Exhibition Archive: 2017-2019
Charles Lindsay: FIELD STATION 4
Gallery exhibition: November 5, 2019 - November 21, 2020
Click here to take a virtual tour of FIELD STATION 4 with Charles Lindsay.
Exploration geologist, author, and artist-adventurer Charles Lindsay delves into earth’s geologic and cultural pasts. Along the way, he investigates inter-species communication, music, memory, and the promise of Artificial Intelligence. His traveling “laboratory,” FIELD STATION 4, re-purposes scientific equipment salvaged from the aerospace, biotech, and military sectors to probe biologic specimens, ancient artifacts, and the rough edges of human perception. Lindsay directs SETI AIR, the artists-in-residence program at the SETI Institute (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) in Mountain View, California. His latest book is Recipes for the Mind, published by Terra Nova/MIT Press.
John Steuart Curry: The Cowboy Within
September 24, 2019 – March 21, 2020
John Steuart Curry was raised on a farm in northeast Kansas and is best known for his depictions of the Midwest. Another region revealed in his art, the American West, has always deserved more attention. Experiences on a family-owned ranch in Arizona nurtured Curry’s love of the Western landscape. During the 1920s the artist illustrated serialized magazine stories that took readers on Wild West adventures. In later years he created mural interpretations of Westward expansion. Through paintings, drawings, magazines, and books this exhibition is the first to survey Curry’s vision of the American West. Co-curated by independent scholar Frank Owings and Beach Museum of Art Curator Elizabeth Seaton, John Steuart Curry: The Cowboy Within is accompanied by an 80-page exhibition catalogue.
Jeremiah Ariaz: Louisiana Trail Riders
2019 Friends of the Beach Museum of Art Gift Print Artist
August 6 – December 9, 2019
The African American trail riding clubs of southwest Louisiana are a part of a Creole culture that has its roots in the population of free people of color, French settlers, and American Indians who lived in the region during the 18th century. Today, trail rides are an opportunity for generations from rural parts of the state to gather and celebrate. Club members assemble on weekends and move through parish communities and prairie grasslands, listening to Zydeco music from a sound system or live bands in tow. Kansas native Jeremiah Ariaz, a professor of art at Louisiana State University, has captured these equestrian clubs in a selection of photographs forming this exhibition. One image will be chosen as the 2019 Friends of the Beach Museum of Art Gift Print, a limited-edition photograph for sale to Friends and the public.
Voices: At the Crossroads of Asia and America
July 30, 2019 – December 21, 2019
This exhibition continues the theme of cultural exchange in art begun in the fall of 2018. Included are contemporary prints from India purchased by Professor Emeritus of Art Charles Stroh for Kansas State University’s art collection. Beach Museum of Art curator Aileen June Wang collaborated with University of Kansas art history professors Sherry Fowler and Maki Kaneko on this project.
Beyond Gravity: Selections from the Permanent Collection
April 2 – November 30, 2019
Apollo 11 mission commander Neil Armstrong and pilot Buzz Aldrin, both American, landed the lunar module Eagle on July 20, 1969. This exhibition celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Apollo Moon landing and compliments the Manhattan Public Library’s summer reading theme A Universe of Stories.
2019 Common Works of Art
Each year, the K-State Book Network selects a common reading for first-year students, providing an intellectual experience they can share with other students and members of the campus community. The 2019 K-State Common Book is Darius the Great Is Not Okay by Kansas City author Adib Khorram. On a trip to Iran to visit his terminally ill grandfather, Darius makes a best friend and resolves some long term issues with his father, allowing him to put together the pieces of who he is and become “okay.” Museum staff members have selected two artworks to complement this year’s Common Book. Two Things Happening at the Same Time, a 2016 mixed media print by Rashawn Griffin, addresses similar themes of origin and mixed identity. Abstract forms in the image allude to the artist’s Scottish and African-American roots. Artist Patrick Shia Crabb refers to his Shard Vessel series as a bridge between past and the present, and between cultures. A teapot by Crabb in the museum’s collection was chosen to connect with Darius’ love of tea, something that he shares with members of his American and Persian families.
