Spencer Museum of Art receives $50,000 award from NEA

Kansas University’s Spencer Museum of Art has received a $50,000 Art Works award from the National Endowment for the Arts, the museum announced Friday.

The award will fund the Spencer’s upcoming exhibition “Temporal Turn: Art and Speculation in Contemporary Asia.” Slated for a fall 2016 opening, “Temporal Turn” will be the first major exhibition at the Spencer following its Phase 1 renovation.

Assembled by Kris Ercums, the museum’s curator of Global Contemporary and Asian Art, “Temporal Turn” will “explore a rich mosaic of ideas about time and history from a generation of artists embedded in what has been dubbed ‘the Asian Century,'” according to a Spencer Museum news release. The exhibition draws from the Spencer’s permanent collection supplemented by international loans and will feature commissions by artists Konoike Tomoko of Japan, Sahej Rahal of India, Park Jaeyoung of South Korea and Rohini Devasher of India.

“‘Temporal Turn’ will inaugurate our transformed galleries and prompt our audiences to vividly imagine the possibilities and challenges of a globalized future,” Saralyn Reece Hardy, director of the Spencer Museum, said in the news release.

The museum was one of two institutions in Kansas, the other being Hesston College, to receive a grant in the Art Works category, which supports the creation of new work, lifelong learning in the arts and public engagement with the arts.