It All Just Feels Like One Long Day is an exhibition of paintings and artist books rooted in lived experience with addiction, recovery, trauma, and survival. Through intimate, meticulously crafted works, Sam Umbral examines the emotional realities of substance use disorder while confronting the social systems that punish vulnerability instead… (Read More)
Each of the works in this series begins with an idea about pattern: the branching of a tree, a grid, a surface composed of triangles, cross-hatch marks. A line is likely not a pattern, but becomes one when one line crosses another. This work is also about patterns in time,… (Read More)
Haw Contemporary is pleased to present MABELMADE, an exhibition of work by Mabel Johnson. Spanning the entire first floor of the gallery, the exhibition features garments and fiber-based forms shaped through hand pleating, embroidery, piecing, and repurposed textiles. At a moment when institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art are… (Read More)
fiftyseven-9, 2025, collage/acrylic/oil on canvas, 48” x 48” I’ve always felt like I have a heightened sense of colour. Even as a child, I was fascinated by colour combinations. My art is still an exploration of colour but also shape, texture, movement, and how the combination of all of these… (Read More)
Andy Brayman holds a BA in sociology and a BFA in ceramics from the University of Kansas (1996) and an MFA in ceramics from Alfred University (1998). His work is a combination of traditional craft, industrial processes, physical computing and contemporary art strategies. At their best, his pots demonstrate an object’s potential… (Read More)
Songlines, 2026, mixed media on linen, 36 x 41 in My work is an exercise in excavation. Using a mix of fabric, photography, and paint, I build "orchestrated histories" where layers are constantly being buried and unearthed. I am drawn to the gaps and slippages—the moments where colors fall out of… (Read More)
From 35,000 feet you can see the curvature of the Earth, the tops of clouds, brilliant sunrises and sunsets, and the intense blue of the atmosphere as it thins toward outer space. This series started with snapshots taken through airplane windows. Allen applied an algorithm to convert them into grids… (Read More)
In this body of work, Matthew Kluber investigates the intersection of painting and digital technology, locating itself at the point where the physical world (traditional media) meets the virtual world (new media). At this intersection, the ephemeral, un-located space of digital video is attached, by means of projection, to… (Read More)
Natural Law begins from the simple truth that entropy governs all things. At once structure and undoing, it’s the pulse that drives every system toward change. That sense of powerlessness, recently heavier as control feels increasingly beyond our reach, became the impetus for this exhibition, an accumulation of small… (Read More)
Oh Adept! The vessels are excited! They have patiently rested long: gestating and fermenting. The seeds have grown wise and the mischief blooms! Oh dear friend! An AWESOME outburst of splendor and charm! Spontaneous constellations, biology, and buds. Do these flowers stare back at me? Oh teacher! I have… (Read More)
Four or five years ago, I began a conversation with my eighty-year-old self. For a time he guided me. Then, as the world tilted further toward oblivion, he went quiet and became harder to find. In the studio I live with the questions he no longer answers. I find myself… (Read More)
Haw Contemporary is pleased to present READY FIRE AIM, a new exhibition by Archie Scott Gobber. Long known for his sharp fusion of text, image, and cultural critique, Gobber here leans into the immediacy of language as both subject and material. Painted phrases, clipped idioms, and everyday expressions are reconfigured… (Read More)
Haw Contemporary is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Mike Erickson, Reflections, boons, muses, joys and playpretties, the artist’s second with the gallery. It’s a bit like this. Lately, for the most part, there have been three Mikes. A Painting Mike, a Fishing Mike, and a Dreaming Mike. The Fishing… (Read More)
Haw Contemporary is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Debra Smith, Walking in Traffic, the artist’s fourth with the gallery. The exhibition presents new works through which the artist furthers her exploration of vivid compositions through the use of vintage textiles, creating works that display a controlled and… (Read More)
The Brain—is wider than the Sky— For—put them side by side— The one the other will contain With ease—and You—beside— The Brain is deeper than the sea— For—hold them—Blue to Blue— The one the other will absorb— As Sponges—Buckets—do— The Brain is just the weight of God— For—Heft them—Pound for… (Read More)
The paintings in DRAFT SET are a direct exploration of formal elements and strategies that have emerged over time in my practice. I have long had a literal and pragmatic collaboration with materials, systems, and phenomena framed in relationship with everyday kinetic experience, building and composing tools and devices,… (Read More)
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound; And frogs in the pools singing at night, And wild plum trees in tremulous white, Robins will wear their feathery fire Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire; And not one will… (Read More)
Fashion has long been a repository of beauty, identity, and self-expression, but beneath its surface lies a complex web of power, control and violence. This exhibition explores the ways in which garments shape and discipline bodies, particularly those of women, and how fashion is deeply entangled with histories of oppression,… (Read More)
The evolution of my painting has been based in landscape. I never thought of my work as having a style. It did evolve however. My early painting was abstract, influenced by Mondrian and then next, and importantly, by Cézanne. In the 1950’s, I used a low-key palette to try to… (Read More)
Haw Contemporary is proud to present Now & Then, an exhibition opening November 22, showcasing two distinct bodies of work by celebrated photographer Julie Blackmon accompanied by the poetry of Jim Howard. In the front gallery, visitors will encounter Blackmon’s work from the early 2000s, all in black and white… (Read More)
My work emerges from specific places—places I’ve developed a relationship with over time. There’s something alluring, something that brings me back again and again to the Kansas River, or Kaw, and its 173 miles of continuous transformation. I’m drawn into the river’s current and ancient coursing—this ongoing adventure of water… (Read More)
