Now and Then: From the Studio of Kathleen Shanahan
September 6, 2025 - January 11, 2026
Kurdian Gallery
About This Exhibition
Wichita-based artist Kathleen Shanahan explores “all the gritty relationships possible” in her mix media canvases—both in the shrewd and slippery visual links she creates and in her investigation of sensory contrasts. Now and Then: From the Studio of Kathleen Shanahan reunites early examples of her art with recent projects, inviting viewers to chart the “gritty relationships” in her work. A Jack-in-the-pulpit flower’s slender stem and undulating bloom; a water bird’s S-curve neck and scissors-shaped head; a dog’s corkscrew tail; a child’s bouncy curls—these are a handful of the many images she rhymes, layers, and splices together.
Like a planful gardener, sowing excess seeds then thinning seedlings to promote healthy growth, she often tests compositions with constructed paper collages, repositioning elements then paring down. Other times, she plants one visual component on a canvas and responds with abstract mark-making, as if the object is a wild garden grounded by a mature tree. Buzzing through Now and Then like pollinators are found objects—from McCall’s sewing pattern pieces to neckties. Some of the pre-fabricated items perch carefully on surfaces, while others she traps in thick paint or deposits of mixed media. Her pairings of images and references—whether painted, drawn, or affixed—alongside her poetic titles offer playful, sometimes biting, possibilities. This exhibition brings decades of Shanahan’s practice together and invites you to—imaginatively—feel the surfaces, peel back the layers, and make new gritty relationships among her images.
Artist Statement:
Kathleen Shanahan
An ongoing theme in my work is the reconciliation (or not) of opposites and dualities, as in the Buddhist idea of the coexistence of good and evil.
Each work begins as an escape toward an unknown destination. Sometimes the work starts with a constructed paper collage, where I have worked out design issues of scale, size, and placement of elements which play their role in the matrix. There I have manipulated the image.
At other times, when paralysis strikes, I begin a work by committing to one visual element on the “canvas”, leaving me with a journey into uncharted territory.
I am an image maker, a figurative artist, though abstraction is often involved. I pursue the image, which begins as a visual puzzle of my own making. I am “out to solve” this puzzle, and I usually struggle with the myriad options, eventually resolving the puzzle with what I feel works.
At times the work before me becomes a three ring circus. I know there are many possible solutions to a visual puzzle, so that gives me the go ahead to try things.
It is up to the viewer to complete the “meaning” of the work. It might speak to them on many levels. Maybe “the medium is the message”. I like mixed media for all the gritty relationships possible, as in satin versus gravel, chalky versus reflective.
I like combining elements because of their associations, differences and similarities. They may have similar shapes but extremely different functions (bullhorn vs. ice cream cone).
The journey for me in launching an image is, as they say, the reward. I like to hold the various elements in an image in suspension, so that the viewer may ponder their strange bedfellow connections.
Additionally, one of the pleasures for me in the pursuit of art making, is the sheer sensuousness of media manipulation (paint, pastel, plaster, whatever).
Artist Bio:
After a BFA from the University of Michigan (1969), and an MFA from the University of Arizona (1976), she taught in colleges and universities in Arizona, Oregon, Missouri and Kansas at Wichita State University (1983-97) as associate professor, and University of Kansas (2001-02), as lecturer in painting and drawing. She devoted one year (1976) to live and work on her art in Bisbee, AZ, and another doing grant-funded research in Japan (1981-82) based at the National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka. During her career, she has exhibited in Chicago and New York City, Paris, France, Hong Kong, and Japan.
Her work can be seen at the Rueben Saunders Gallery in Wichita KS, and Viridian Artists in New York City .
During a seven year residence in Kansas City (1997-2003), she was awarded the Alpha Delta Kappa Foundation Fine Arts Painting Grant (2000). She returned to Wichita in 2003. In recent years she has taught various classes at Mark Arts, and been commissioned by Ballet Wichita to create promotional materials for two separate seasons of the Nutcraker.
Artist residencies include Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest IL (1987), Hot Springs National Park (2018), and Riley-Strauss Printmaking Studio in Wellfleet MA.
She and her work were featured in New American Painting, Midwest Edition
(1993), Forty-Four Kansas Artists, A Kansas Collection (1989), Wichita Artists in Their
Studios (2016), Practical Mixed Media Printmaking, Sarah Riley, A&C Black, London
(2011), and Slide Portfolio which accompanies Drawing-Space, Form ,
Expression, Wayne Enstice, Prentice Hall (1990).
Notable collections with her work include Art of Emprise (Wichita KS), Kansas Health Foundation (Wichita KS), The University of Kansas Spencer Art Museum (Lawrence KS), Kearney Regional Medical Center, Kearney NE, Hot Springs National Park, Hot Springs, AR, Elizabeth Koch Foundation, Wichita, KS, Greteman Group, Wichita, KS, Wichita Art Museum, Wichita, KS, Dr. T. Fujii, Director, National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, Japan, KMUW, National Public Radio Affiliate, Wichita KS and
Southern Graphics Council, Print Archives, Statesboro, GA.
