Events
Gallery Opening and Artists’ Talk: Let Me Take You Down
April 11, 2025 | 6:30pm
Exhibition Opening, Featured Event, FREE Event, Local Creatives Exhibition Series, WAM Nights, Adult Events & Programs
Cost:
FREE | Open to the Public | No RSVP Required
Location:
Howard E. Wooden Auditorium
Wichita Art Museum, 1400 West Museum Blvd
Organizer:
Wichita Art Museum
About this Event
In Let Me Take You Down–the latest exhibition in WAM and Harvester Arts’ Regional Creatives series–Kendra Cremin, Kelsy Gossett, and Jennifer Ray navigate themes of uncertainty, disconnection, intimacy, and the tension between fantasy and lived experience. Through their photographs, they explore personal and cultural narratives of motherhood, queerness, and adoption, challenging societal expectations and the pressure to conform. This joint talk invites the audience to step through portals, pathways, and doors—metaphors for the ways we shape, distort, and ultimately reconcile our own realities.
◆ Bar opens – 6 PM ( cash and credit card accepted)
◆ Artist Panel Begins – 6:30 PM
WAM Nights We’re open late on Fridays until 9 pm! Start your weekend with after-hours access to the galleries and shopping in the Museum Store. WAM Nights will include programs with artists, musicians, and performers–don’t miss your chance to see the art at WAM in a new way! The museum comes to life with local creatives during WAM Nights!
WAM’s Regional Creatives Exhibition Series is dedicated to exhibiting art by local artists. This program is a partnership with Harvester Arts, a local nonprofit art organization fostering opportunities for Wichita creatives. Their core values of experimentation, capacity building, and community engagement are a framework for this partnership, which includes this exhibition space and programming with local creatives, including performances, talks, and pop-up experiences.
The Panelists
Kendra Cremin a Freelance Photographer, Artist and Instructor out of Wichita, KS. She loves being part of a story. If you aren’t in a hurry, ask her about her photography work with the International Rescue Committee, The Shout or The City of Wichita, to name a few. Addicted to photography and caffeine, she jumps at the chance to access unique locations where one moment can be a whole story within itself. All photography work is good work to her and she has likely taken your picture at an event or you’ve seen her work published locally. Currently she is working on her own art show concentrations while teaching as an Adjunct Instructor at Wichita State University
as well as continuing her freelance schedule.
Kelsy Gossett Dennis is an artist and educator. Her work has been featured worldwide including venues in Germany, Romania, Belgium, Hungary and extensively across the United States in galleries and museums such as Center for Fine Art Photography, Crisp-Ellert Art Museum and The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. Her short films have been showcased in film festivals including the Seattle Queer Film Festival, Defy Film Festival, Los Angeles CineFest, and Femmes’ Video Art Festival. She received her MFA from Wichita State University and is currently the Assistant Professor of Photography & Art at McPherson College.
Jennifer Ray received her MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago and BA in Studio Art from Oberlin College. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Ulrich Museum of Art, the Museo del Barro, the Fundación Bienal Asunción, and the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. It was selected for the 1st Asunción Biennial (Paraguay) and Bienal de Curitiba (Brazil) and has been exhibited at the RISD Museum of Art, the Chelsea Art Museum, Gallery 44, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Hyde Park Art Center, and Chicago Cultural Center, among other venues. She’s been awarded residencies at Latitude Chicago, ACRE, and Unpack (Havana/Toronto). Her work is included in the Collector’s Guide to New Art Photography, published by Humble Arts Foundation. She’s received research grants from the Illinois Arts Council, Columbia College, the Chicago Office of Tourism and Culture, Oberlin College, and Wichita State University. Her long-term project, Shouting Fire, will be published by Push/Pull Editions in 2024. She is currently Associate Professor of Photo Media at Wichita State University and Associate Director of the School of Art, Design & Creative Industries.
