Bruce Hartman, director of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art at Johnson County Community College, has big plans for the new exhibition space. Hartman is pictured with a work by Do-Ho Suh made of stainless-steel dog tags.

Green

Overland Park ? Installing pieces in one of his new contemporary art galleries, Bruce Hartman realized something.

The gallery didn’t have any white male artists represented. Hartman and his colleagues joked that the room wasn’t very diverse.

That’s the sort of attitude that permeates the new Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art at Johnson County Community College, which opens to the public today.

Previous stereotypes of artists and their artwork are out – the focus is on the present and the future.

“We’ve created a museum for the new millennium,” says Hartman, the museum’s director. “This is about diversity, about all types of artistic expressions.”

The $14.8 million, 38,200-square-foot Nerman Museum opens with a public reception from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. today.

The museum traces its roots back to 1980, when the JCCC board of trustees approved an annual art acquisition program. Until now, those works have been exhibited across campus and in a 3,000-square-foot gallery.

“At that moment, in Johnson County, Kansas, at a relatively new community college that was only about 10 years old, you would think they would have chosen historic artworks,” Hartman says. “But I think they made a momentous decision. They said, ‘We’re a new college. We want to collect the art of our time. We’re about looking to the future, being progressive, not looking back.'”

The museum is named for Jerome and Margaret Nerman and their son, Lewis, whose lead gift in 2003 helped fund the project. The first exhibition, “American Soil,” features works from the museum’s 700-piece permanent collection. Many of those pieces were purchased by Tony and Marti Oppenheimer and the Oppenheimer Brothers Foundation.

The first exhibit includes works by Lawrence resident Roger Shimomura and Lawrence native Andrzej Zielinski, as well as artists Tomory Dodge, Nicola Lopez and Angelina Gualdoni, among others.

Hartman says he thinks many people have an unfair stereotype about contemporary art.

“I think the reality is it’s a question of what they’re looking at at the moment,” he says. “And I think a lot of people have a stereotypical image – they’ve seen something bizarre. It might be a Damien Hurst shark in formaldehyde. They’re automatically put off by that, and they equate that with all contemporary art.”

‘Defies the odds’

With the opening of the Nerman Museum and the existing Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, the Kansas City metropolitan area now has two museums dedicated entirely to contemporary art. The Bloch Building at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art also showcases some contemporary art.

Hartman notes that many large cities on the coast have only one contemporary art museum.

“I think it’s a fascinating thing that defies the odds,” Hartman says. “I think East Coast or West Coast perceptions would be, ‘That wouldn’t occur in the Midwest.’ I love the idea of that.”

Hartman says he sees more room for collaboration than competition with other area art museums, including the Spencer Museum of Art at Kansas University.

The Spencer has put a new focus on contemporary works in recent months, opening the 20/21 Gallery that showcases works from the 20th and 21st centuries. (The museum’s director, Saralyn Reece Hardy, could not be reached for comment for this story.)

Shimomura, the retired KU professor and painter, says when it comes to contemporary exhibition space, the more, the better. His only regret, he says, is he wishes the new museum were in Lawrence.

“If you’re asking me if Lawrence could support a museum like the Nerman financially, probably not,” Shimomura says. “At least not with local money. If you’re asking me if Lawrence could support a museum like the Nerman attendance-wise, I’d say yes, but marginally. The shows would have to draw people from K.C. More realistically, a large contemporary, changing-exhibits wing to the Spencer seems to make more sense.”

Still, Shimomura thinks the Kansas City area can support the new museum in Overland Park.

“I cannot think of one city in the country that has ‘too much’ exhibition space for contemporary art,” Shimomura says. “It would be wonderful if K.C. were the first to achieve that distinction.”