Art Capsule Reviews
Kim Casebeer: 10 Miles From Home There are no boring places, only boring people. The regionalist Kim Casebeer stakes her work on this claim, and she’s interesting enough to pull it off. All of the subject matter here lies within a 10-mile radius surrounding the artist’s childhood home in the Flint Hills of Kansas. Most clever is the tongue-in-cheek pastel work “Hillsboro Evening Skyline.” Featuring eight houses and a barn under an orange-and-blue sky, it highlights the humbling imbalance between our diminutive human structures and the scale of nature. The oil painting “The Warmth of the Evening” is Casebeer’s most colorfully dynamic work, balancing the blue and gray of a pond with the warm orange and red of a setting sun. Through June 13 at the Leopold Gallery, 324 W. 63rd St., 816-333-3111. (Santiago Ramos)
The Chicano Experience This is the third-annual group exhibition organized by the Mattie Rhodes center celebrating the Chicano (Mexican-American) experience. Israel Garcia’s mixed-media installation includes two large photographs — a white-haired woman working in the kitchen, and a male worker in a cowboy hat and a denim jacket — placed next to an abstract sculpture of a disembodied face, with hands clasping a rosary. Adolfo Martinez’s painting “Orale, We Come in Peace” is as brilliant as it is sly: Playing on the word alien, he makes a Mexican migrant look like an extraterrestrial. With photographs, paintings and poetry by 14 artists from Kansas City, Los Angeles and Chicago, the show captures the wide range of symbols and stories that make up Chicano life. Through May 25 at the Mattie Rhodes Art Gallery, 919 W. 17th St., 816-221-2349. (Santiago Ramos)
Armin Mühsam Armin Mühsam’s charcoal “Box Drawing” series has a mysterious, unfinished quality, thanks to roughed-in elements that are selectively completed. It’s as though portions of the page have been brought into focus by a lens. Lacking backgrounds or true perspective, the bold lines and simple compositions intrigue without satisfying. Elsewhere, Mühsam’s paintings include imagined landscapes built up from simple architectural forms. His stylized and deliberately architectural topologies, precisely rendered, contrast with the twitchy brushwork of exciting, impressionistic backgrounds — rolling plains and big, Midwestern skies dominate the machined smoothness of seemingly abandoned architectural forms. “Composition 5,” an acrylic painting of a rectilinear industrial structure, and “Composition 7,” a delicately rendered highway overpass, are outstanding variations on this theme. Mühsam’s style also finds expression in the translucence of watercolor; indeed, with his “Watercolor on Grid Paper Series,” ghostly penciled graphs (of precipitation per day over a crop year, apparently) are visible through characteristic juxtapositions of organic brushwork and fabricated precision. Through June 15 at the Mallin Gallery, 201 Wyandotte, 816-421-5222. (Chris Packham)
Matthew Peake: American Dream Who are we trying to keep out of our country with that fence along the Mexican border? Matthew Peake, an Iowan and a promising young photographer who finishes his B.F.A. at the Kansas City Art Institute this month, decided to find out. Immersing himself in the local Hispanic community, he assembled photographs illustrating the daily lives of three immigrant families: one that arrived in the United States last year, one that’s lived here for 10 years, and another that’s enjoying its third generation in America. Peake’s pigment-based inkjet prints reveal that the “aliens” frame their diplomas, enjoy TV, like to cook, value family dinnertime and love America. He puts a human face on an issue drowning in words and abstractions. Through May 25 at the Mattie Rhodes Art Gallery, 919 W. 17th St., 816-221-2349. (Santiago Ramos)
Picturing Artists: Photographs by Dan Budnik Beautiful art is sublime; art about art is an indulgence. This exhibition is a sublime indulgence: a collection of photographer Dan Budnik’s dye-transfer photographic prints from the 1950s through the early ’70s, starring some of the greatest artists to live in New York during that time. The Kemper pairs each of Budnik’s shots with an original work by the portrayed artist. His picture of Robert Rauschenberg (looking directly at the camera, holding a car door) is accompanied by Rauschenberg’s sizable mixed-media painting “Seminole Host.” Budnik caught Willem de Kooning in action before a canvas in a far corner of his studio, with the floor covered by other unfinished paintings; next to this photo is de Kooning’s “Untitled (Woman).” Other artists who met Budnik’s camera: Roy Lichtenstein, Peter Krasnow and Jasper Johns. What they have in common is the intensity of their gazes. Through July 8 at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, 4420 Warwick, 816-753-5784. (Santiago Ramos)
Jennifer Vanderpoole: Yum! Yum! A small slide show, featuring selected pages from a cookbook, and a few tasty cupcakes indicate that this show celebrates food and eating. Los Angeles installation artist Jennifer Vanderpoole uses various “domestic landscaping materials” to create a half-edible landscape within the small Project Space gallery. Cut-outs of Jell-O boxes, color-enhanced candies and beauty products are strewn amid the garden of colors and shapes scattered across the floor. More than 30 colorful ropes hang from the ceiling, adding a vertical dimension to an installation that takes place mostly on the floor, boxed in by walls bearing painted green leaves. For all its flair, however, there’s little to sink one’s teeth into. Through June 2 at the Project Space of the Urban Culture Project, 21 E. 12th St. 816-221-5115. (Santiago Ramos)