I am not a traveler. I was born in Kansas City, live in Kansas City and my photographs are mostly of Kansas City. France was not a place I had planned to see. My connection to France was through the photographer Eugène Atget. I loved his pictures and the way… (Read More)
This recent body of work deepens my exploration in saturated color, transparency, opacity, density and weight in sheared planes of industrial felt, and woodcut prints. As with previous work, I focus on edges, rhythmic intervals and sequences, and tactile surfaces that build layers in print and dimensional planes. These works… (Read More)
Racism is deeply rooted and alive within the Midwest's agricultural history and can be seen woven into the infrastructure of the Great Plains. Ghost of the Plains is a body of work that utilizes black-and-white photographs to focus on individual stories of Black farmers and Black horsemen, whose existence is… (Read More)
“Imagine a multidimensional spider's web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so ad infinitum. That is the… (Read More)
The watcher comes, knowing the small knowledge of his life in this body in this place in this world. He comes to a place of rest where he cannot mistake himself as larger than he is, the place of the gray flycatcher, the yellow butterfly, the green dragonfly, the white… (Read More)
When discussing my art I’ve frequently made references to being unable to plan ahead to a given end. I’ve rarely consciously had a particular conception that I manage to see through to its conclusion. I’ve often used terms like meandering, recognizing, responding and salvaging to describe what I find myself… (Read More)
Mark Cowardin’s work begins with observations of the absurd in relation to the intersection of us and Nature, shedding light on the extreme beauty that ironically exists in some of our most conspicuous forms of consumption. Illustrative of this irony, Just Passing Through embodies a dependency on the grid, yet… (Read More)
I began working with clay almost 30 years ago, in a high school ceramics class. Since that time I have been more or less continuously engaged with the problems of making forms with clay. I’ve learned from many teachers but my work does not come from any one particular tradition.… (Read More)
‘untie the spell’ (1) In the end, Prospero gives up the magic that he has usurped from a sprite, abandons his need for revenge, and chooses forgiveness. Thunder. ‘o dear father’ (2) Untie the spell of death, so that I am no longer hunted by the hounds of grief, mercy,… (Read More)
As with all art that I admire, mine also emerges from a conversation of the present with the past – my images are drawn from a broad repertoire of historical references that have been distilled into a private iconography. My current practice could be compared to that of a stage… (Read More)
Haw Contemporary is pleased to announce an expansive group exhibition celebrating our first ten years. Entitled "Decade", the show will feature new and classic work from over 40 gallery artists, stretching through all six exhibition spaces in the building. The exhibition opens this Friday, July 14, and will run through… (Read More)
Haw Contemporary is pleased to host a solo exhibition with Kika Karadi. A painter, Karadi makes large-scale, monochromatic, time-based works in which she applies stencils, masking tape, and oil-based ink to glass, effaces and rearranges the paint, then transfers it to canvas. Karadi’s process is visceral rather than calculated, likened by the artist to “drawing… (Read More)
Haw Contemporary is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Warren Rosser. Entitled Loose-threads:, the exhibition is Rosser’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery, and the first at our Lightwell space. Rosser is known as one of the region’s preeminent painters and educators, and his legacy looms large. We invite… (Read More)
It’s a bit like this. Lately, for the most part, there has been three Mikes. A Painting Mike, a Fishing Mike, and a Dreaming Mike. The Fishing Mike is trying to be more of the Painting Mike and Dreaming Mike while Fishing. The Dreaming Mike is trying to be more… (Read More)
In his new exhibition, Hello Darkness My Old Friend, Davin Watne presents two bodies of work that explore the concept of darkness - both the physical absence of natural light and the feeling of deep foreboding. Darkness is explored as an emotional state, a physical space, and a cultural signifier. … (Read More)
RIVERING “Rivers are among the most dynamic and sensitive features on earth, responding to environmental changes over intervals of time ranging from minutes to millennia. Wakefield Dort, Jr., Professor Emeritus of Geology, University of Kansas. RIVERING refers to my adventures and explorations of the Kansas River, or Kaw, as it… (Read More)
Haw Contemporary is pleased to announce a one-day only pop-up with Julie Blackmon in her hometown of Springfield, MO. The event will be held in the Night Windows house at 910 S. Pickwick, and will run from 3-6pm. A selection of Julie's new and classic work will be on view,… (Read More)
Spectrum, an exhibition of richly colored drawings from 2021-22 by Anne Lindberg, opens alongside the release of her new book with Dürer Editions (Dublin, Ireland). The exhibition includes drawings from two recent series called roots of how we measure and rising temperatures, each with flashes of brilliant color shot through… (Read More)
Julie Blackmon: Artist Talk + Book Signing Please join us this Saturday, December 3 for an artist talk and book signing with acclaimed photographer Julie Blackmon. Julie will talk about her current exhibition at the gallery, entitled Metaverse, and do a Q&A after the talk. Stay after to enjoy a glass of wine or… (Read More)
Haw Contemporary is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Julie Blackmon. Entitled Improvising, this will be Julie's first solo exhibition in Kansas City, featuring six new works from 2020 as well as a carefully curated selection of previous work. (Read More)
My work investigates facets of the Black American experience. Through a mostly “lens-based” practice, I focus on Blackness as I have lived it. I incorporate different modes of street and studio photography, as well as mixed media assemblages. By creating still lifes from found and personal objects, I decontextualize symbols… (Read More)
Marlee and Kevin’s collaboration represents the true nature of ancestry and the Black community. This collaboration is rooted in the desire to capture history, celebrate life and Black joy, bring visual representation to the oral histories of marginalized voices, and honor the maternal presence and mentorship present in this study… (Read More)
