The second day of my Total Eclipse cross-country road trip
in Kansas City was a day of Art that began at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of
Art. The city's traditional main
museum of art opened in 1933 in a two story neoclassical structure made
possible by combining two major bequests made by William Rockhill Nelson and
Mary McAfee Atkins (they did not know one another in life). In 2007 it received a major modern
addition of the Bloch Building to feature works of Contemporary Art, African
Art, Photography, and modern Sculpture.
Because there is so much to cover, I am breaking this visit up into
smaller chunks of images and examples from the collections by topic. We begin with the contemporary
galleries in the Bloch Building.
You conveniently enter this building from the parking
garage. The first thing you
encounter is a monumental weaving.
I, however, could find no attribution for it anywhere. So we are left to simply say it's
beautiful and move on.
I LOVE Thiebold. He applies paint with the apparent
viscosity of icing and it's all I can do to just not stick out my tongue and
lick his canvas!
My favorite photo-realist painter. At one point I fashioned some of my watercolors after his
work.
"My works quote historical sources and position young black men within the field of power." ~ Kehinde Wiley.
The hottest ticket in any town. He not only derives motifs from Renaissance portraiture, he also has created a workshop around it--the modern equivalent to Medieval ones from cultures European, sub-asian Indian/Persian, and far East Asian Chinese/Japanese/Korean. Kehinde embodies the Renaissance human of the 21st century, and after failing to see his blockbuster retrospective exhibition in Atlanta or Brooklyn, fate saw it clear to let me wallow in it in Seattle in March of 2016. If there is a museum in North America that doesn't own at least one of his works...it's a pretty huge hole in their contemporary collection.
"Spell" 2006, Maria Lassnig (Austrian) 1919 - 2014
I love her work, and I'm seeing it more and more in contemporary collections since her death. She was born the same year as my mother--if only my mother had lived so long...
The way this work emulated a quilt resonated with me.
This one is part of a two painting focus exhibition called
simply "Pollock and Motherwell".
"Chromoplastic Mural" 2011, Luis Tomasello
(Argentinian) 1915 - 2014
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