Main & Sub Gallery

Convos Around the Dinner Table, Vulpes Bastille’s first-ever student show, represents 78 students from 8 different universities: the Kansas City Art Institute, University of Central Missouri, Johnson County Community College, Metropolitan Community College, Kansas University, University of Missouri, University of Missouri-Kansas City, and Avila University.

Main Gallery

Decline Liminations showcases a series of large and small petroglyphs devised from natural textures and found surfaces, also featuring an art book and an interactive alter. The exhibition will create a sacred atmosphere for the viewers to reflect on our primitive selves and reintegrate basic, foundational truths with our modern world.

Sub Gallery

UNDOCUMENT is a public encounter with my family’s gradual loss of our New Mexican roots and ancestry across several generations of cultural assimilation, lost language, and missing people.

Main Gallery

Off the Cob pursues ways of working that each artist had to place on the back-burner during graduate studies. In pursuing past subject matter and methods of working we once discarded, this exhibition will answer the proverbial question, “what if?”. Some work will encourage audience interaction, such as the sound components paired with Reynolds’ ceramic sculptures or Pisto’s plastic book, and other work will invite a close look or extended observation, like Erb’s otherworldly dioramas and Johnson’s recorded performance Only a Matter of Time.

Sub Gallery

Low Roll is an exhibition of woodblock printmaking that explores the complexities of social interactions and the challenges that arise when adapting to the changes that accompany our inherently social nature.

Sub Gallery

In Currently Untitled, Wolf and Rouse challenge viewers to reconsider the value we assign to the material world, transforming ordinary materials into powerful expressions of longing, loss, and self-reflection. Melissa Guadalupe Wolf, a Mexican-American artist, draws on her Hispanic heritage to create mixed-media sculptures that question the functionality and meaning of everyday objects. Riley Rouse, a Kansas City-based sculptor, explores emotional connections with objects through ceramics, satire, and scale.

Main Gallery

TRYHARD aims to examine notions of identity, persona, and the self within the community through a dialogue of vibrant, unconventional, collaborative, and interactive works. The 9 emerging artists each explore, through an array of media from filmmaking to fiber, the shifting nature of persona—the code switching and contortion intrinsic to constructing an identity and inhabiting a body.

Main Gallery

Pretty in Pink II is an exhibition of ceramic and mixed media work that deeply explores my experiences as a Black woman with femininity. The body of work shown in this exhibition is a continuation of the topics discussed in Pretty in Pink, a one day end of residency culminating exhibition. I’m inviting the viewer into a world of pink and girlyness of Black women.

Sub Gallery

No Mud, No Lotus is a multimedia exhibition that focuses on painting and sculptural ceramics meant to highlight the sublime and beauty found in the return to nature.

Sub Gallery

Cuentos Y Colores Mexicanos presents a vibrant collection of 20 works by Mauricio Zúñiga, which fuse cubism and surrealism to capture the essence of Mexico. Spanning the last five years of his work, this exhibition invites the viewer to immerse themselves in a world of the artist’s personal memories and tales, expressed through intense colors and bold contrasts.

Main Gallery

Joyous Community highlights humor, laughter and joy as tools to better knit communities together and build strong bonds. Finding common ground through these fun emotions is one way we as a people and community can get past differences and fill our hearts with warmth and compassion for each other. These four female ceramic artists, who all approach the medium of clay in unique ways, use it to inspire fun, humor and community.

Sub Gallery

Edgeplay is a series of paintings that have a sense of what might be narrative dysphoria. Highly influenced by the concept of a “scene”, the exhibition borrows from kink and BDSM communities, in which a temporary fictionalized time and space is opened up between two or more people that is used to play out dynamics of power and control that could resemble real hierarchies and subjugations.

Main Gallery

Champagne Room is an installation conjuring a psychedelic tavern on the banks of the River Styx. It’s the last stop, but it’s a party stop. Most of the individual artworks have a Memento Mori theme, reminding us all to contemplate how many summers we have left. Skulls and taxidermy are a common element, but the ultimate message aims to strike a balance between Carpe Diem & Mea Culpa.

Main Gallery

i·de·a867 is an exhibition composed of four Kansas City artists’ work that speak to one theme - the juxtaposition of personal histories and fabricated histories. Some works are a direct reference to a personal history, drawn from the artists’ life experiences, or a shared history such as the history of tattoo flash and tattooing, while other works are created from an implied reality or a fabricated history, including imagined worlds, intricate stories, and visual world-building.

