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Kansas City, MO 64111

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Kemper Museum is a free art museum in Kansas City, Missouri that presents global contemporary art.

Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art

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Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art acknowledges it resides on the ancestral territory of the Osage, Kaw, and Otoe-Missouria, among other tribal nations forcibly moved to the region such as the Shawnee, Wyandot, Delaware, Potawatomi, Sac and Fox and Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo) nations. We recognize and support the continued vibrancy of Native communities and cultures today who continue to thrive, as well as the inherent sovereignty of tribal nations. We are compelled to serve and advocate for these communities in accordance with our public mission.

Kemper Museum acknowledges and respects the diversity of Native people connected to this land today. Many recognize the land and all beings who live within it as relatives. We acknowledge the earth we inhabit, the waters of the Blue River, the Kansas River, the Missouri River, and the plants, animals, and people supported by them. 

We acknowledge our responsibility to be good caretakers of the land we occupy. 

Click here to learn more about our land acknowledgment process.

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Meet artist Sarah Zapata at Kemper Museum.

Artist Talk & Reception Sarah Zapata: So the roots be known

Artist Talk | Sarah Zapata

Bar Opens 5:30 p.m.  |  Artist talk 6 p.m.  | Reception 7 p.m.

Join us for an evening celebrating the eighth annual Atrium Project installation, Sarah Zapata: So the roots be known. 

New York-based artist Sarah Zapata (Peruvian American, born 1988) creates vibrant and inviting site-specific installations. In her practice, she sources familiar materials—such as acrylic yarn and natural fibers—and traditional artforms including weaving, coiling, sewing, and latch hooking, to articulate the intersections of her plural identities: the daughter of a Peruvian immigrant; a first generation American born in Texas; and a queer woman raised in an Evangelical household.

In So the roots be known, Zapata centers local lesbian and feminist histories from her research at the Gay and Lesbian Archive of Mid-America at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. In part, this installation pays homage to Womontown, a group of primarily queer women who established a revolutionary community in the Longfellow (Dutch Hill) neighborhood of Kansas City in the late 1980s. Zapata’s use of abstracted tulip forms and shades of lavender draw inspiration from the Womontown banner while simultaneously evoking histories of queer resistance, as the color lavender came to be associated with gay and lesbian communities, and thus stigmatized, in the mid-twentieth century. Ladders—a recurring motif in Zapata’s work alluding to ideas of fantasy and transitional spaces—here make reference to the national lesbian magazine The Ladder (1956–1970), founded by the Daughters of Bilitis and later operated remotely by recognized writer and publisher Barbara Grier in Kansas City. 

Image: Sarah Zapata. Photo by Ignacio Torres.