Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art
Encyclopedia
Kansas City, Missouri
Kansas City, Missouri is the largest city in the U.S. state of Missouri and is the anchor city of the Kansas City Metropolitan Area, the second largest metropolitan area in Missouri. It encompasses in parts of Jackson, Clay, Cass, and Platte counties...
. The core of the museum
Art gallery
An art gallery or art museum is a building or space for the exhibition of art, usually visual art.Museums can be public or private, but what distinguishes a museum is the ownership of a collection...
's permanent collection is the Bebe and R. Crosby Kemper Jr.
R. Crosby Kemper Jr.
R. Crosby Kemper, Jr. was born into an influential banking and railroading family in Kansas City, Missouri. His father was R. Crosby Kemper....
Collection, a gift of the museum's founders. The collection includes works created after the 1913 Armory Show
Armory Show
Many exhibitions have been held in the vast spaces of U.S. National Guard armories, but the Armory Show refers to the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art that was organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors...
to works by present-day artist
Artist
An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...
s. Artists in the permanent collection include Dale Chihuly
Dale Chihuly
Dale Chihuly is an American glass sculptor and entrepreneur.-Biography:Chihuly graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in Tacoma, Washington. He enrolled at the College of the Puget Sound in 1959...
, Arthur Dove
Arthur Dove
Arthur Garfield Dove was an American artist. An early American modernist, he is often considered the first American abstract painter.-Youth and education:...
, Louise Bourgeois
Louise Bourgeois
Louise Joséphine Bourgeois , was a renowned French-American artist and sculptor, best known for her contributions to both modern and contemporary art, and for her spider structures, titled Maman, which resulted in her being nicknamed the Spiderwoman...
, Andrew Wyeth
Andrew Wyeth
Andrew Newell Wyeth was a visual artist, primarily a realist painter, working predominantly in a regionalist style. He was one of the best-known U.S. artists of the middle 20th century....
, Fairfield Porter
Fairfield Porter
Fairfield Porter was an American painter and art critic. He was the brother of photographer Eliot Porter and the brother-in-law of federal Reclamation Commissioner Michael W. Straus....
, Georgia O'Keeffe
Georgia O'Keeffe
Georgia Totto O'Keeffe was an American artist.Born near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, O'Keeffe first came to the attention of the New York art community in 1916, several decades before women had gained access to art training in America’s colleges and universities, and before any of its women artists...
, Frank Stella
Frank Stella
Frank Stella is an American painter and printmaker, significant within the art movements of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.-Biography:...
, Lesley Dill
Lesley Dill
Lesley Dill is an American contemporary artist and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is represented by George Adams Gallery, New York and Arthur Roger Gallery, New Orleans.-Education:...
, Romare Bearden
Romare Bearden
Romare Bearden was an African American artist and writer. He worked in several media including cartoons, oils, and collage.-Education:...
, Christian Boltanski
Christian Boltanski
Christian Boltanski is French sculptor, photographer, painter and film maker.-Life and work:Having no formal art education, he began painting in 1958. Nevertheless, he first came to public attention in 1960 with few short films and publication of several notebooks...
, Robert Mapplethorpe
Robert Mapplethorpe
Robert Mapplethorpe was an American photographer, known for his large-scale, highly stylized black and white portraits, photos of flowers and nude men...
, Garry Winogrand
Garry Winogrand
Garry Winogrand was a street photographer known for his portrayal of America in the mid-20th century. John Szarkowski called him the central photographer of his generation....
, Kojo Griffin, Jim Hodges
Jim Hodges (artist)
Jim Hodges is a New York-based installation artist.Hodges was born in Spokane, Washington in 1957. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Fort Wright College in 1980 and his Master of Fine Arts degree from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY in 1986.Since the late 1980s, Hodges has...
, Wayne Thiebaud
Wayne Thiebaud
Wayne Thiebaud is an American painter whose most famous works are of cakes, pastries, boots, toilets, toys and lipsticks. He is associated with the Pop art movement because of his interest in objects of mass culture, although his works, executed during the fifties and sixties, slightly predate...
, Hung Liu
Hung Liu
Hung Liu in Changchun, China is a Chinese-American contemporary artist.Hung Liu was born in the People's Republic, China and emigrated to the United States in 1984. She attended Beijing Teachers College in 1975 and studied mural painting as a graduate student at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in...
, Marcus Antonius Jansen
Marcus Antonius Jansen
Marcus Jansen is an American born painter. He attended Berufsfachschule fuer Gestaltung in Mönchengladbach in 1985.-Career:...
and Stephen Scott Young
Stephen Scott Young
Stephen Scott Young is an American artist best known for his watercolor paintings and etchings that depict everyday life in the south of the United States and the Out Islands of The Bahamas...
. Along with the collection, the museum also maintains a schedule of self-organized and traveling exhibitions.
The Kemper Museum’s striking building, constructed from 1992 to 1994, was designed by architect Gunnar Birkerts
Gunnar Birkerts
Gunnar Birkerts is a prominent American architect who, for most of his career, was based in the metropolitan area of Detroit, Michigan. Some of his designs include the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York, Marquette Plaza in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in...
. The structure has a large central atrium under an articulated skylight. Two wings extend from either side of the atrium. The main gallery displays works from the permanent collection and exhibits works in special exhibitions. Side galleries present works in rotation, and a large meeting room displays works on paper and crafts from the permanent collection.
The Café Sebastienne restaurant combines the worlds of contemporary art and contemporary cuisine in the heart of the museum.