Picturing Kansas
October 5, 2018 – August 31, 2019
From scenic prairies to bucolic farms to the architecture of Kansas’ agricultural industry, this exhibition features more than 100 years of works by Kansas artists that capture a sense of place.
The exhibition is a cornerstone of the museum’s popular “Picturing Kansas” school tour program, which integrates art, history, environmental and agricultural science, and language arts.
Voices: Art Linking Asia and the West
December 4, 2018–December 21, 2019
A section of the permanent collection galleries will highlight the exchange of aesthetics and ideas between East and West through objects made by artists who traveled between the two regions. This project is a collaboration between curator Aileen June Wang and University of Kansas art history professors Sherry Fowler and Maki Kaneko.
Celebrating Heroes: American Mural Studies of the 1930s and 1940s from the Steven and Susan Hirsch Collection
March 5–June 15, 2019
The 1930s and 1940s were a golden age for murals in America when the everyday worker rose to the status of hero. Murals celebrating the work of miners, farmers, and other laborers covered walls in public buildings across the country. Preliminary ideas played out in sketches, and nearly fifty of these are displayed in this exhibition. On loan from Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College.
Pete Souza: Two Presidents, One Photographer
February 5-April 27, 2019
Souza served as official photographer to both President Reagan and President Obama and developed an abiding respect for both men. It is the artist’s intention to have these images contribute to civility and respect across party lines during the lead-up to the 2020 election season. The museum is proud to be the first venue for this historic exhibition.
Culture Mixmaster Zhang Hongtu
September 25-December 22, 2018
Zhang Hongtu trained as an artist in Beijing, China, lived through the Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1976, and emigrated to New York City in 1982. Having now lived as long in the United States as in China, Zhang produces works that embody his hybrid cultural roots. His knowledgeable mash-ups of Chinese and Western cultures are sometimes amusing and always thought-provoking.
2018 Common Work of Art
Each year, the K-State Book Network selects a common reading for first year students, providing an intellectual experience they can share with members of the K-State community. The 2018 K-State Common Book is “The Hate You Give” by Angie Thomas. Beach Museum of Art staff members have selected a series of lithographs by New Mexico artist Karsten Creightney to complement the 2018 Common Book. Thomas’s best-selling and award-winning novel tells the story of a 16-year old girl named Starr Carter. Starr has grown up in an urban, poverty-stricken neighborhood and now attends a suburban prep school. After she witnesses a police officer shooting her unarmed friend, she must find a way to share the truth of her experience with her family, friends, and community. Creightney’s Burial Series Portfolio, a set of nine prints, is a response to the death of his uncle from a drug overdose. Burial visually conveys a search for truth that parallels Starr’s. Burial was produced in collaboration with print publisher Zanatta Editions. Sets of three prints from the series will be shown each semester.
Chipping the Block, Painting the Silk: The Prints of Norma Bassett Hall
August 7-December 15, 2018
Norma Bassett Hall was the only female founding member of the Prairie Print Makers, the Kansas-based organization established during the Great Depression to promote American artists’ work. This traveling exhibition of richly colored prints is the first solo exhibition of Hall’s work since her death in 1957. Joby Patterson of Eugene, Oregon, serves as guest curator.
Jam Session
Musical Selections from the Permanent Collection
May 15-August 25, 2018
This exhibition, curated to complement the Manhattan Public Library’s summer reading theme “Libraries Rock,” features music, musicians, and musical instruments through the eyes of artists. Summer programs will focus on the intersection of music and the visual arts.
Summer Idyll
Selections from the Permanent Collection
June 12-August 4, 2018
Inspired by the recent acquisition of A Place for Eagles to Fly by Jean Van Harlingen, this exhibition features abstract landscapes from the permanent collection, displayed to encourage travel to idyllic places through the imagination.
Water Stories by Lynn Benson
2018 Friends of the Beach Museum of Art Gift Print Artist
February 13 – May 26, 2018
In 1969, the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio, burst into flames due to sparks falling on oil-covered debris floating on its surface. The news caught Lynn Benson's attention and inspired her to study how human activity affects a vitally important resource: water. Benson's multi-media works in this exhibition represent bodies of water impacted by development and politics.
Here, and Now.
