Amy Kligman: Shrines of the Luminous Halo
Main Gallery
November 7-January 19
Imagine you are stepping into a bubble, a space filled with all the thoughts that drift through your mind in a single day. What do you surround yourself with? What defines you? And how do you interact with or move around these objects that symbolize yourself?
Amy Kligman’s series of 23 paintings glimpses an inner world, specifically focusing on the objects we choose to surround us. Arranged in a deliberate, symmetrical way, these objects represent who we are.
“I love objects and environments that carry the history of the people that have shared space and time with them. I think about lineage — the patina of the world handed from generation to generation, and what it means to try to make something of the world as we receive it from others,” says Kligman, who lives and works in Kansas City, Missouri. “Generations of women, generations of artists, generations of family. In my paintings I pull together elements from these histories to suggest a kind of ‘bubble world’ where those disparate pieces come together in a place of hope, reverence, acknowledgment, or sometimes a sort of aspiration for a future where the efforts of the past inform progress.”
Throughout the history of art, depictions of the table and its contents have been used as a storytelling device to convey skillfully coded meaning and sociocultural significance to the viewer. Taking the genre of still lifes as its entry point, this exhibition expands upon art historical precedents to think about the table (or toolcart) not only as a site and signifier of power, position, and social status but also as a shrine.
Kligman’s series also gives form to Virginia Woolf's idea of a "luminous halo" — a semi-transparent layer that envelops us from the moment we become conscious until the end. Kligman’s works act like a book focusing on how we remember and what we think we know.
“In the assembling of objects I’m often pulling together references and symbols as an invitation to a specific state of being or meditation or reflection. By creating these spaces and inviting others into them, I’m inviting them into these states of reflection as well, though folks are not meant to understand all the symbols and the visual language in a didactic way. I believe intention has its own halo, echoing out into the universe, subtly encouraging movement.”
About the artist
Amy Kligman is a painter and installation artist whose work is mostly about people, even when it takes the form of rooms full of layered, disposable party goods. Kligman holds her BFA from Ringling College of Art & Design. At the end of 2024, after nine years in the role, she stepped down as executive director at Charlotte Street Foundation to create her own opportunities by identifying gaps in the Kansas City arts ecosystem. She launched Special Effects gallery to make local artists more nationally visible. In March of 2025 she opened Salon for Possible Futures, an artwork that doubles as a community gathering space on view at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art. Additionally her work was featured in New American Paintings and she received the Charlotte Street Foundation Visual Art Award, ArtsKC Inspiration Grant, Art in the Loop Public Art Commission, residency at the Luminary in St. Louis, Missouri Bank Artboards Commission, and the Byron C. Cohen Artist Award.