Artspeak Radio with Kemper Museum of Art, Christine Cronin and Debbie Barrett-Jones

Artspeak Radio, Wednesday, March 26, 2025, 9am -10am CST, 90.1fm KKFI Kansas City Community Radio, streaming live audio www.kkfi.org
Producer/host Maria Vasquez Boyd welcomes curator Kevin Moore, author Christine Cronin, and artist Debbie B Jones.

CHRISTINE CRONIN is an MSW and MPH graduate of Washington University in St. Louis. She has worked in the field of psychology since 2004. She became Vice President at a non-profit at age 27 working with the homeless, has been a yoga instructor since 2022, completed the first level of Reiki training in 2023, and has multiple countries and is currently a psychotherapist at the Veterans Health Administration.

KEVIN MOORE, Curator- The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art is proud to present Stan Douglas: Metronome, a groundbreaking exhibition by the renowned Canadian artist Stan Douglas. This highly anticipated exhibition opens to the public with an Opening Celebration on Thursday, March 27 at 6:00 p.m. and an exclusive Artist Talk on Friday, March 28 at 6:00 p.m.
Stan Douglas (b. 1960) is a Canadian artist whose work investigates the intersection of technology, image-making, and collective memory through the mediums of film and photography. For Stan Douglas: Metronome, three major video works are showcased, each focused on the theme of music. As an audiophile and former DJ, Douglas uses music as a metaphor for social and political conditions and a means for global cultural exchange. By intertwining historical moments with the present, his work highlights themes of memory, social unity, conflict, and the complexities of cultural interaction.
The featured works in Stan Douglas: Metronome include ISDN (2022), which connects rappers from the UK and Egypt through the now-obsolete ISDN technology, exploring social struggles and aspirations. Luanda-Kinshasa (2013) imagines a historic jam session at Columbia’s 30th Street Studio, creating a utopian musical space where different ethnicities come together. Douglas’s early work, Hors-champs (1992), features Black expatriate musicians improvising a “free jazz” session, while his photographic series Disco Angola (2012) and Crowds and Riots (2008–21) delve deeper into themes of collective memory and cultural transference. Through these pieces, Douglas blends narratives and geographies, challenging binary thinking and reimagining both history and the present.
Stan Douglas: Metronome is organized by the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, and curated by Kevin Moore. It is supported by a major publication, Stan Douglas: Ghostlight, published by Dancing Foxes Press in collaboration with the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS), Bard College, Hessel Museum of Art. The book includes essays by CCS graduate program director and chief curator Lauren Cornell, Kevin Moore, and other prominent scholars.
This exhibition has been generously supported by the Bebe and Crosby Kemper Foundation for the Arts, UMB Bank, n.a., Trustee; William T. Kemper Charitable Trust, UMB Bank, n.a.; Richard J. Stern Foundation for the Arts, Commerce Bank, n.a., Trustee; Christy and Bill Gautreaux; John and Sharon Hoffman; and the Missouri Arts Council. In-Kind support has been provided by DRAW Architecture + Urban Design, Kansas City and Mid-America Contractors. The organizers extend special thanks to David Zwirner Gallery and Stan Douglas Studio.

Exhibition Details: Stan Douglas: Metronome March 28, 2025 – October 12, 2025 Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art 4420 Warwick Blvd, Kansas City, MO 64111
Public Opening Celebration Thursday, March 27, 2025, 6:00 p.m.
Media Walkthrough Friday, March 28, 2025, 10:00 a.m.
Artist Talk with Stan Douglas Friday, March 28, 2025, 6:00 p.m.

Kevin Moore is a curator and writer based in New York. His work focuses on the history of photography, film/video, and contemporary art. He earned a Ph.D. in art history in 2002 from Princeton University and has worked in curatorial departments at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University. He is the Curator of the McEvoy Collection, San Francisco, and the Artistic Director and Curator of FotoFocus, Cincinnati. Moore has curated museum exhibitions of the work of Stan Douglas (2025), Barbara Probst (2024), Chip Thomas (2024), Tony Oursler (2022), Ian Strange (2022), Ellen Berkenblit and Sarah Braman (2019), Eugène Atget and Berenice Abbott (2018), Karin Mamma Andersson (2018), Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Constance DeJong (2018), Roe Ethridge (2016), Zanele Muholi (2016), Jackie Nickerson (2016), Taiyo Onoroato & Nico Krebs (2014), David Benjamin Sherry (2014), Vivian Maier (2014), as well as thematic surveys, including Infinite Regress: Mystical Abstraction from the Permanent Collection and Beyond (2024), After Industry (2016), New Slideshow (2016), Screenings (2014), Stills (2014), Panopticum (2014), Eve Plays Duchamp (2013), Alchemical (2013), Real to Real: Photographs from the Traina Collection (2012), and Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970-1980 (2010). Many of these exhibitions are accompanied by significant publications. Moore has written extensively on modern and contemporary art. He is the author of On the Line: Documents of Risk and Faith (with Makeda Best, 2022), Old Paris and Changing New York: Photographs by Eugène Atget and Berenice Abbott (2019), Jacques Henri Lartigue: The Invention of an Artist (2004; French version, 2012; Polish version, 2015), and a contributing author to Ian Strange: Disturbed Home (2022), Tino: Nivola in America (2022), Lincoln Kirstein’s Modern (2019), and Photography at MoMA 1920-1960 (2016). He is also a regular contributor to The Art Newspaper, Aperture, and The Guardian.

DEBBIE BARRETT-JONES-Textiles artist, Debbie Barrett-Jones left her small town in Iowa so she could pursue an education at the Kansas City Art Institute (KCAI) and since graduation, has exhibited her work throughout the United States, including the Kansas City area locations, such as; Children’s Mercy Hospital in North Kansas City, Truman Medical Center, Community Christian Church, Lead Bank in the Crossroads of Kansas City and The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. And in late 2016, she collaborated with the Kansas City Ballet for an art installation and performance called Unspoken. Barrett-Jones received her Master of Fine Art at the University of Kansas focusing on textiles in May of 2023.
In 2016, she began to envision the “Healing with Weaving” initiative, highlighting the importance of how art, specifically weaving, can be a therapeutic tool for healing. The first Healing with Weaving Community Outreach Program’s pilot project at Children’s Mercy Hospital Adele Hall Campus in Kansas City, MO. The project provides 200 Healing with Weaving Frame Loom Kits with instructions to be used by patients, family members and staff to explore the meditative and therapeutic benefits of weaving during the summer and fall of 2021. Currently, Barrett-Jones was one of nineteen Kansas City artists to be commissioned to make permanent public artwork for the new KCI Airport that will open in the spring of 2023.

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