Haw Contemporary is pleased to announce a posthumous exhibition of still life paintings by artist, educator, and friend Wilbur Niewald. An opening reception will be held Thursday, June 30 (5-8pm) at Haw Contemporary. Aptly, entitled Still Life, the show runs through July 30. Remarks at 6 pm by Kansas City… (Read More)
Starting with recognizable objects DeBoer recreates them with rigorous detail in porcelain as well as realistic and imagined surfaces often depicting exact branding or imagery of Americana. The source of his inspiration for this exhibition comes from DeBoer's upbringing in South Dakota and everyday objects in the backdrop of his… (Read More)
This show should have been titled “If You Can You Prolly Should”. Once again, I’m opening a show on Friday the 13th. Last time, 2 years ago, my show opened and closed the same day as the pandemic began. It was the first time I experienced zero post-show depression, there… (Read More)
The paintings begin as pastel drawings on raw, stretched canvas. I simply start by making a thick line using the square shaped pastel stick on its side, and every other line that follows is a response to the one that came before it. On certain canvases I use only black… (Read More)
Over the last two years, we have encountered several important and critical events including the global pandemic, Black Life Matters and social justice. I have felt anxious about the current situation and uncertainty towards the future. This new series of work in charcoal and ink expresses my concerns and desires… (Read More)
Stereophonic / Semaphoric This exhibition represents a broad set of explorations in my studio that have taken place mostly within the confines of the pandemic. The isolated conditions have provoked a re-examination of my priorities and promoted a renewed spirit of fascination with the functional and mechanical realm as it… (Read More)
In the studio, I reflect on my decisions within each piece, listening to them tell me who they are and what they need. My practice is an ongoing learning experience - gaining wisdom through mistakes and advancing my intuition. In this contemplative daze I hear a voice….. Moon: You’re daydreaming.… (Read More)
Haw Contemporary is pleased to host a second solo exhibition with San Francisco-based artist Jenny Sharaf. Sharaf's process is instinctual, spiritual and meditative. Her paintings, installations, murals, videos, and happenings celebrate process and the artist's intuition, while reflecting on art history, counterculture, feminism, formalism and the rhetoric of abstraction. Sharaf's large-scale paintings… (Read More)
The first serious photographs I remember taking were of a white birch tree in our front yard in Westwood. My mother had just planted it. She was very proud of it. It was the only white birch on our block. I felt her pride and wanted to somehow capture it… (Read More)
I confess. I frequently don’t know where I am going to end up with a painting. But I consider chance, that aleatoric interface/interference to be my friend. Similar to the Situationists who would dèrive (drift/meander) the streets of Paris to engage with the attractions or distractions they would encounter, I’d… (Read More)
The word color itself is very potent – especially today. The fact of color is profoundly complex, even elusive. Color can comfort or confront, it can influence or disguise. Our awareness of color is optical, but our experience of color is cultural. Even when explained it remains a wonder. Color… (Read More)
My work emerges from specific places—places I’ve developed a relationship with over time. There’s something alluring, something that brings me back again and again to the Kansas River, or Kaw, and its 173 miles of ceaseless transformation. I’m drawn into the river’s current and ancient coursing—this ongoing adventure of water… (Read More)
In preparing this exhibition there were many starts and stops, fear and hibernating, loss and shared resilience. There was a prevailing feeling that everything I did mattered and nothing I did mattered. It was a constant feeling of high-stakes and low-stakes, concurrent and steady. Going to the grocery store was… (Read More)
I am interested in the weight of a place and the transcendence of a distilled moment. My sculpture, drawings and installations are often informed by the conditions of a place, the pitch of a roof, the depth of green of a forest, an earthen rubble wall. I make objects of… (Read More)
Bringing together their individual affinities for constructed space, Warren Rosser, Caleb Taylor, and Armin Mühsam present EDGE I CUT I PLAY, an exhibition investigating the structural potential of color, pattern, and the multiple connections existing between their practices. Each artist’s work is an extended dialogue with content paralleled in contemporary… (Read More)
Home and Place (Lost and Forgotten) This body of work began almost exactly one year ago during a residency in a remote town in Newfoundland, about as far east as you can go in North America. I have lived in many Canadian provinces and culturally they are all quite… (Read More)
Robert Bingaman is an artist based in Kansas City, Missouri. In 2014, selections from Night Pools, were shown in a solo exhibition at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City. More recently, he expanded upon the pool motif with large- scale paintings for Until It’s All You See, a solo… (Read More)
The paintings in “A Relative Way” highlight a variety of styles, genres, materials and processes that typify Sall's works of recent years. Ranging from drawing-based paintings that incorporate pastels on bare canvas to more traditional oil and acrylic paintings made with brushes and palette knives to paintings made with brooms… (Read More)
“Won’t He Do It?” is an exhibition that navigates many topics of life, death, mortality, illness, healing, hope, despair, trauma. The images and sculpture exude a faithful joy and hope, like the thin thread we find ourselves hanging on to in order to survive and thrive. This faith propels us… (Read More)
The work in this show comes from my political bubble, a place filled with a gnawing anxiety that often feels as if it’s imploding. The daily bludgeoning of what once was considered normal is too much. How is it that we may so strongly disagree with those who raised us… (Read More)
Something clear I think art, if it is meaningful at all, is a conversation with other artists. You say something, they say something, you move back and forth. John Baldessari (1931 - 2020) Haw Contemporary is pleased to bring together a distinct group of artists who define their art with… (Read More)
