Upcoming Events at KCAC
31st Annual Undergraduate Student Juried Exhibition
April 4 - 25, 2024 | MAIN & SNAP SPACE GALLERY
The 31tst Annual Undergraduate Student Juried Exhibition will be on view at KCAC Galleries April 4th - 25th, 2025
Jurors are asked to select an exhibition of artworks from submissions made by currently enrolled undergraduate college students in Missouri and Kansas. The intention is for jurors to select the highest quality artwork and present an exhibition of what the juror finds most interesting, compelling, and noteworthy. The exhibition is an opportunity for students to be recognized as emerging artists in an established and professional art gallery while introducing the collecting community to the artists who will be entering the arts scene over the next several years.
This year’s 2025 guest jurors are Jori Cheville, Area Director at 21c Museum Hotels
The Leigh Rosenberg Earnest Memorial Fund awards a total of $2,250 in scholarships to exhibition participants , awarded by the juror and distributed in tiers of $1,000 $750 and $500.
April Coffee Talk
Ann Holliday is a senior leader at the Downtown Council of Kansas City (DTC), focusing on strategic and arts initiatives. She works closely with the President and CEO across various DTC departments (Economic Development, Urban Environment, Membership & Management, Community Development, Research) and related organizations to promote collaboration, efficiency, and growth.
She’s particularly involved in weaving arts and culture into the organization's work, collaborating with partners, and leading the Art in the Loop Foundation. For more than 20 years, Art in the Loop Foundation (AILF) has enhanced Downtown Kansas City’s visual appeal, enriched its environment, and spurred revitalization. AILF creates opportunities for artists and expands public engagement with art, as a charitable nonprofit dedicated to activating Downtown KC through art.
Ann grew up in the KC area and raised her two children, Luke and Ruth, here with her husband Chris. She's active in the community as a Westwood Planning Commissioner and at St. Andrews Episcopal Church. Ann holds a BA in Art History from Bowdoin College, a Master of Planning and Historic Preservation from the University of Virginia, and an MBA with a Finance emphasis from the University of Missouri, Kansas City.
Anna Wehrwein and Linda Lighton
In the Main Gallery, Anna Wehrwein explores the idea of garden space. The garden is a site of containment, but also wildness. A liminal space between interior and exterior, home and nature. She is interested in the garden as a metaphorical and psychic space, but also as a visual and optical field of textures, colors, and patterns that can feel both abstract and decorative, and consider the garden as a social space in which care and nurturing can take on many forms.
In The Snap Space Linda Lighton presents a group of handbuilt ceramic sculptures melding biomorphic plant and human aspects.
Sarah Knight and Jonathan V Green
In the Main Gallery, The work that results from Sarah Knight’s experimental ceramic processes in RADIANT ABBERANCE allows them to build a queer reality that uses artifice and deception as a defense mechanism and reflective safe space. The dialogue their work has with the history of craft and tradition questions the role of clay as a material deconstruction of identity and value.
In the Snap Space Gallery, Jonathan Virginia Green presents HEAVEN IS HELL, an exhibition that functions as a biographical survey of the artist’s relationship to erotic intimacy and grief. Combining leather, rubber, and chrome surfaces (both real and simulated) with hardware such as zippers, chains, and bondage gear, these materials allude to apparel and by extension, the body.
KCAC Sketchboook Project, and Caroline Honas
In the Main Gallery, The Sketchbook Project is a group exhibition featuring various local artists. Each artist filled a 5 x 9" sketchbook in their own personal style! Throughout the exhibition you'll see the work of painters, photographers, sculptors, ceramicists, and mixed media artists. All sketchbooks will be included in a digital catalog.
In the Snap Space, The flora depicted in Caroline Honas’ ANAMNESIS IN GREEN are derived from ecosystems found around the state in the regions known as the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, the California coast, the semi-arid desert of Utah, and primarily, the Great Plains of the Midwest. Collage-like in composition, these paintings condense thousands of miles and hundreds of days into singular visual moments.
Portrait Group Show and Tara Karaim
In the Main Gallery, the Portrait Group Show showcases several Local artists exploring the power of portraiture and the human face.
