HA 706/906

Since its founding in 1994, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, MO has built a permanent collection of nearly 1,500 works by artists from across the USA and around the globe. The collection includes significant works by canonical modern and contemporary artists including Georgia O’Keeffe, Jacques Lipchitz, Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Alice Neel, Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Romare Bearden, David Hockney, Wayne Thiebaud, Christian Boltanski, Magdalena Abakanowicz, and Louise Bourgeois. The Kemper also actively acquires works by regional, emerging, and mid-career artists, often collecting works from exhibitions it organizes (e.g., by Rashid Johnson, Natalie Frank, and Dyani White Hawk). 

This seminar will engage students in the detailed study of selected artworks in the Kemper’s permanent collection. Seminar participants will develop and apply practical art historical skills of research, analysis, and writing to produce informative texts on individual artworks for publication on the Kemper website. Each student will research and write on a limited number of artworks over the course of the semester under the instructor’s guidance and with the benefit of feedback on their writing from their peers. Students at the 900 level will also write a longer research paper on a single work in the Kemper collection.