(im)permanent exhibitions now on view:

• Home and Place

  August 2024 - Ongoing

  In a world long before this one, there was enough for
  Everyone,
  Until somebody got out of line.
  –United States Poet Laureate Joy Harjo (Muscogee),
  “Rabbit Is Up to Tricks,” 2015 

  Are home and place the brick and mortar that house us and the ground beneath our feet? Or are home and place at least as much in our heritage, relationships, and histories? What is the significance of home and place for Native Americans, whose homelands were seized and their communities displaced?    

  These are questions that contemporary Native artists, including Fritz Scholder, Norman Akers, and Tony Abeyta, raise in their art about the complexity of Native people’s relationship to home and place. Taken together, the artists in this exhibition visualize diverse viewpoints—both about the legacies of displacement as well as the joys, beauties, and richness of what it means to be Native to a place and to make that place one’s home.  

  

• Origin Stories: Highlights from the Roland P. Murdock Collection

  December 2023 - Ongoing

  “Wichita? Mrs. Navas is a careful shopper. Result—she collects good pictures.” –Artist Walt Kuhn, 1948

  The Wichita Art Museum owes its existence to the passion and vision of two women, Louise Caldwell Murdock and Elizabeth Stubblefield Navas. In 1915, Murdock made it her mission to ensure that her hometown of Wichita would have an art museum, donating her family fortune—her husband Roland P. Murdock was the business manager and co-owner of The Wichita Eagle—to purchase a “significant collection” of American art. Murdock entrusted Navas, her friend and colleague, with the task of assembling the collection that would become the core of the Wichita Art Museum. Preparing for the day that she would become a major collector, Navas moved to New York City, where she immersed herself in the art world and learned from leading art historians and critics. In 1939, she made her first purchase, John Steuart Curry’s Kansas Cornfield. (Although Louise Caldwell Murdock died nearly 25 years earlier, money from her estate was not available until the late 1930s.) For the next 20 years, Navas acquired art for the museum, including the works displayed in this gallery, aiming to “present visually a history of the culture of the United States.” She lived her life in service of Murdock’s dream to establish WAM as a great American art museum on the Kansas prairie.

  

• The Personal is Professional: Artists’ Friends and Family

  December 2023 - Ongoing

  Creators have drawn inspiration from the people in their lives for centuries. For instance, author and comedian David Sedaris uses family material so often that he once sat in a Q and A session thinking “how odd it was that these people seemed to know so much about my brother and sisters.” Taylor Swift, whose iconic song writing is partly defined by its frequent references to her former lovers, made a lighthearted reference to this reputation in a song: “I bet you think about me when you say/ ‘Oh my God, she’s insane, she wrote a song about me.’” The artists featured here suggest that no insanity is required: they all look to their relationships—family, friends, romantic partners, and acquaintances—for everything from cheap models to intimate character studies.

  

• America at Work: Images of Labor from the Wichita Art Museum Collection

  December 2023 - Ongoing

  As a young country attempting to define itself in the 1800s, the United States—and American artists—celebrated the nation’s vast landscape as a symbol of the country’s prosperity and potential. By the early 20th century, however, artists increasingly embraced the American worker and American industry as the true symbols of the nation. Many of the paintings in this exhibition celebrate the laborer—the farmer and rancher working the land, maintenance men keeping up US cities, and mothers raising children in difficult conditions. At the same time, artists used images of labor and industry to highlight the plight of the worker, particularly during the Great Depression in the 1930s. These images valorize the American farmer, miner, and factory worker while revealing the barriers—particularly racism and generational poverty—they endured in pursuit of the American Dream. Each image speaks to work and life in the US—despairing or hopeful, commonplace or

  

• Hard Edges and Lyrical Visions

  December 2023 – June 2025

  In the 1950s, American abstract art—called “the new American painting”—was the first United States art movement to make a truly global splash. It is easy to see how rural landscapes or city life in New York represented the country, but big black circles or rainbow-colored squares? In the middle of the 20th century, though, abstraction meant progress, a definitively American value. Bold, experimental, individualistic, forward thinking—these characteristics of abstraction were all understood to be quintessentially American. Although the story of abstract art at that time was told mainly through the headlines of a few larger-than-life, paint-splattered white men, abstract artists were a diverse group that included women and people of various ethnic and racial identities. They—and artists who continue in the tradition today—drew inspiration and meaning from diverse heritages and histories. Featuring canonical names with other artists who are less well known, Hard Edges and Lyrical Visions celebrates the various strands of modern and contemporary US abstraction.