In the Snap Space, Tara Karaim is “OUT WITH FRIENDS,” exploreing modern friendship by depicting intimate moments influenced by snapshots of those close to me. These works are meditations on contemporary connection. While the moments depicted are deeply personal to me, they transcend individual experiences by encouraging any viewer to take a seat and savor the moment.
Paul Acevedo Gomez and Melissa Guadalupe Wolf
In the Mian Gallery, "No Pierdas El Tino,” loosely translates to “Don’t Lose Aim,” which Paul Acevedo Gomez use to speak about his personal story and talk about his identity as a Mexican American artist. Heoffer a distinctive perspective on the pursuit of identity through art, evoking a universal sense of yearning to belong in a world that often marginalizes and isolates.
In the Snap Space, Melissa Guadalupe Wolf explores “The Origin of Vaqueros.” Hundreds of years before there was the American cowboy, there was the vaquero, an expert horseman who could adeptly herd cattle through skills with a lasso. Dating back to classic western cinematography, the image of cowboys has been cemented as white Americans when the first vaqueros were in fact Indigenous Mexican men.
Butch Murphy and Aaron Dougherty, and Kristen Taylor
Kristen Taylor Berth, Mixed media Installation
In The Main Gallery, Butch Murphy Presents a new collection of Welded steel sculptures, paired with Aaron Dougherty’s photographs medetating on the unreparkable.
In the Snap Space, Kristen Taylor’s work explores the interconnected relationships between humans and the natural world. By using embodied learning methods, she engages directly with nature, collecting materials such as clay, plants, and sounds from my surroundings. Taylor’s practice is often site-specific and always deeply rooted in place.
Art for All and KCAC Studios Exhibition
ART FOR ALL, KCAC MEMBERS SHOW
Every November The Kansas City Artists Coalition will present Art For All, a Members Only Exhibition in the Main Gallery with a feature from KCAC Studio Tenants in the Snap Space Gallery.
This show focuses on our KCAC Member Artists and connects them with the patrons, collectors, and art professionals curious in
Kansas City and beyond! This fun and unique exhibition showcases original artworks from KCAC members that are no
bigger than 18 inches and under $500. This small works showcase is the perfect time to add a local flavor to your art collection, keep supporting your arts community OR begin an artful collection of your very own!
Robert Dohrmann & Dick Daniels, and Michael Webb
In the Main Gallery: In combination with traditional 2D materials and collage techniques, the objects used to construct Robert Dohrmann’s body of work are mostly large romantic cardboard print paintings, shadow box clocks, unlistenable LP records and a variety of found objects. The process of cultural anthropology (picking though thrift stores) is conducted anywhere he happens to find junk stores. He likens these stores to museums (also consumer graveyards) where affordable consumer goods go to die and hopefully be reborn. When he finds something that piques his curiosity, he “re-arts” the object and gives it a new life through remix and mash-up strategies. For extra fun Dick Daniels creates oddball wooden signs painted on found and forgotten weathered wood in his ramshackle basement studio as well as Hammerspace Workshop, has created hundreds of whimsical ceramic face pots, mugs and trays at the Kansas City Clay Guild and more recently explored painting geometric abstract paintings on wood.
In the Snap Space Gallery, Michael Webb seeks the harmony between the past and the present, where the pulse of the digital world merges with the brushstroke of tradition. The landscapes beneath the vast and starry dome speak to me in tongues of light and shadow, their illuminated whispers recalling the early days of pixels and screens that first taught me to see. These nightscapes, with their grids of brilliance and darkness, do more than color my canvases; they etch the very lines of my narrative, allowing me to weave the threads of culture, the echoes of politics, the laughter of satire into a tapestry both vast and intimate.
Of Our Own Accord : Reading led by Mary Silwance
In a tribute to Women's History Month, anyone who identifies as female is welcome to come share their writing. The poets featured in Of Our Own Accord, an anthology of women's embodied experiences, will also share their work. Participating writers are welcome to bring their books, zines, & chapbooks to sell or trade.