Kansas State University Department of Art Faculty Exhibition
March 6-May 12, 2018
The works in this exhibition represent the studio practices of fifteen members of the Kansas State University Department of Art. These works, made within the last two years and varying in concept and construction, feature the disciplines of ceramics, drawing, fibers, graphic design, painting, photography, sculpture, and new media.
Fronteras/Frontiers
October 7, 2017 - April 12, 2018
The exhibition Fronteras/Frontiers explores the complexity of borders and frontiers in the midwest through the work by artists Artemio Rodríguez and Fidencio Fifield-Perez. Artemio Rodríguez is a master printmaker based in Patzcuaro, Mexico whose practice transcends the boundaries of printmaking by engaging the public through a mobile printmaking studio/gallery, the GraficoMovil. Born in Oaxaca, Mexico and raised in the U.S., Fidencio Fifield-Perez explores issues of migration, labor, and the politicization of borders through the manipulation of maps, newspaper cuttings, and paper.
Ubiquitous: Enrico Isamu Oyama
August 15 – December 23, 2017
Enrico Isamu Ōyama represents a contemporary generation with a distinctly global perspective. Child of an Italian father and a Japanese mother, Ōyama grew up in Tokyo, Japan, lived for extended periods in North Italy, and has been working in New York since 2011. “Ubiquitous” surveys how Ōyama channeled his interests in Tokyo and American street cultures, Western abstract art, and Japanese calligraphy to create Quick Turn Structure (QTS), his signature expression. Appearing across a wide range of creative platforms, including painting, digital media, sound, and fashion, QTS gives visual form to the mixed-race, multicultural, transnational experiences of people in today’s world of fluid borders and interconnectivity.
Sayaka Ganz: Reclaimed Creations
September 5 – December 9, 2017
In her sculpture, Sayaka Ganz uses reclaimed plastic objects such as discarded utensils as a painter uses brush strokes. She describes her style as “3D impressionism”: The recycled objects appear unified at a distance, but at close proximity, individual objects are discernable. Sculptures in this exhibition include animals in motion that are rich in color and energy. Ganz was born in Yokohama, Japan, and grew up living in Japan, Brazil, and Hong Kong. She holds a master of fine arts degree in sculpture from Bowling Green State University in Ohio. The Tour of “Sayaka Ganz: Reclaimed Creations” is produced by David J. Wagner, L.L.C., David J. Wagner, Ph.D., Curator/Tour Director.
Thrift Style
August 1 – December 16, 2017
The reuse of feed, flour, and sugar sacks in clothing and other household objects became popular during the mid-1920s. Businesses capitalized on interest by introducing bags with increasingly varied printed patterns. The sacks and other fabric scraps from manufacturers continued to serve thrifty home sewers during the Great Depression and into the 1960s. A collectors market for the bags and fabric remnants thrives today. This exhibition will explore the recycling of fabrics in clothing and quilts drawn from the collection of the Historic Costume and Textile Museum of Kansas State University. Varied feed bags from a 2016 gift to that museum will highlight the range of print motifs available to twentieth-century home sewers.
Youth Builds a Better World
June 6-August 5, 2017
“With realization of one’s own potential and self-confidence in one’s ability, one can build a better world.” - Dalai Lama
We often refer to our children as our future, and youth as a time of discovery and development. Drawn from the Beach Museum of Art’s permanent collection, this exhibition investigates how educational experiences allow young people to explore their options and develop their talents for building a better world. Developed in conjunction with the Manhattan Public Library’s summer reading theme “Building a Better World.”
This exhibition is organized to complement the Manhattan Public Library's summer 2017 programs.
Porta Magica: Jason Scuilla,
2017 Friends of the Beach Museum of Art Gift Print Artist
March 14-July 1, 2017
Jason Scuilla is the 2017 Friends of the Beach Museum of Art Gift Print Artist. Each year museum supporters commission a printmaker or photographer to produce a limited edition print for sale to the public. The program, which began in 1934, recognizes outstanding contemporary artists associated with Kansas.
Scuilla lives in Manhattan, Kansas, where he serves as associate professor and head of the printmaking department at Kansas State University. An American artist of Italian descent, he has been drawn to his ancestors' country and traveled there frequently to study and create prints. Monumental fragments of Italian sculpture inspire his recent work in this medium. Dramatic compositions rendered with a pictorial economy and a deadpan sense of humor raise questions about humankind's relationship with mortality and the ancient past.