Sub Gallery

let us bear each other’s weight is a collection of collaborative photographs created by artists Sky Maggiore, Jonathan Virginia Green, and Nick Norman. The photographs document intimate moments, fluctuating relationships between the artists, and their individual gender transitions over time.

Main Gallery

Behind The Scenes is a group exhibition that showcases the many creative talents of the staff of the Nelson Atkins Museum. This show will shine a light on our artistic abilities, offering a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the lives and talents of those who make the museum experience possible. It will provide the public greater insight into the role of the Nelson Atkins in our city, and give meaning to our time and place in its history.

Sub Gallery

At Least You Can’t Be Sad If There Are Balloons is a series of paintings on the theme of balloons as a powerful symbol of the pressure and trials that have shaped my life—experiences that have stretched me to my limits and at times, deflated me. Balloons, filled with air, reflect moments of tension and build-up, but they also speak to the inevitable deflation that follows.

Sub Gallery

Generation Loss refers to visual data being lost when copies are made of digital files. A file saved and re-saved 10, 20, or 100 times gradually becomes a distortion of what it once was, with visual information either being lost or filled in with new artifacts. Generation Loss draws inspiration from this phenomenon and a shared nostalgia for early and modern internet culture as a universal visual language that is simultaneously encrypted and unencrypted.

Main Gallery

What Work Is is an exhibition of wearable coveralls featuring 60 invited artists: Hadley Clark, Josh Martin, Andy Ozier, Jose Faus, Noelle Choy, Cooper Siegal, Nyonu Branch, Logan Renolds, Meredith Smith, Elaine Buss, Kevin Demery, Celina Curry, Sun Young Park, Mikey Yates, Paul Maloney, Adams Puryear, Lisa Maione, Stink E. Cur, Ryly, Sally Paul, Jackson Daughety, Sierra Faust, Kate Clements, Steph Becker, Rodrigo Carazas, Elise Malone, Corey Antis, Kelly Clark, Nina Littrell, Trenton Lindner, Neko Lynn, J Berry, Raleigh Berry, Callie Juhl, Keirceten Nelson, Aleah Washington, Josie Eckerman, Fannie Berlau, Pamela Lucas, Stephanie Mcintosh, Cory Imig, Michelle Chan, Caroline Honas, Whitney Manney, Aimee Adams, Erin Dodson, Maret Cisner, Hung Le, Marie Bannerot McInerney, Erin Barchet, Gwen Murphy, Sandy Lundy, Geena Mericle, Sandra Romero, Miranda Pratt, Megan Mac Wheeler, Jackob Graves, Lizbeth De La Luna, Manabu Takashi, Kim Eichler-Messmer, and Faviola Calymayor

Sub Gallery

Secret Signs is an exhibition that delves into the transformative power of storytelling and the activities and artifacts that emerge from it. This exploration considers how stories—both the act of sharing them and the tangible remnants they leave behind—shape our identities and evoke vivid images of the individuals we aspire to become.

Main Gallery

In The Poppet Show, sixteen artists will create puppets and then help their puppets paint a painting or create in a manner they see fit. This show is about creating art through other vessels and how our art takes on a life of its own without us.

Main Gallery

Uninvited Guests contends with how built environments are constantly in tension with existing, naturally occurring non-human infrastructures embedded underneath the earth’s surface. Included here is a selection of works from an ongoing post-photographic project that relies on the glitch as a productive site of settler colonial disruption. Working across video, AI-generated texts, post-photographic images, and excavated sculpture, these pieces document a site now destroyed as of this application. Contending with legacies of natural habitat displacement in the wake of rapid urban expansion across Phoenix, Arizona’s metropolitan area, this project highlights the impact of luxury housing development in an already precarious landscape – one shaped by an ongoing water crisis in a locale plagued by significant housing instability.

Sub Gallery

Doors of Deception is an exhibition of the transportive potentials of abstraction in the work of Harper Newell and Max Crutcher. By bringing the pair together, the exhibition will present the distinct methods each artist uses to create hypnotic and illusive visual spaces. The artists use fiber and drawing techniques to individually explore differing modes of geometric and organic abstraction.

Main & Sub Gallery

The second-annual Vulpes Bastille student show will bring together 70+ artists enrolled in undergraduate programs from colleges and universities across the metro region and beyond.