Join the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center for two complimentary Solo Art Exhibitions by brother and sister Troy and Holly Swangstu, June 4‑July 31, 2021 in the main gallery space. Both artists will be showcasing new bodies of work produced over the last two years paying tribute to Jim Leedy’s legacy of fostering creative experimentation, as well as the artists, own personal histories, educational backgrounds, and artistic evolutions that forged them into the innovators they are today.
Holly’s showcase, entitled, Elemental Intentions, will focus on her signature use of fiber as a painting and drawing material to create evocative colorscapes, coupled with new and exciting divergences in mixed media.
Troy’s exhibit, titled Blankety Blank, Blank, will explore his viscerally expressive and symbolically potent images inspired by the day-to-day rigors of farm life. Troy’s installation will also include a special collaboration featuring multi-disciplinary artist, writer, teacher, and Kansas City institution, Jose Faus.
Both Holly and Troy are heavily inspired by the natural world, but neither allows the objectively referential to dominate their work, instead transfiguring the commonplace through the lens of memory, feeling, and the process of art-making itself. Though bound by shared experience as siblings and the heady influence of early days in the then fledgling Crossroads Art District, these artists have nonetheless undertaken wildly divergent paths. As these two solo shows will make clear, these paths, while sometimes meandering, always circled back to an unwavering core focus, Art with a capital A.