Haw Contemporary is pleased to announce our final exhibition of 2019 - a group show entitled Who Needs This. The work in the exhibition covers a wide range of styles and mediums. Some of it has been seen before. There are old friends and new. Artists at different stages in… (Read More)
The paintings of Wilbur Niewald have a deep and persistent connection to his lifetime home of Kansas City, and in a larger sense, to the history of painting itself. After developing a unique abstract language for his paintings in the fifties and sixties, Niewald began to paint in the representational… (Read More)
I began this work with a pair of sandbar paintings from photos of the Kaw along McDowell Creek Road near Manhattan. Then the sandbars disappeared. 2019 has been a story of weather. New terms to describe weather and climatic shifts keep springing up like “bomb cyclone.” That was the wet… (Read More)
Debra Smith’s new works contained in the exhibition Seeking Balance are the result of both an intuitive process, formed from years of working with historic textiles, and a mindful practice. Each work is an open expression, constructed in an extraordinary way - with hours of stitching, embedding layer upon layer… (Read More)
SHENEQUA is an Artprenuer who received her Masters of Design in Fashion, Body, & Garment at School of the Art Institute of Chicago under the mentorship of Nick Cave and Liat Smestad. She has exhibited her works in Tangled Roots at InterUrban ArtHouse in Overland Park, KS, Performing Labor at… (Read More)
The house is still and quiet. I sit at my kitchen table with my sketchbook opened, surrounded by items that accumulated on the table throughout the day. There is an ever-present, yet always changing still life of a sort that occurs on my kitchen table. The set-ups are brief and… (Read More)
“What Do You Do When You No Longer Know What Good Is” depicts imagined moments within the lifespan of a work of art. Born from asking myself: “How does a work of art come to be?” and, “Where does art go when it dies?” I sought to stage and act… (Read More)
Harrow is a ceramic sculptor who explores issues of production and mechanization. His multidisciplinary art practice spans sculpture and design, elegantly integrating work made by the hand with digital modeling software and computer-controlled machines. Ceramics authority and critic Glen R. Brown, in Ceramics Art and Perception, said Harrow’s large-scale mixed… (Read More)
Jenny Sharaf is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in San Francisco, CA. Her paintings, installations, murals, videos, and happenings celebrate process, while reflecting on art history, counterculture, feminism and abstraction. She explores the mythology of California, Hollywood vernacular and the quintessential “California girl” in the work, partly because of… (Read More)
Representing human experience through the personification of lineage, The black interior is a space marked with love, mantra, self-healing, and culture. Using collage as a metaphor to describe black [her]story, Johnson presents us with narratives that reference nostalgia as place through spaces that remind her of home. The scenes of… (Read More)
Our world is made with cocky prescriptions of stability scaffolding the earth’s aggregates. It is a losing battle that convinces us per generation that we can control the elements and survive according to our dreams. Through systematic approaches to compositions, these works and much of my practice employ a balance… (Read More)
In Words: Almost Nothing Sometime after the election, I began cutting leaves and photographing them. A small impulse to make something visible again. After many walks, I would mark sites of potential, choosing a trajectory but lacking an objective. The pictures describe a world that you and I occupy, full… (Read More)
This body of work is an homage to Plato, Paraselcus, and Odilon Redon. Fenchel’s paintings are studies of beauty and ancient allegory, and his studio process is a study of personal growth. This micro/macro relationship of practice and theory mirrors that of the alchemist working to raise the vibrations of… (Read More)
I worked with my long-time collaborator Pele Prints, a fine art printer in St. Louis, to create the Gemelli suite of relief prints. The goal of the project was to work within a fixed set of parameters to create a body of work that was expansive in both color and… (Read More)
Matthew Kluber's work investigates the intersection of painting and digital technology, locating itself at the point where the physical world (traditional media) meets the virtual world (new media). At this intersection the ephemeral, un-located space of digital video is attached, by means of projection, to the fixed object of a… (Read More)
My classical training in ceramics and fine art led to the negation of craft ideals and culture. I am heavily inspired by the brave high school students sneaking bongs in kilns and making ashtrays and pipes. Disapproved objects and summer camp ceramics take over my source imagery. I’ve always been… (Read More)
Opening Reception: Friday, March 15, 6 - 9 PM Location: Haw Contemporary Stockyards Lineage and Impact: KCAI Faculty Past and Present, March 1- May 4 at Haw Contemporary Stockyards, celebrates seven decades of working artists on the faculty of the Kansas City Art Institute, a community that values making, teaching,… (Read More)
Opening Reception: Friday, March 8, 6-9PM Location: Haw Contemporary Crossroads A mashup of traditional craft, industrial processes, and contemporary art and architecture strategies, Brayman’s distinctive work, whether sculptural or purely decorative, demonstrates the potential of an object to be simultaneously beautiful and cerebral. Show Room features a range of smaller functional work, along… (Read More)
Opening Reception: Friday, January 25th, 6-9PM Location: Haw Contemporary Crossroads RED—a long-drawn-out, intense red, monochrome through and through. This saturated, warm red unfolds its very own effect, a lasting presence. Hear Coca‑Cola, and you see red. This red is dominant, powerful, melodic, and permeated by an infinite number of pigments that… (Read More)
Opening Reception: Friday, January 11th, 6-9PM Location: Haw Contemporary Stockyards The Domestication of Johnny Naugahyde A friend once told me that he thought about my work every morning—because he kept one of my pieces in his sock drawer. This remark stuck with me, and I started to pay attention to where… (Read More)
