Paul Anthony Smith Opening Reception

Join us at Paul Anthony Smith’s Gallery Opening in the Art Gallery

There will be Curry and a special beverage served in the Art Studio served by yours truly!

6:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Paul Anthony Smith’s newest work, Dreams, models itself after the Harlem Renaissance Poet Langston Hughes’ poem, A Dream Deferred. Nodding to Andy Warhol’s paintings of flowers and the extraordinary value of those works, Smith’s large-scale paintings are constructed from images taken along the gardens of Fifth Avenue in the Upper East Side across from New York City’s Central Park where semi-impervious fencing both lures passersby and enforces distance. Smith’s work asks What is the American dream, in a context of impervious
class and place. Here, in Kansas City, these paintings consider local systems of oppression such as red lining along Troost Avenue, highlighting how neighborhoods are designed to segregate people, but also memorializes the intention required to maintain these divisions. Smith’s work speaks to beauty that remains beyond reach, and the barriers that we should explode.