wood+paper+box in your hands
2023 Friends of the Beach Museum of Art Gift Print
October 3, 2023–April 6, 2024
Katie Baldwin, Mariko Jesse, and Yoonmi Nam make up the artist collective wood+paper+box. They met in Japan in 2004 at an artist residency, where together they lived and studied mokuhanga, the traditional Japanese woodblock printmaking technique. Artworks by wood+paper+box carry the spark born of shared experience and are created through collaboration, interaction, and friendship. They offer the idea of appreciating art not just by looking but also by touching and participating.
In the exhibition, visitors can handle and interact with a sample gift print, Mise-en-Scène. The title refers to stage design and the arrangement of actors in a theatre or film production. Viewers can contribute to wood+paper+box’s ongoing visual dialogue by posting images of their own arrangements of prints from the box on Instagram, using the hashtag #woodpaperbox. In the current challenging social and political time, wood+paper+box offers a moment to slow down and share in the beauty and comfort of communal creativity.
Major Sponsors: The Alms Group, Greater Manhattan Community Foundation’s Lincoln & Dorothy I. Deihl Community Grants Program
Related event
wood+paper+box Artists Talk by Katie Baldwin, Mariko Jesse and Yoonmi Nam
Thursday, November 2, 2023, 5:30 p.m.
Beach Museum of Art
Free and open to the public
Image: wood+paper+box, Mise-en-Scène, 2020–22, mokuhanga, lithography, letterpress, inkjet, printing, relief printing, dimensions, variable, 2023 Marianna Kistler, Beach Museum of Art Gift Print, edition of 10, photo: Alec Smith
To the Stars Through Art: A History of Art Collecting in Kansas Public Schools, 1900-1950
August 22, 2023 – May 11, 2024
In 1911 the school superintendent in McPherson, Kansas, organized an exhibition to acquire artwork for a new high school. This became an annual ticketed event, allowing the McPherson schools to establish a rich collection of works by regionally and nationally recognized artists, among them James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Birger Sandzén and Fern Coppedge.
Before the mid-century, schools in dozens of Kansas communities, including boarding schools for Indigenous students and segregated schools, joined McPherson in acquiring original art. To the Stars Through Art will feature 70 paintings and prints by Blackbear Bosin, Norma Bassett Hall, Walter Ufer and other artists, from more than a dozen schools and history museums across the state.
A goal of the exhibition is to guide Kansas schools in caring for their collections and using art for educational enrichment. The exhibition is being organized by Curator Elizabeth Seaton in collaboration with regional scholars and museum curators.
Major Sponsors: Friends of the Beach Museum of Art, The Alms Group
Sustaining Sponsor: Humanities Kansas, a nonprofit cultural organization that connects communities with history, traditions, and ideas to strengthen civic life.
Media Sponsor: KANSAS! Magazine
Click here to view the exhibition flyer
Related free events
The Sue Jean Covacevich Educators Conference
Inspiring Students Through Art Collecting
Saturday, November 4, 8:30 a.m. – 4 p.m., Beach Museum of Art
An event for educators (K-12, college, museums) and the general public. Registration is free and is required. Secure your spot now to join this incredible opportunity to expand your knowledge and network. Click here to register for the conference.
Best Practices for the Care of Art in Schools
Thursday, November 16, 5:30 p.m.
Livestream conversation with Nicole Grabow, director of preventive conservation at the Midwest Art Conservation Center, and Sarah Price, Beach Museum of Art Collections Manager. Free and open to the public. Join the program via Zoom. Click here to register. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with information about how to join the program.
Image: Ethel Spears, WPA Cutting Down a Tree, ca. 1938, Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project, Illinois, allocated to Topeka High School, opaque watercolor and graphite on paper, 2016.30
Neil Welliver: Maine Seasons
June 27, 2023 – August 17, 2024
Neil Welliver (1929–2005) is known for his large landscapes of rural Maine. Three of his impressive canvases form this exhibition. The paintings are on loan from Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. Welliver set up his easel in the state’s woods, along its shorelines, and atop its peaks, in all seasons and all weather. The artist, remarking on working during a Maine winter, said, “It hurts your hands, it hurts your feet, it hurts your ears. … But sometimes there are things you want and that’s the only way you get them.”
In a warmer studio, Welliver translated his painted studies into charcoal-on-paper compositions, which he stapled to a massive canvas. He traced the drawing using a sewing pouncing wheel, which left a pattern of dots on the fabric. He then began painting, starting in the upper left corner and moving across and down. Author and artist Maurice Grosser described Welliver’s process as being “exactly as though he were lowering an upside-down window shade to reveal a landscape already behind it.”
Welliver’s dramatic views of Vacationland, as Maine often calls itself, are notably devoid of humans, except for an imagined hiker-viewer. The artist once said: “I am very interested in the idea of the spectator entering a picture … to, in fact, not see the picture as an object but really actively enter into it … in a psychological sense.”
The Beach Museum of Art is a borrowing institution of the Art Bridges Collection Loan Partnership. Art Bridges, established by philanthropist and arts patron Alice Walton, is a foundation dedicated to expanding access to American art across the United States.
Major Sponsor:
Image: Neil G. Welliver, Autumn Blueberry Barren, 1982, oil on canvas, 96 × 96 in., Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, Gift of Ruth and Stanley Westreich, 2021.14