December 6, 2018 - January 16, 2019 Opening Reception: December 6th, 6-9PM, Haw Contemporary Crossroads Haw Contemporary Crossroads is pleased to present a solo exhibition of Warren Rosser’s recent works including his foray into new media and technology. With these tools Rosser has expanded his abstract language creating transparent layers of… (Read More)
November 16, 2018 - January 5, 2019 Opening Reception: November 16th, 6-9PM, Haw Contemporary Stockyards Strange how memories are often not true. It seems that the most accurate way to recall our experiences is through remembered feelings. And yet, feeling is as ephemeral and ever-changing as we humans are. A… (Read More)
November 16, 2018 - January 5, 2019 Opening Reception: November 16th, 6-9PM, Haw Contemporary Stockyards For the better part of four years, Caleb Taylor’s practice has grown to engage dialogues that shift abstract form away from pure distillation and focus on its relationships to constructed environments, history of place, and dynamics… (Read More)
Haw Contemporary Crossroads Opening: November 2, 2018 from 6-9 PM I revel in the lyrical sweep of the Kansas River, particularly an oblique, aerial view of the floodplain stretching to the prairie horizon. Certain sections have an abstract asymmetry that it makes it easy to compose a canvas. There’s a rhythm, a cadence… (Read More)
Shane Lutzk’s exhibition Interrupted Flow features a compilation of ceramic pieces. While Lutzk’s focus to date has centered around large wheel thrown vessels inspired by historical and contemporary architecture, the work for this exhibition features a number of unique sculptures that reflect his personal life experiences, including a diagnosis of Juvenile… (Read More)
September 7 – November 17, 2018 Opening: September 7, 2018 from 6 to 9PM Haw Contemporary is pleased to present broken-riddle piece, our season-opening exhibition with gallery artist Anne Lindberg and poet Ginny Threefoot. broken-riddle piece features 17 new drawings by Lindberg and a series of 14 poetry fragments by Threefoot. This… (Read More)
Tornado Warning includes one site-specific room installation, one large scroll painting and three small framed charcoal drawings Zhang combines her gorgeous long hair drawings with iconic American midwest tornados to create a surrealistic visual experience. “Born and raised in China, I have had long hair since high school, and it… (Read More)
Haw Contemporary presents SiteParallels, bringing together the sculpture of Marcie Miller Gross and the paintings of Armin Mühsam. The title of the show points to the shared conceptual and aesthetic inclinations of the two artists while acknowledging that these affinities have evolved from independent practices. Each of their bodies of… (Read More)
In our struggles we often taste or see goodness that is beyond our ability to take in. Sometimes we taste beauty, truth, or love in a way that is more than our hearts can take in. We are blinded. This exhibition explores various sides of struggle - challenge, tragedy, and… (Read More)
"The Fool's Journey" is the third part of BBQLA's yearlong migrating exhibition series afa (american fine arts). afa is a multilayered project that manifests as a growing exhibition which, in seven parts, shows the work of emerging artists from the United States, Canada and Mexico in artists-run and alternative spaces,… (Read More)
This body of work reflects directly on the rural midwestern environment Amy Kligman grew up in. In exploring her past she often engages with thoughts on issues of class, feminism, mental health, loss, and isolation. The personal and cultural weight of everyday objects and an identity rooted in the colliding of worlds is also apparent. Many… (Read More)
A survey of our personal histories and the objects that fill them. Brock DeBoer is captivated with porcelain’s poetic ability to control and limit objects. DeBoer puts those limitations to the test with the subjects that make up his sculptures. It is reflected in the scope of work produced for… (Read More)
Echoes is an exhibition that explores both the possible and impossible connections found in the works of artists from two sites, Kansas City and Berlin. The exhibited works have formal or procedural similarities, which in an exhibition establishes a fragile symmetry. These unstable adjacencies provoke the urge to generate connections, but each artist, in… (Read More)
The earliest sense of amateur (“one that has a marked fondness, liking, or taste”) is strongly connected to its roots: the word came into English from the French amateur, which in turn comes from the Latin word for “lover” (amator). This has led some people to assume that the word… (Read More)
The paintings in this group all began as pastel drawings on raw canvas. I started using this technique about fifteen years ago but would only make a painting like this every few years or so. Last spring I decided to make a larger series based on this process. Using soft… (Read More)
In conjunction with The Charlotte Street Foundation and their 20th anniversary celebration, Haw Contemporary is pleased to host a group exhibition opening Friday, December 8 and running through January 17. The title for the exhibition is Every Street, in line with the organization’s overall theme for the anniversary - Every… (Read More)
Restitution of the dream A garment defines sleep. A clothed sleep. The garment that defines sleep is vulnerable, volatile, intimate. It corresponds with a supposed domesticity and the hour in which the body rests to recover from whatever has happened. The restfulness of safe sleep. A set of these garments… (Read More)
The recent sculptures of Satoru Koizumi portray humans dressed in animal pelts, their expressions of naive purity offset by a sorrowful air of loneliness and anxiety. In Japan’s (and indeed, much of the world’s) hyper-civilized society, people are increasingly forced to walk a thin line between losing our animal instincts… (Read More)
Grace Sachi Troxell explores an elegy to material remembrance and the promise of the ritual of play. Through intuition and physicality the work investigates haptic experiences of urgent play, metamorphosis, sensuality, and displacement. Fiberglass, steel, and textiles shed their familiar roles to transform into a language of ruins. Grace received… (Read More)
From an early stage in my career I have periodically turned to the collage to shape my aesthetic, either because I felt the need to jumpstart a stalled process or because I wanted to mark a momentous transformation of personal circumstances. This new body of works on paper has its… (Read More)
Andrzej Zieliński is fascinated by the visual manifestation of new communication technologies, which are the subject matter of his work. At the core of his work in drawing, painting, sculpture and printmaking are the ideas of 'interface' and 'data transmission'. The devices Zieliński paints and sculpts are refreshingly liberated from… (Read More)
