Artist Statement

My process is meditative. I find myself losing track of the world while adding strokes, like keeping time or taking a tally of moments lost. I’ve intentionally stripped away everything representational. Painting is a place for me to escape reality and face only the problems that are confined within the edge of the canvas. While I apply strokes of paint to a surface, the focus is on the formal elements of the piece as a whole. Though I seemingly keep it simple, responding to what’s there, still synapse sparks, thoughts race, and emotions run high. Ultimately, the truth is that I can’t escape. I don’t want to use color just to fill a canvas. Rather, I intend for the strokes of paint to occupy the frame like people gathered in a room at a party. Sometimes dancing, sometimes fighting, and on occasion recalling fond memories they’ve shared.

There’s something about the colors crashing into each other on the canvas as I push paint and scrape pigments over one another. Painting conjures memories, like a familiar smell. Maybe it’s the site of particular combinations of color, the shape or texture of a stroke that sends me hurling back to a childhood daydream or a day spent with an old lover that I’ve almost forgotten.

I wanted to make balanced fields of color with movement like static on the screen of an old tube TV. Over time they’ve become reflections of my life’s loves, losses, triumphs, and traumas. They carry baggage without claim to reality. It’s something I don’t understand, that I don’t know how to define. It’s why I paint.

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Artist Bio

Artist Jacob Schildtknecht began his artistic ventures with a high school teacher who encouraged him to further explore his interest in painting. After a summer program at the Kansas City Art Institute at 16, Jacob found it inspiring to be around like-minded individuals striving for similar goals to his own and compounded his goals to later attend the university. During his first year, through design, life drawing, and color theory, he always leaned toward painting as a primary focus. With a fascination for sculpture, his intentions in painting ended up adding many dimensional and sculptural elements. One particular professor, Jim Woodfill, was a particular influence on Jacob’s approach; questioning the reasoning and purpose behind using paint as a medium and how the materials used defined his intentions and purposes in his work.

After graduating, Jacob went on and created his first solo studio in the Crossroads area. To help sustain his material costs, he started working in the restaurant and bar industry and developed relationships with regulars around the city. During this time, he began to substitute teaching which led to a full-time position as a general art educator to middle school-aged students in Arkansas. During his five years of teaching, the knowledge that he was imparting to the students, in turn, influenced his own work, principles, and elements of design. With renewed inspiration, he decided to leave the teaching position and focus on creation full-time, which brought him back to Kansas City in 2014.

With a change in surroundings, Jacob immersed himself back in with the artists he had worked beside in the past. A friend saw a piece he had been working on, inquired about its value, and that interaction proved to be a pivotal point in artistry becoming a career. The same friend connected Jacob with a restaurant to show his work. Since then, the relationships he had created while working in the service industry opened doors with opportunities to show his work.

In recognition of the Women’s Center’s 50 years of service to the University of Missouri, Kansas City and the surrounding community, this art exhibition features local artists whose works convey gender empowerment and portrayals of activism, determination, and resilience in the lives of individuals seeking gender equity. In the fight for women’s and gender rights, “well-behaved women seldom make history!” (Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Harvard professor emerita)

When Professor Ulrich wrote the above sentence in one of her scholarly articles in the 1970s, little did she know the cultural phenomenon that it would become, appearing on bumper stickers, t‑shirts, coffee mugs, and later becoming the title of one of her books (Knopf, 2007). The phrase became a rally cry for some feminist activist as they’ve tried to reclaim the significance of women’s lives in history. Whether rooted in gender normative, domestic duties of housekeeping and childrearing or barrier-breaking (and rule-breaking) actions of abolitionists, suffragists, and human rights activist, women have played a significant role in modern civilization, though often not regarded, or recorded unless it was for behaviors that were extreme or uncharacteristic. Ulrich’s 2007 book addresses the slogan by illuminating the lives of three history-making women, Christine de Pizan, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Virginia Wolfe. Today we can also look at the lives of individuals like Malalah Youfsafzai, Dolores Huerta, Serena Williams, and Dr. Rachel Levine whose own extraordinary journeys defied gender norms and patriarchal systems.

Ms.behaving! is an exhibit that captures the lives of individuals making statements about gender equity. Whether lived extraordinarily or every day, these creative individuals are shaping society and defining humanity. Works in this show portray gender empowerment, strength, and survival. Today, women’s behaviors need not be defined as good or bad, but important, relevant, and valid.

