The Kansas Masters' Invitational & The Kansas Park Trust

The diversity of artwork in this year’s Kansas Masters Invitational is as varied as the backgrounds and visions of the Kansas artists who created it. 

That is why you'll see, displayed next to each other and one above the other, an oil painting of a Flint Hills sunset, a watercolor of western Kansas cowboys, a photograph of those iconic grain elevators, an ethnic-inspired quilt, a found-object sculpture, an abstract with swatches of color and another with circles of color which turn out to be paint can lids.  Many show the sweeping beauty of our state, while others make wry statements about what it means to be a Kansan.
       
This exhibit respects Kansas artists (more than 120 of them here, ages 23 to 89) who have made and are making significant marks, figuratively and literally, on this state.  They have achieved their own recognizable yet ever-changing visions on local, regional and national levels. 
   
This exhibit, like Kansas itself, has its share of treasured traditions as well as, often unexpectedly and diversely, an ability to see beyond them.  Don Lambert

Our Curator: Don Lambert: 

Don has organized exhibits for over 500 museums and art centers across the country, including the Smithsonian and the US Capitol.  He is best known for his "discovery" of the artist Elizabeth "Grandma" Layton.  His major touring exhibits have been "The Kansas Landscape" and "Homage to the Flint Hills."  In 2007, nominated by then Governor Kathleen Sebelius, he received the annual arts promotion award from the National Governors' Association