The exhibition is divided into the four seasons, albeit out of order. There is no irony. There is no sarcasm. There is empathy. There is love. There is a story. It is a story of darkness and of light. And confusion. No redemption. Only transformation. The story is the same… (Read More)
Cast in bright white porcelain, the objects in Archival Nostalgia have been prepared for future discovery, while carrying with them the details of their extinction. Just as we uncover layers of information about the notion of value in cultures before us through stories and clues left by ancient ceramics and… (Read More)
Andrzej Zieliński, Anne Lindberg, Archie Scott Gobber, Armin Mühsam, Corey Antis, Corey Goering, Davin Watne, Deanna Dikeman, Debra Smith, Dylan Mortimer, Eric Sall, Garry Noland, Hong Chun Zhang, Matthew Kluber, Michael Krueger, Molly Kaderka, Philip Heying, Russell Shoemaker, Warren Rosser (Read More)
remnants and residue has grown from a body of work that began five plus years ago when I started collecting unsolicited mail from a single source. Within my practice of art making my work is based on a foundation of collection, deconstruction, and re-organization of subject matter often considered to… (Read More)
Combining the history of oil painting with the visual language of our contemporary lives, Davin Watne’s Picture the Wall is an installation of 38 paintings standing ten feet tall and spanning the width of the gallery. The history of oil painting is steeped in the rhetoric of power. Evidenced by… (Read More)
Skipt Antenna is a memorial to fleeting neural noise, built by piecing together threads of disparate memories. Jotted down thoughts; sketched recollections of people and places never likely to be seen again; rocks ejected from crumbling structures (ancient or modern); and litter-like neon and discarded bottle caps all create flickering glimpses of… (Read More)
You cannot see the great sweeping bends of the Kansas River from the ground. For years it was only an intriguing blur as I drove over one of the bridges that span it. When I moved to Lawrence from Kansas City in 1996, I began exploring the river’s edges––riparian trails… (Read More)
Works from the ‘50s and ‘60s showcases the early work of Kansas City legendary Wilbur Niewald. In the ‘50s, Niewald focused almost exclusively on the landscape, responding to basic forces and rhythms from his subjects. Creating gestural drawings with charcoal and crayon, he would return to the studio and use… (Read More)
The paintings of Wilbur Niewald have a deep and persistent connection to his lifetime home of Kansas City, and in a larger sense, to the history of painting itself. After developing a unique abstract language for his paintings in the fifties and sixties, Niewald began to paint in the representational… (Read More)
Haw Contemporary is pleased to announce Master Graphics, an exhibition of prints spanning a half century. Works from Michael Krueger, Andrzej Zieliński, Yoonmi Nam, Roger Shimomura, Rashawn Griffin, Archie Scott Gobber, and Carly Kurka will be displayed throughout the gallery's first floor alongside lithographs and silkscreens from modern masters including… (Read More)
Debra Smith has the aesthetic sensibilities of a painter, but rather than applying pigment to a fabric support, Smith creates her compositions from a palette of already-dyed textiles. These she cuts by hand into geometric shapes, manipulating a limited range of colors and patterns within the grid of an intuitive,… (Read More)
Loitering with Intent is my first solo exhibition of paintings at Haw Contemporary, and will occupy all three of the ground floor galleries. In the first gallery the work plays with structure and the shifting relationship between two-dimensional forms and their translation into shallow three-dimensional structures. The group of four… (Read More)
The works are self-reflections, a sort of wishful nostalgia or fantasy of a memory that carries the weight of melancholy within its realism. There is an expectation one has when they see an exhibition of paintings in a gallery. Sights of grandeur and a literal stepping back to see the… (Read More)
For the second consecutive year, Haw Contemporary hosts Kansas City Society for Contemporary Photography's exhibition of recent works by members. This year's show is juried by Kansas City art collector Larry Meeker. (Read More)
I long for a kind of healing that stretches my imagination. One that generates life out of seeming lifelessness. I desire hope when there doesn’t seem to be a reason to hope. Discovery, possibility, and faith involve a risk to jump beyond what is currently imaginable. I long to move… (Read More)
The most alone I’ve ever been, painting, was in the backcountry of the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, just north of Strong City, Kansas. This rare gift of time and space to work was granted through the newly established Tallgrass Artist Residency, which gave ten artists two weeks to work on… (Read More)
The Thrills of Common Ground Generally one of two things happens when looking at Mike Sinclair's photographs. If you've never been to the place photographed, his images urge you to go there. Yet even if you know a place well, you wonder how he made this picture, as the images… (Read More)
“I can’t do it justice.” Our most vivid memories tend to elude capture. We try to share them with others, go Dutch on what was so meaningful to us—only to stammer in the recounting, repeating ourselves with different inflections and emphases, impotent in the face of the infinite. Enter Robert… (Read More)
In this exhibition of new work, Andy Brayman continues to explore the intersection of craft and technology. In addition to ceramics, New Work expands into steel and enamel, while maintaining Brayman's exquisite sense of geometry and design. (Read More)
Dear Red. If you're reading this, you've gotten out. And if you've come this far, maybe you're willing to come a little further. You remember the name of the town, don't you? (Read More)
My work considers the space where transience and permanence coexist. In my on-going drawings and prints, I have used images of man-made environments and objects, and cut flower arrangements as metaphors to evoke a sense of time that is both fleeting and eternal. In the arranged flower imagery, the flowers,… (Read More)
In the exhibition What Remains, Chris Daharsh and Molly Kaderka present their latest works, which explore the relationship between material processes and historical objects. In these works, the artists pay particular attention to remnants, to what is left behind, either by humans or by natural forces, contemporary and ancient. Both… (Read More)
