Laura Berman Projects

Black & Blue
Kansas City’s Grit and Grace

Curated by Michael Schonhoff

March 2-26
closing reception: March 26, 7-9pm

John A. Day Gallery
Warren M. Lee Center for the Fine Arts
The University of South Dakota
414 East Clark Street
Vermillion, SD

– excerpt from the Curator’s statement:

Historically, Kansas City is a turnstile for goods and travelers spanning the Coureur des Bois to SmartPort, with shadows of all sorts still spinning around. In artists’ terms, Kansas City is big enough to offer a diversity of creative approaches, small enough to share critical dialog, and affordable enough to allow for a high level of generativity. Uniquely, a certain quality of grit and fortitude is associated with many cultural producers operating throughout the city. Perhaps that’s growing pains of a Floridian (Richard) paradigm shift, or traits of a long established ‘grassroots’ landscape. Peter von Ziegesar describes the bohemian scene “as a kind of beaten down mulch, from which the younger shoots must gather nourishment.” It all feeds the art.
Black & Blue in no way attempts to totalize an organic and diverse arts community, rather, with an estimated 6,000 artists in the Kansas City region,2 it simply exists as one of many potential exhibitions revealing a diversity of practice, inspirations, and backgrounds, all of which Kansas City has inimitably and historically incubated. Black & Blue employs and illuminates polarities, opposition, multiplicities of meaning, diametricism, and difficult subject matter. Together, the works offer viewers reflexive interpretations and achieves visual resolution by the artists’ use of interior or internal spaces, text, landscape, figuration, and even abstraction or formalism.