is currently working on her Master of Fine Art at the University of Kansas focusing on textiles along with teaching weaving courses to KU undergraduates.

In 2016, she began to envision the “Healing with Weaving” initiative, to highlight the importance of how art, specifically weaving, can be a therapeutic tool for healing. The first Healing with Weaving Community Outreach Program’s pilot project at Children’s Mercy Hospital Adele Hall Campus in Kansas City, MO. The project provides 200 Healing with Weaving Frame Loom Kits with instructions to be used by patients, family members, and staff to explore the meditative and therapeutic benefits of weaving during the summer and fall of 2021. Currently, Barrett-Jones was one of nineteen Kansas City artists to be commissioned to make permanent public artwork for the new KCI Airport that will open in the spring of 2023.

Kristine Barrett is an American artist, composer, academic, and vocalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. After completing a double BFA in Studio Art and Art History from the Kansas City Art Institute, Barrett went on to study music composition with the legendary Fred Frith at Mills College, where she received an MFA in Electronic Music Composition and Recording Media in 2006. A storyteller at heart, Barrett’s work has been performed, exhibited, and featured in various galleries and media festivals throughout North America and Europe, and was recently featured on the NPR show The Thistle and Shamrock. In addition to her solo work, Kristine has performed professionally with several renowned musicians and ensembles, including the acclaimed Kitka Women’s Vocal Ensemble, Svetlana Spajić, and Trio Kavkasia, among many others. She has directed several community choirs throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, including the Temple of Light Georgian Community Choir, Headlands Community Folk Ensemble, and Sound Orchard’s West Marin Choir. Connecting folklore, textiles, and women’s vocal arts, Kristine is currently working on her second Master’s degree in Folklore at UC Berkeley. An avid hiker, bibliophile, lover of ancient literature and art; Kristine loves being in the non-human world, wooden boats, needlework, and sailing schooners. She currently resides on a houseboat with a myriad of plants, shrines, and animals with her husband in Sausalito, California.

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