An Artist's Perspective

The Ulrich Museum’s fall exhibition Bruce Conner: Somebody Else’s Prints is a retrospective that celebrates 60 years of Bruce Conner’s print works. Conner grew up in Wichita and attended University of Wichita. He settled in San Francisco by 1957, and soon became a key visual artist of the Beat generation.

Tom Otterness is a New York-based artist from Wichita who has two notable sculptures in town. His Dreamers Awake stands in front of the Wichita Art Museum, and Millipede, or “Millie” as she is lovingly referred to, is nestled in front of the Ulrich Museum on WSU’s campus.

Wichita is currently part of a nation-wide project called Art Everywhere U.S., which calls itself "The biggest outdoor art show ever conceived." Art Everywhere displays images of artwork in outdoor advertising spaces.

While Anne Schaefer was here for her two-week stay as artist-in-residence for Harvester Arts, she conquered Shift Space Gallery with her signature stripes and dots for a vibrant installation titled In The Thick of It.

Working on the installation Sen by artist Lisa Solomon was an all-hands-on-deck affair at the Ulrich Underground. I was one of many on the team and its completion was nothing short of a Herculean effort.

Artist and activist Armando Minjarez has been busy! He’s the driving force behind the ICT Army of Artists, responsible for the Immigration is Beautiful mural – and its loving restorations after it was defaced.

The Kansas African American Museum opened a new show this past weekend commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Summer of 1964.

This month the Ulrich Underground honors a beloved member of our community, Ruth Ann Martin, in the exhibition, Fill It to the Brim.

The Wichita Art Museum’s permanent collection has strong holdings in Early Modernism from the United States, with notable artists such as: Edward Hopper, Arthur Dove, John Singleton Copley and Mary Cassatt. But did you know it also has an exceptional collection of American glass?

I recently traveled to the Salina Arts Center for the maiden voyage of the TYTON - an installation by artist Randy Regier and writer and director Gail Lerner. Both led a workshop-in-residence at the Center. Regier and Lerner worked together and collaborated with the community to create a fictional luxury submarine cruise liner called TYTON.

There has been a lot of performance art in Wichita lately: ProjectvRunaway for WSU Shift Space, George Ferrandi with Harvester Arts, and The Bridge Club brought in by the Ulrich Museum.

This is the final weekend for the exhibition FREE TEXTS by Stephanie Syjuco at the Ulrich Museum.

On Commerce Street, you can find a number of art galleries, but there is one that I would even hesitate to call a “gallery.” It’s really a restoration workshop with a space for art up front.

Have you ever seen that print of the word “LOVE”? It has red capitalized letters, each stacked on one another like the four quadrants of a Cartesian grid, but with the “O” slightly tilted.

For February’s Final Friday, Fisch Haus hosted a multi-media, interpretative art installation they called Shattered Telephone. The concept is a blend of the grade-school game "Broken Telephone" and, of similar structure, the Surrealist poetic technique called "Exquisite Corpse."

Wichita is full of amazing public art that gives our city character. It belongs to all of us. And when it is vandalized, it hurts. It hurts emotionally, financially and it hurts the culture of our city.

The Ulrich Museum’s exhibition Juvenile in Justice presents the award–winning work of photographer Richard Ross.

Andy Goldsworthy is a British sculptor who travels all over the world to create site-specific sculptures.

It’s the New Year, and with it comes the excitement of change and things to come. Galleries are preparing for their newest shows, but for 2014 the Ulrich Museum is taking the bull by the horns with four new exhibitions opening in January.

During the Christmas season, we are surrounded by images of Santa Claus-- yes, that jolly, rotund man with his famous white beard on a mission to deliver presents to children around the world. We see Santa surrounded by elves and reindeer at the North Pole, but where did this image of Santa Claus come from?

The Christmas décor in grocery stores and shopping centers gets trotted out earlier and earlier every year. Now, Christmas decorations replace the Halloween costumes and treats. This leap from skeletons to silver bells means that Thanksgiving is left to us to keep traditions with family and friends alive.

Francisco Zúñiga’s “Three Women Walking” seems to be a straightforward representation, but subtleties in expression, gesture and formal technique indicate there is more going on.

On November 8th and 9th, the Ulrich Museum and the Wichita Art Museum team up for a joint symposium called Nature’s Impact, Art’s Force. While the title is a little awkward, the collective symposium appears intriguing, as it will tackle issues of nature, ecology and technology through the lens of contemporary art.

This week, I returned to the Wichita Art Museum eager to visit the exhibition: Learning to See: Josef Albers and The Interaction of Color.

This month, the Wichita Art Museum opened “Vital Signs: New Media Art from the San Jose Museum of Art.”