"We are currently processing information within a time of cynicism and in order to deal with our very pessimistic consciousness, we are actively initiating an element of levity, so that we may continue to bear the persistent weight of life." - Pigpen This work is a multifaceted reappropriation of cultural… (Read More)
Having recently moved across the county to the home of the Hudson River School painters, Anne Lindberg has recognized a deepening in her process, one which joins the personal and the abstract in reference to place and the sublime. In a small series of new drawings, Lindberg takes new turn,… (Read More)
My studio practice is multi-disciplinary. The one constant is an openness to “rough patches”, glitches or mistakes. The presence of edges or boundaries between mistakes establishes immediate contextual and formal relationships. Those abutments mime our interactions with art and with each other. What goes with what? What happens on either… (Read More)
Within his current body of work, Cover the Earth, Anthony Baab experiments with objects and materials associated with consumerism – packaging, advertisements, and logos. Baab views an explicit sense of command and function conveyed through these containers, perhaps more so than the commodities they hold or represent. Attempting to regenerate… (Read More)
What does it mean to divorce the protagonist from the narrative? In my latest body of work, I address this question, arranging a historically ambiguous cast of Hussars, miscreants and dandies in dislocated, overlapping and flattened narrative time. They are suspended as elements in elaborate still lives becoming empty shells… (Read More)
After the paper was relieved of memory, after the books were bound in black linen, after the tables were mortised and smoothed, after everything was finished and complete, especially the books on the shelves, and the tables, more or less complete with only the book wedges on them staring upward… (Read More)
Ken Ferguson (1928 - 2004) is considered to be one of the most influential educators in ceramic arts. Ferguson retired as Professor Emeritus from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1996 after 32 years of educating and mentoring young students. He transformed the Institute into a center for ceramic art… (Read More)
Toshiko Takaezu (1922 - 2011), a Japanese-American ceramist whose closed pots and torpedo-like cylinders, derived from natural forms, helped to elevate ceramics from the production of functional vessels to a fine art. Early in her career she made traditional vessels but in the late 1950s, strongly influenced by the Finnish… (Read More)
Wendy Red Star’s work layers influences drawn from her tribal background (Crow), daily surroundings, aesthetic experiences, collected ephemera and conjured histories that are both real and imagined. Through her photographs and sculpture new universes are built, simultaneously urban-rural and high-low with their own language of symbols created from such seemingly… (Read More)
It’s as if with line from the loom - Weaver knife and weaver brush Stitch color thick into Diamond and terrace, into Planes black as wool tied by Stripe and cross, all falling in The warp and weft of weave, Patchwork tricksters playing ‘till Depths fill with ring and bell… (Read More)
For a long time roses were the things I was least interested in at the rose garden. I went to watch and photograph people. I went to watch the wedding parties who’d stop by for group portraits - in late spring the American Pillar roses on the south edge of the… (Read More)
Making Waves is creating a statement that challenges viewers’ eyes and minds. In this show, I combine long hair (my identity) with nature (water, wind and Kansas prairie) to present 6 large charcoal drawings that reflect traditional skills and contemporary ideas. I use disembodied long, black, straight hair to refer to… (Read More)
I started out thinking I would write an artist's statement about what the title “F” means. Then I thought I would leave it ambiguous and jump into writing about identity and contemporary culture but that seemed too obvious. I thought I could write about my process but ultimately I decided… (Read More)
You cannot see the great sweeping bends of the Kansas River from the ground. For years it was only an intriguing blur as I drove over one of the bridges that span it. When I moved to Lawrence from Kansas City in 1996, I began exploring the river’s edges -… (Read More)
Haw Contemporary is excited to announce a group exhibition opening July 24 in galleries 1-6. YOU PEOPLE features new work from an expansive range of artists, several showing for the first time at the gallery. Featured artists include Ricky Allman, Corey Antis, Anthony Baab, Miki Baird, Laura Berman, Robert Bingaman,… (Read More)
That Used to Be Us is a group show delving into the economy of our bodies, labeling theory, and the need for cultural reinvestment. Exhibiting artists refute society’s traditionally “true discourses” as they discuss personal identities. Globalization through information technology gives visibility to societies rapidly building their infrastructure, while previous… (Read More)
If a stylist is presented with new collaborators and inspiration points, then they will be motivated by original means; this will produce new dialogues and formats. If the function of the experimentation is focused on collaboration, then the task will take form intuitively; this final outcome will yield a wide… (Read More)
Haw Contemporary is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of two related series by New York-based Bill Jacobson. Place (Series) + Lines In My Eyes together showcase the celebrated photographer's newest bodies of work, completed between 2009 and 2014. A 92 page monograph, recently published by Radius Books (Santa Fe),… (Read More)
I am interested in the behavior of light. Sometimes a camera records light in a way that our eyes do not see. In this capacity, the camera becomes an extension of our own senses, helping us to perceive a fundamental element of our existence in novel ways. Generally, the camera… (Read More)
The work of Sanam Emami, Andy Brayman, and Del Harrow explores themes of function and design, volume, containment, furniture, and the body, but always with a particular sensitivity to nuances of repetition and variation in line, form and mark. In his essay “The Workmanship of Certainty and the Workmanship of… (Read More)
