Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art

Exciting news! Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art announced today that Jessica S. Hong has been appointed to lead the museum’s curatorial program as chief curator, effective December 30, 2024. Hong joins Kemper Museum from the Toledo Museum of Art (Toledo, OH) where she is the senior curator of modern and contemporary art. With nearly two decades of experience, Hong has worked with artists and communities at museums and organizations including Dartmouth’s Hood Museum of Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, Harvard Art Museums, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Independent Curators International (ICI).

📣 We can't wait for you to see two brand new special exhibitions that will enliven the museum this fall! Your first chance to see both exhibitions will be at the opening celebration on Thursday, September 19, and we'll be celebrating with special events all weekend long. "Infinite Regress: Mystical Abstraction from the Permanent Collection and Beyond" brings the past in dialogue with the present through selections from the Permanent Collection paired with works by contemporary artists who will exhibiting at the museum for the first time on the occasion of its 30th anniversary. The exhibition connects these works through a shared vocabulary of mystical abstraction that has both historical and contemporary resonance, engaging periods of extreme transformation in nature and technology. "Lucía Vidales: Hambre" is the ninth Annual Atrium Project commissioned installation by @lucia_vidales, which, for the first time in 2024, is expanding to fill the entire central core of the museum. Members have the opportunity to join curator Kevin Moore for a VIP walkthrough of "Infinite Regress" to get the party started. Join today (memberships start at just $30!) to receive your invitation!

It's the last weekend to see "Hangama Amiri: A Homage to Home" at Kemper Museum! Afghan Canadian artist Hangama Amiri combines painting and printmaking techniques with textiles, weaving together stories based on memories of her homeland and diasporic experience. Amiri fled Kabul with her family in 1996 when she was seven years old. Moving through numerous countries over several years, they immigrated to Canada in 2005 when Amiri was a teenager. Amiri’s choice of materials stems from autobiographical origins—her mother taught her to sew and her uncle was a tailor. Her textiles also reference the colors and fabrics she remembers in the bazaars and on the streets in Kabul. She sources her materials from an Afghan-owned shop in New York City’s fashion district, collaging with fabric and painting on the surfaces. Large-scaled with frayed edges, Amiri’s textile works are made from layering fabrics, piecing and sewing them together, so the fragments collectively characterize her home from a distance. Centered on the lives of women, she builds interiors that capture her protagonists within domestic and entrepreneurial spaces and amplify a collective struggle for women’s rights in Afghanistan and around the world.