KCAC 42nd Annual Benefit Art Auction Sweet Peek
Last chance to view this year's auction items and complete buyout's before the big event on the 22nd!
February Coffee Talk
Gregory Kolsto of Oddly Correct Coffee will be the February Coffee Talk guest speaker!
“Founder of Oddly Correct Coffee, musician, printmaker and reluctant painter. Squarely in the second half of life, he is finding new motivation to stay curious and creatively generative”
42nd Annual Benefit Art Auction Preview
This is your first opportunity to come take a look at this years auction items and start making buyouts!
December Coffee Talk: Cory Imig
Join us at KCAC for a cup of coffee and to talk with Cory Imig!
Layered Collage and Running Stitch Workshop
Saturday, December 7 · 11:30am - 1pm CST
Layered Collage and Running Stitch Workshop
Drawing inspiration from the tradition and history of Kantha quilts, participants in this workshop will create hand stitched small
KCAC After Dark : Happy Hour & Live Music
Come hang out as we continue the good vibes from the December First Friday Opening Reception.
Music begins at 8:00pm
Refreshments available
Free Entry
First Friday Opening Reception
Join us for the opening reception of our December Exhibitions living-language-land by The Studio Art Quilt Association and a solo exhibition by Sarah Nguyen First Friday December 6th from 5 - 8pm
RSVP HERE
November Coffee Talk
Join us for our monthly Coffee Talk at KCAC! November’s guest speaker is Andrew Johnson.
Andrew Johnson is the editor of Forum, an arts magazine published by the Kansas City Artists Coalition. He is the author of two collections of prose and poetry, The Thread (2022) and On Earth As It Is (2017). His essays and poems have appeared in The Sun, Image, Commonweal, Guernica, Crazyhorse, KC Studio, and elsewhere. His multimedia installation Closure Is Not Justice won a Rocket Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation. Andrew is the recipient of a Charlotte Street Foundation studio residency, an Arts KC Inspiration grant, and a Vermont Studio Center residency. He lives in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Kansas City, Missouri with his wife and three kids.
First Friday Opening Reception
Join us for the opening reception of our November Exhibitions Art For All and Studio Showcase First Friday November 1st from 5 - 8pm
RSVP HERE
Art is Like Lasagna; You Build it in Layers with Robin VanHoozer
Adding encaustic to your collage making can take many forms. Today we will be using encaustic throughout the collage. Encaustic items can also be added to other collages made from other materials by several different techniques, such as, nails, tacks, threads, etc. Encaustic paint is beeswax, resin, and pigment and has been used since ancient times. The paint is heated and the layers are fused with heat. Encaustic medium is beeswax and medium without the pigment.
The beauty of encaustic is that it is very versatile and lends itself well to collage making. We will learn various techniques and best practices for adding encaustic to your studio practice. The goal of this workshop is to demonstrate how to incorporate elements of encaustic to your work. If you are interested in continuing to learn more about using encaustic, I suggest further workshops, in addition to this workshop, which will teach more in-depth techniques.
WATERCOLOR WORKSHOP FOR BEGINNING AND INTERMEDIATE ARTISTS
Saturday, October 12th: 12:30 PM - 3:30 PM
WATERCOLOR WORKSHOP FOR BEGINNING AND INTERMEDIATE ARTISTS
To introduce a variety of techniques, regardless of subject matter. Teacher will demonstrate, then monitor students.
October Coffee Talk with Kelsey Pike
Join us for a cup of coffee as we talk with Kelsey Pike local artist and papercraft business owner!
WATERCOLOR WORKSHOP FOR BEGINNING AND INTERMEDIATE ARTISTS
Saturday, October 5th: 11:30 AM - 2:30 PM
WATERCOLOR WORKSHOP FOR BEGINNING AND INTERMEDIATE ARTISTS
To introduce a variety of techniques, regardless of subject matter. Teacher will demonstrate, then monitor students.