Making monoprints offers me a fluid process to investigate color and form; to create new approaches that play with the transparency and overlaying of color. The press bed becomes a site for generating the new forms and structures that drive my overall body of work. Having recently acquired an etching… (Read More)
See Be, Michael Krueger’s first solo exhibition at Haw Contemporary and his first ever exhibition of paintings opens January 30, 2015. The subject of the exhibition is rooted in landscape, and notions of wilderness and observation. The title, in part, refers to the act of seeing as becoming; meditative observation as a… (Read More)
You know, it's easy to talk 'word play' when talking about Scott and his signs. That he'd punned that way and this way; that the paint and the words danced just right; that he'd cut off just enough… but I don't think I buy it. Not as the heart of… (Read More)
The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all. - John Updike (Read More)
Peregrine Honig's latest collection of large-scale oil paintings transform into backdrops for donor selfies; self-portraiture destined for digital immortality. With the use of Western religious iconography to create temporarily mounted parlors and paintings that feature large decorative rings and central radiations, every sitter becomes contextualized as a saint, royalty, or… (Read More)
Corey Goering's latest collection of paintings and drawings, primal as I wanna be, are intense works on paper filled with anxiety and introspective wonder. Viewers are immediately brought into a world informed by childhood drawings and 70's television graphics, complete with vibrant, unnatural color, energized parades of lines, and intricate patterns… (Read More)
In her newest body of work Shifting Territory, Smith focuses on gestural motions and the graphic aspects in her work. The foundation of the series comes from her collection of vintage kimono fabric and a striped dead stock yardage originally intended for men's suit lining. Smith found this striped silk… (Read More)
REACH includes plein air landscapes as well as studio investigations of certain naturally occurring visual phenomena of twilight in the open prairie. For over twenty years, I’ve painted on location in Kansas’s tallgrass prairies and have experienced and painted distant horizons with atmospheric perspective, dramatic color shifts and vivid spectrums… (Read More)
The sun and the moon jockey dusk and dawn, flowers close, insects sing, another day on earth ends. In this exhibition the artists punch and pull at light and dark and many at the fade between. Some confront the night straight on while others use hidden cameras and deep internal dialogue. When the… (Read More)
Anne Lindberg, in drawn together at Haw Contemporary, presents for the first time both two and three-dimensional drawings conceived as an environmental work that activates the full spectrum of the gallery space. Using eye level as a coordinating reference point and measure of scale, her immersive exhibition gracefully summons an awareness of the… (Read More)
"My aim in these works was to create a living, moving image. I began with a photograph of a folded sheet of glossy paper that was printed, re-folded, and re-photographed many times. The process later required drawing to further animate the graphic content of the photograph. Further on, sculptural forms… (Read More)
Stars are the inspiration for Laura Berman’s exhibition Pulsar. Directional, magnetic and precise, pulsar stars inform the way we view and measure the universe. These dense stellar remnants are born in supernovas; simultaneously inward-falling and outward-exploding stars. Berman has spent a great deal of time in the Kansas Flint Hills,… (Read More)
The paintings in James Brinsfield’s exhibition, Self-Titled, sit in dialogue with the beginnings of abstract expressionism. Brinsfield investigates the emotional, gestural work of painters like Jackson Pollock, fragmenting it and abstracting it even further. “I wanted to invent a new signature one that didn’t mimic the bravura model of… (Read More)
Since the early seventies, Wilbur Niewald has maintained a singular focus on representation, constantly refining the still life, figure, and landscape. In this solo exhibition of recent paintings,Niewald continues his signature meditative exploration of his subjects. Wilbur Niewald is Professor Emeritus of Painting at the Kansas City Art Institute, where… (Read More)
"I spent this past summer making trips into the Kansas countryside, approaching the land as a newcomer, as I did 18 years ago. But how could I possibly look at this land with the same eyes? By accepting the inevitable shift, the landscape became my starting point. I gave recognition… (Read More)
This solo exhibition continues an exploration in sculptural form, of ideas related to parts and wholes. Here this plays out through four structures: a still life, a morphology, a series of ceramic sculptures, and a chandelier. For each of these, the idea of volume is essential - movement between interiors… (Read More)
Corey Antis’ studio practice investigates how images, objects and spaces can be proposals for the experience of perception and the uncanny. This exhibition depicts a framework where constructions and their representations maintain and subvert aspects of themselves. A Robert Smith lyric, The Head on the Door reflects how the perception… (Read More)
It is a difficult concept for the mind to accept that the answers to the deepest mysteries can only be found between the lines. To see more clearly, we must learn to soften and broaden our gaze. In the same way that the universe needed nothingness to come into being,… (Read More)
Miki Baird’s work is based on a foundation of collection, discovery, deconstruction and reconstruction of pedestrian narrative. Using routinely collected material and photography read this is a continuing exploration of the growing stockpile of unforeseen direct mail carried away from a single address. Not unlike Baird’s other series these works… (Read More)
Working Parts represents Marcie Miller Gross’ ongoing fascination with the relationship of materiality and elemental, abstract form. Through an accumulative means of building, Gross examines the visceral relationship of mass and void, density, line, weight, and compression while considering the absorptive silence of these industrial felt solids. The potent physicality… (Read More)
Santa Fe to Kansas City is more than a road trip. It’s a challenging 900 mile journey of arid plains, desert, mountains, rattlesnakes and violent thunderstorms. Crossing the southwestern region of North America and connecting St. Louis with New Mexico, the Santa Fe Trail was originally a trading route opened… (Read More)