The University of Missouri-Kansas City Women’s Center is one of the oldest campus-based women’s centers in the United States and the second oldest in the Midwest. Founded in 1971 as the Women’s Resource Service in the Division of Continuing Education, the Women’s Center has maintained a home at UMKC for over 50 years serving as a resource to our campus and beyond. Our mission is to educate, advocate, and provide support services to advance gender equity on campus and in the community at large. Through the Her Art Project, our mission is achieved via programs that examine the status of gender equity in the arts, remove barriers to access and participation, and celebrate the creativity of women and gender minorities.

FEATURED ARTISTS

Art by .E Lewis

Stasi Bobo-Ligon

Nedra Bonds

Summer Brooks

Mona Cliff

Nicole Emanuel

Rachelle Gardner Roe

Smitha George

Gloria Heifner

Linda Jurkiewicz

Ada Koch

Brittany Noriega

Nancy Morrison

Gwen Murphy

Vania Soto

This latest group of works from the Ross couple is their newest group of observations after one of their many trips to Nisamehe Island and the Resound Fields. The inhabitants on the island are dealing with new waves of temptations and stress in sharp contrast to the beautiful surroundings. On this trip, Scribe focuses on the hearts and minds of some unique characters. Alisa’s works are lush snapshots of the beautiful landscapes and what hides in the foliage. This recent trip shows complex emotions in contrast to the soft forgotten world around them.

Recognize the stress and trauma through all of the temptations. So be it.

Rediscover the wonders created around you. Laugh again. You would think this was a resounding choice.

Fields of Mercy.

ARTISTS BIO

Donald “scribe” and Alisa Ross have been making art together for 30 years.

Alisa graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute and is a Fiber Artist. Her work ranges from character development for various companies to contemporary art drawing influences from nature and urban surroundings.

Scribe is most known for his iconic murals in Kansas City and internationally for the past 30 years. He has shown work around the world, designed toys and is an author of three books. He is also known for being the resident artist for Children’s Mercy Hospital for eighteen years where he focused on making art that uplifted both the visitors and employees.

The two of them often collaborate on works based on some of the writings of Scribe where the character and environmental influences are traded back and forth to create the island of Nisamehe mounted to the back of a sea turtle.

Passages includes more than 40 sculptures, prints, paintings, and drawings by Robert Stackhouse, all from the Belger Collection.

Stackhouse was born in Bronxville, NY, in 1942, and moved to Florida as a teenager. He was one of the first students enrolled at the University of South Florida and graduated with a degree in studio art in 1965. He later earned an MFA from the University of Maryland.

His two-dimensional artwork often documents large-scale outdoor sculptures that were created with his students and volunteers. Many of them were of a scale where visitors could enter and pass through the installations. Often A‑frame wooden structures, the sculptures were literal passageways through art. Frequent imagery in Stackhouse’s output includes boats and ships (reflecting earthly and spiritual passages) and snakes (symbolic of regeneration and death). He was also especially intrigued with the process of a snake shedding its skin and slithering away afresh.

Early in his career Stackhouse maintained an active studio in New York City, while commuting to Washington, D.C., to teach at the Corcoran School of Art, and working on outdoor sculpture events throughout the country. In the mid-1990s he moved to Kansas City, teaching at the Kansas City Art Institute, continuing to create outdoor installations locally. Stackhouse and his wife and collaborator, Carol Mickett, have resided in the Tampa area for two decades. They continue to work on national public installation projects involving volunteers during the fabrication and installation process.

50 Bowls, 50 States, 50 Woodfires, includes 50 porcelain bowls made by artist Elaine Olafson Henry. Each thrown bowl was made using the same amount of clay from the same clay block, the same building and shaping process, and the same glaze. Curious about the effects of firing circumstances in different environments, Henry sent a bowl to a ceramist in each of the 50 states to be woodfired. The resulting bowls are products of the types of wood and variety of kilns used (Anagama, Arch, Bourry Box, Noborigama, Tube, and Train), the length of firing, and temperature reached. Henry explains “…like the human story [where] we all start out as a blank slate…it’s what happens to the bowl in its lifetime that changes it. Each bowl tells a story of what it went through.” The bowls will be presented with technical details, including names of wood firing team members, providing insights into each collaboration and the various nuances acquired during the firing process.