Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Stephanie Fox Knappe
Sanders Sosland Senior Curator, Global Modern and Contemporary Art, Head American Art
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Kansas City, MO
(816) 751-1278
www.nelson-atkins.org
What event (gallery show, museum exhibit, etc.) in the next few months are you looking forward to, and why?
A Layered Presence, part of our “KC Art Now” initiative, opens this fall and features 22 local Latinx artists. Like the artists’ identities, their art is richly layered in terms of materials and meaning. These strata combine to honor ancestors, probe histories, conjure memories and craft personal narratives. Queerness, gender, states of being, immigration and more are explored. Some of the layers reveal. Others protect and conceal. While there are points of connection, each artist and every work in the show resonates as singularly powerful.
What are you reading?
I have just started to read Brown Neon (Coffeehouse Press, 2022). It is a compilation of essays by queer, Chicanx, art critic, writer, poet and educator Raquel Gutiérrez. The essays navigate the complexities of intersectional identity, family, art, the borderlands and the meanings and messages embedded in liminal spaces.
Interesting exhibit, gallery opening or work of art you’ve seen recently.
We are thrilled to have just installed a promised gift from Kansas City-based collectors Bill and Christy Gautreaux—a multi-media piece by current Yale MFA student Kahlif Tahir Thompson titled Summertime (2022). Since I have been thinking a great deal about layering, this piece composed of handmade paper, papyrus, velvet, raw silk, fabric, newsprint, oil and acrylic paint has caused me to pause on my walks through the galleries many times. I wonder about the lives and conversations shared between the two women in matching yellow sundresses standing in this vivid interior.
What are you researching at the moment?
Resulting from work in collaboration with our exhibition core team on the exhibition A Layered Presence, I have been aiming to better my understanding of the neologism Latinx. Lately, I have attended panels, read articles and listened to podcasts about that term (as well as Latina/Latino) and the nuanced reasons why it is variously embraced, rejected, or selectively and strategically claimed. Conversations around identity as fluid, evolving, contested, personally and politically motivated, and above all, endlessly complex, are fascinating to me.
What is your dream exhibit to curate? Or see someone else curate?
Ever since the first time I saw a slide of late 19th-century/early 20th-century American artist William Merritt Chase’s 10th Street Studio painting in my introduction to American art course as an undergraduate, I have been fascinated with the notion of artists’ studios as self-portraits. I would love to develop an exhibition on that topic that crosses cultures and time from the historic to today. —
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