Kansas Veterinarian at Work: A Portrait by Tom Mohr
February 7-June 17, 2017
Over a span of twelve years, Tom Mohr followed Dr. Lee Penner with his camera, as the large animal veterinarian made his rounds among family farms in Kansas. What emerges from this photographic adventure is a multifaceted representation of contemporary Kansas farm life, as seen through such routine tasks as calf deliveries and such dramatic events as a nighttime necropsy. Mohr's photographs challenge his viewers to appreciate Kansas and its farmers with fresh eyes, expanding into contemporary times the movement of Regionalism started in the 1930s by John Steuart Curry, Thomas Hart Benton, and Grant Wood. See through Mohr's camera the grandeur of a vast field with a lone red barn, the quirky charm of the veterinarian's mud-encrusted van, and the strong bonds nurtured by a doctor and his community.
More Information and Related Events
John Steuart Curry: Mapping the Early Career
January 17-May 13, 2017
During the late 1920s, artist John Steuart Curry (1897-1946) gained national attention for his paintings of rural Kansas. Critics lauded his distinctive vision of the Midwest, and he became associated with leading Regionalist artists Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri and Grant Wood of Iowa.
Much less is known about Curry's early years as an artist. An exploration of his career beginnings provides a deeper understanding of the conceptual and formal underpinnings of his later success. This exhibition of works from the Beach Museum of Art and other collections charts the artist’s art studies in various parts of the United States and Europe and his exploration of occupations, including magazine illustration and mural making. A recently conserved map mural (pdf), on loan from the Burr Living Trust of Lewisberry, Pennsylvania, makes its public debut in the installation.
The exhibition is organized by Curator Liz Seaton and members of a spring 2016 seminar through the K-State department of art, comprised of students from K-State and University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Major support for “John Steuart Curry: Mapping the Early Career” is provided by Joann Goldstein in memory of Jack Goldstein. Additional support comes from the R.M. Seaton Endowment for Exhibitions and The Ross and Marianna Kistler Beach Endowment for the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art.
2016 Common Work of Art
August 23, 2016 - May 14, 2017
View Dendrochronological Data Sequences by Andrzej Zieliński, the 2016 Common Work of Art chosen to complement the K-States 2016 Common Book, Spare Parts by Joshua Davis.
Elizabeth "Grandma" Layton: You Gotta Have Art
October 11, 2016—January 28, 2017
The Beach Museum of Art's twentieth anniversary theme, "You Gotta Have Art," was inspired by the words printed on caps worn by Elizabeth Layton and her husband in many of her self-portraits. The caps were gifts from her friend Don Lambert, the Ottawa Herald reporter who discovered her work in 1977 and helped to establish Layton as an important American artist through his writing and curation of exhibitions. The succinct phrase encapsulates how art was a positive force in Elizabeth Layton's life. After an unstable marriage that ended in divorce, the death of a son, a lifelong battle with manic depression, and thirteen debilitating electroshock treatments, Layton took her first class in contour drawing and discovered how art could help her heal. Her drawings examined universal human experiences such as aging, death, social injustice, and love through the lens of her own life and body. She demonstrated the power of art in forging personal connections and developing understanding and empathy. In the comment book from her 1992 exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, one visitor wrote: "I am going through a hard time right now and it takes some effort to remember that it's all a part of life. Your drawings... remind me that other people feel pain and ecstasy, rage and glory. Thank you for celebrating."
Stan Herd: Cairns on the Beach
Fall 2014 - May 2017
Inspired by the artist’s encounter with stacked rock sculptures in woods near Lake Perry, Cairns on the Beach highlights the natural beauty of our region’s geology and pays homage to the long history of built stone structures in Kansas. Herd, who is best known for his work as a crop artist—arranging rocks, dirt and plants into compositions best seen from above—acted as lead artist on this collaboratively designed project. Throughout the fall 2014 semester, Herd will work with students from the K-State departments of Art and Landscape Architecture and Regional and Community Planning to design and install this temporary outdoor installation.