Life Altering: Selections from a Kansas City Collection is at BU’s Faye G., Jo, and James Stone Gallery through March 1. Museum of Fine Arts Boston’s Penny Vinik Curator of Fashion Arts, theo tyson (above), was among the visitors to the exhibition.

Visual Arts

Life Altering: Selections from a Kansas City Collection Celebrates Diverse Artists

Stone Gallery exhibition explores race and racism, identity, and inequity of wealth and power around the world

The striking pieces in the new BU exhibition Life Altering: Selections from a Kansas City Collection offer a welcome reprieve from the gray winter weather. Many of the 23 works on display use eye-catching materials—from glitter, rhinestones, and sequins to circuit boards, tiny bells, and glass beads. Featuring work by women, people of color, and artists working internationally, the show is at the Faye G., Jo, and James Stone Gallery through March 1.

Among the pieces is Amy Sherald’s oil painting She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them (2018)—the title a reference to a passage in the Zora Neale Hurston novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. It stands out for its relative simplicity, compared to many of the pieces in the gallery, but is vibrant and colorful nonetheless. In it, a woman with a stoic expression,  wearing a bright orange cloche hat, teal shirt, and white floral-patterned pants, faces forward. She is set against a plain coral red background and looks outward, meeting the viewers’ gaze. Sherald has given much attention to the woman’s outfit, capturing the seeming heaviness of the large multistrand pearl necklace she’s wearing. The title of the work pairs with this intense focus given to the woman’s outward appearance—the viewer is privy only to what they see on the “outside.”

The New Jersey–based Sherald is known for her portraits of Black people, both famous and not. First Lady Michelle Obama selected the artist to paint her official White House portrait, which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Another one of Sherald’s works, a striking portrait of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman fatally shot by white police officers at her home in Louisville, Ky., in 2020, was featured on the cover of the September 2020 issue of Vanity Fair. Sherald renders all of her subjects in grisaille—a grayish monochrome—often set against solid color backgrounds, like the painting in the Stone Gallery show.

“The story of why I paint my figures gray has evolved over the years. I’m not trying to take race out of the conversation, I’m just trying to highlight an interiority,” she said in a conversation with fellow artist Tyler Mitchell for Art in America in 2021. “In hindsight, I realize that I was avoiding painting people into a corner, where they’d have to exist in some universal way. I don’t want the conversation around my work to be solely about identity.”

All of the exhibition’s pieces come from the collection of Kansas City art collectors Bill and Christy Gautreaux, who have set out to acquire work by diverse artists. The works explore such themes as identity, race, the experience of exile and diaspora, and the impact of technology. Lissa Cramer (MET’18), managing director of Boston University Art Galleries, worked with independent curator Leesa Fanning to put together the show. 

“Each work in this exhibition is just incredible,” Cramer says. “There’s so much diversity between artist, theme, medium—there are so many ways that these works can resonate with viewers.”

While Sherald’s work draws viewers in with its figure’s challenging gaze, another piece in the exhibition, Ebony G. Patterson’s II Treez in a Forest (2013) pulls visitors in with its glittery embellishments. A mixed-media triptych of sorts, it consists of three large, vertically oriented pieces of watercolor paper mounted side by side. On top of the paper, Patterson, a Jamaican artist who had a solo show at BU’s 808 Gallery in 2016, has created a collage with glitter, sequins, fabric, and patterned paper to depict two figures wearing elaborate outfits and jewelry, posing as if for a photograph. In this work, she explores Jamaica’s dancehall culture and the concept of traditional gender codes. According to Patterson, the dancehall is a freeing site where men who are typically made invisible in their daily lives, through forces like poverty and racism, wear bold clothing to stand out and become visible.

Life Altering features artists from all over the world and many different cultural heritages, among them Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, a British painter of Nigerian descent; Elias Sime, an Ethiopian artist based in Addis Ababa; and Vibha Galhotra, an Indian artist who lives and works in New Delhi.

Senegalese artist Omar Ba, based in Dakar, Brussels, and Geneva, addresses the inequities of wealth and power around the world in his work Promenade masquée 2 (2016). The painting, done on canvas with oil, acrylic, gouache, and pencil, has a tapestry-like quality. Ba’s mark-making makes it look like the painting has a woven texture. It shows a masked figure sitting in an elaborate throne, while next to the figure stands a man whose head is obscured by the painting’s background. At his side stands a much smaller figure, perhaps a child, also faceless. Both figures’ standing position and absence of face contrast with the eerie mask of the person in power, seated comfortably on the throne. Finally, in the painting’s foreground, Ba has depicted a black ship that connotes slavery and oppression. It appears to be traveling in front of the throne and towards the faceless people.

One of the exhibition’s notable sculptures, throne, roof and clapboard (2010), is part of a series by Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates. He uses reclaimed wood and found materials to construct thrones modeled after the ones at Shine King, a shoeshine and shoe repair store in Chicago. The wood making up the back of this “throne” is weathered, jagged in spots, and a nail sticks out of one of the chair’s arms. Gates told W magazine in 2013 that with the throne series, he is trying to grapple with how “certain forms of labor are associated with certain kinds of people—and to blow that up.” At NADA/Art Basel Miami Beach in 2009, Gates set up some of the sculptures and invited visitors to sit in them. Then he started shining their shoes. Crowds of people began to watch him and soon he had sold all of the sculptures. According to W, one throne fetched $12,000.

“As with every exhibition at the BU Art Galleries, this show is about amplifying the artists’ voices,” says Cramer. “Giving these artists space to make their statement on topics like ​​race, power, and wealth dynamics, and LGBTQIA+ rights—through such dynamic, beautiful works—is a timely gift to our BU community as well as to the Boston metro area.”

Life Altering: Selections from a Kansas City Collection is at the Faye G., Jo, and James Stone Gallery, 855 Commonwealth Ave., through Tuesday, March 1; hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 11 am to 5 pm. Admission is free. A virtual tour is also available.