First Friday Opening Reception
Join us for the opening reception of our October Exhibitions: Special Power, an exhibition by Hannah Banciella and a solo exhibition by Katherine Moes First Friday October 4th from 5 - 8pm
WATERCOLOR WORKSHOP FOR BEGINNING AND INTERMEDIATE ARTISTS
11:30 AM - 2:30 PM
LESSON 2: Saturday September 28thWATERCOLOR WORKSHOP FOR BEGINNING AND INTERMEDIATE ARTISTS
To introduce a variety of techniques, regardless of subject matter. Teacher will demonstrate, then monitor students.
WATERCOLOR WORKSHOP FOR BEGINNING AND INTERMEDIATE ARTISTS
Saturday, September 21, 2024 11:30 AM
WATERCOLOR WORKSHOP FOR BEGINNING AND INTERMEDIATE ARTISTS
To introduce a variety of techniques, regardless of subject matter. Teacher will demonstrate, then monitor students.
Art is Like Lasagna; You Build it in Layers with Robin VanHoozer
Adding encaustic to your collage making can take many forms. Today we will be using encaustic throughout the collage. Encaustic items can also be added to other collages made from other materials by several different techniques, such as, nails, tacks, threads, etc. Encaustic paint is beeswax, resin, and pigment and has been used since ancient times. The paint is heated and the layers are fused with heat. Encaustic medium is beeswax and medium without the pigment.
The beauty of encaustic is that it is very versatile and lends itself well to collage making. We will learn various techniques and best practices for adding encaustic to your studio practice. The goal of this workshop is to demonstrate how to incorporate elements of encaustic to your work. If you are interested in continuing to learn more about using encaustic, I suggest further workshops, in addition to this workshop, which will teach more in-depth techniques.
First Friday Opening Reception
Join us for the opening reception of our September Exhibitions: A Girl Named Seattle, an exhibition by Barbara Lane Tharas and Reflections by Braxton Fuller First Friday August 2nd from 5 - 8pm
August Exhibitions Closing Reception
Join us for a closing reception of our August exhibitions Protect N' Serve by FIGWÜRM and I need an adult by Christine Riutzel
Spontaneous Realism Painting Workshop
Saturday, August 10th - Second Class
1-5 PM
Unleash your inner artist in our exciting 2-day Spontaneous Realism painting workshop!
Coffee Talk with Mary McCawley
Join KCAC, Saturday August 10th 11:30 am - 12:30 PM, for coffee talk with Mary McCawley, owner and curator of Digital Dreams Gallery.
About: Mary McCawley is a digital art curator and the visionary behind Digital Dreams KC, Kansas City's first digital art gallery. With a passion for interactive art, innovation and a deep understanding of technology she has dedicated her career to exploring and showcasing the intersection of technology and art.
Digital Dreams KC is a groundbreaking digital art gallery located in Kansas City, established by Mary McCawleyThe gallery is dedicated to pushing the boundaries of digital art and fostering a community around Web3, NFTs, and decentralization. It serves as a platform for both established and emerging digital artists to showcase their work and engage with audiences in innovative ways.
Spontaneous Realism Painting Workshop
Saturday, August 3 · 11am - 2pm CDT
Unleash your inner artist in our exciting 2-day Spontaneous Realism painting workshop!
First Friday Opening Reception
Join us for the opening reception of our August Exhibitions: Protect N' Serve, an exhibition by FIGWÜRM I need an adult, an exhibition by Christine Riutzel First Friday August 2nd from 5 - 8pm
Beginning Macrame
Saturday, July 20 · 11:30am - 12:30pm CDT
Welcome to our beginner's macramé workshop, where we'll unravel the art of knotting to create great textile designs!
Coffee Talk with Dave Eames
Saturday, July 13 · 11:30am - 12:30pm CDT
Join us for a morning of caffeinated culture as we visit with Dave Eames, and discuss the transformative power of art journaling
Artist Talk
Join us for coffee Saturday morning and meet our July exhibiting artist Evan Stoler! Hear from Evan as he shares about his studio practice and new exhibition While Supplies Last on view July 5 - 26, 2024 in the Snap Space Gallery.
First Friday Opening Reception
Join us for the opening reception of our July exhibitions! The Sketchbook Project in the Main Gallery and While Supplies Last by Evan Stoler in the Snap Space Gallery.
July 5th 2024, 5-8 PM