Art Capsule Reviews

The African Art Experience It isn’t often that Kansas City audiences have a chance to see a collection of non-Western art as diverse as the one on display at the Belger Arts Center. The majority of the pieces in The African Art Experience are three-dimensional objects made of wood, clay, metal or natural materials such as woven and dyed textiles. Each piece, including masks, furniture and pottery, was created to fulfill a specific purpose; most were commissioned by priests or kings for use in religious ceremonies. For example, “Kuba Costume,” from the Congo, consists of a red-and-brown-feather headdress, a mask with two cowrie shells for eyes, a red shirt and red pants with an elaborate cowrie-shell belt and pouches. The gallery’s lighting enhances the art’s religious origins — the room is dim, but lights shine brightly and reverently on each piece. Although it’s hard to imagine actual faces behind the masks hanging in front of the gallery’s white walls, that doesn’t mean they can’t be appreciated for their beauty as objects. Through July 2 at the Belger Arts Center, 2100 Walnut Street, 816-474-3250. (T.B.)

Amy Cutler The fanciful costumes and absurd situations depicted in Amy Cutler’s gouache paintings on white paper often draw comparisons to fairy-tale illustrations, but Cutler finds inspiration in a wide variety of sources: Laura Ingalls Wilder, James Audubon, childhood memories of her father’s pet store. For example, in “Dinner Party,” young women in elaborate ball gowns use their long braids of hair to strap wooden chairs atop their heads; they then conduct a duel standing on the dinner table, fighting with the chair legs the way elk fight with their antlers. Cutler’s highly detailed paintings show only characters and props; that there are no backgrounds to help explain the bizarre situations expands the opportunities for a viewer’s interpretation. Through July 11 at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, 4420 Warwick Blvd., 816-753-5784. (T.B.)

The Disembodied Spirit One of the most eerie pieces in the Kemper’s show is scary for reasons more psychological than otherworldly. Francesca Woodman — known as much for her young suicide as for her art — used to take out-of-focus self-portraits as she hid behind the peeling wallpaper in her dilapidated studio. In the resulting images, a woman seems either to be vanishing into or stepping out of the walls. One such beautifully creepy image is hidden in the corner of the gallery, a small work compared with the others in this varied exhibit. Other gems include a handful of tiny early photographs from the Spiritualist movement that depict people with superimposed images of deceased relatives (and other companions unavailable to pose for pictures — Jesus, for example). A standout example from this collection, titled “I Remember Father,” shows a well-dressed man sitting in a chair, smoking a cigarette, smiling to himself. Framed by the smoke is a billowy likeness of what we can only assume is his pop. The exhibit delivers big names such as Joseph Beuys, Bill Viola and Gregory Crewdson. But more important, a suspended chair with gooey-looking, resin-covered fabric hanging from it brings back fond memories of scenes from Ghostbusters featuring “ectoplasm” — all anyone can ask of a ghost-themed art show. Through May 23 at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, 4420 Warwick Blvd., 816-753-5784. (G.K.)

Mary Ann Strandell: The Polygot Series and Nina Bovasso: New Paintings and Works on Paper Although St. Louis-based Mary Ann Strandell describes her own work as a “post-conceptual celebration of hyperspace,” it looks like the kind of thing that Crown Center’s Bloom would display if that store carried fine art. Strandell’s prints blend vibrantly colored flowers, bubbles, birds and waterfalls with Asian-inspired prints and hard-edged geometric shapes. She uses 3-D lenticular printing, which produces an optical illusion: When viewers walk by, her images appear to be moving. This makes a good match for New York artist Nina Bovasso’s acrylic paintings composed of small, multicolored circles and squares surrounded by tiny, looping lines. (Her palette includes everything from fluorescents to metallics to earth tones.) The graphic masses of wiry marks seem to swell with a nervous potential energy, as if they were about to bounce across the composition. Through July 31 at the Byron C. Cohen Gallery for Contemporary Art, 2020 Baltimore, 816-421-5665. (T.B.)

Voice of Authority: Women’s Use of Text in Visual Art If Oprah had seen this exhibition while she was in Kansas City on Mother’s Day weekend, the talk-show host would’ve found art to complement her women’s self-improvement mantra. For her ongoing project What Was Beautiful, University of Kansas fine arts professor Tanya Hartman records her daily observations of beauty, combining typewritten descriptions with blobs of acrylic paint and long lines of black stitching; the delicate and poetic result resembles a whited-out rough-draft essay on notebook paper. Elsewhere in the show, Shawnee artist Joy Baer paints frescoes inspired by the ancient aesthetics and languages of Pompeii, Egypt and China. She paints handwritten, often unintelligible messages into the wet plaster, then covers those soft images with a veil of words. And Lawrence-based Heather Jones Smith transcribes text from her grandmother’s journals and letters onto paper through pinhole drawings and egg-tempura and oil painting. Through June 25 at CKSpace@ Mpress, 1715 Baltimore, 816-419-1040. (T.B.)