Heartland Exhibition at Art School KC
Lee’s Summit connects community with art at Art School KC– where Nicholas Erker’s exhibition is open through the rest of August.
Photos courtesy of Nicholas Erker
On Market Street in Lee Summit, art lovers and creatives will be excited to see an exhibition up until August 31st - Heartland, a solo exhibition featuring artist Nicholas Erker. The exhibition is on display at the Art School, a non-profit that opened in 2020, offering classes, workshops, and opportunities for artmaking and engaging with artists.
Erker’s family has lived throughout Kansas for generations, particularly in Wellington. For those who don’t know, Erker explained, “it’s the last place you go through before crossing to Oklahoma.” His paintings recall childhood memories and examine his family’s past. Still, these personal stories transcend one family, speaking to those universal Midwest experiences - like pulling up a lawn chair and listening to tornado sirens, undeterred by the big weather of Spring.
Nicholas Erker
“I really want people to find that connection with their own life,” says Erker. “I want people to come away with a feeling of remembrance, of growing up in their hometowns, listening to their family stories.”
This process of remembrance, evoking feelings of nostalgia, is paramount to Erker’s artistic choices as he examines his family’s life in rural America. They inform his compositions, colors, and subjects.
Composition: Looking to Art History
Erker calls upon the abstract, almost simplified landscape of Kansas’s great plains and vast blue skies when setting and composing his paintings. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Kansas and a Master of Art History from the University of Missouri, Kansas City. Studying prior artistic movements such as the Dutch Golden Age, Romanticism, and the genre of Western American Art by painters like Frederic Remington have influenced his artwork.
Erker reflected that he likes to look around in art history and ask, “Okay, how did other people and their environment influence their work? How can I continue with this tradition in ways that influence my work?”
Color: Captured & Fading Memory
Color plays a significant role in the artwork on display in the Heartland exhibition at the Art School. These vibrant hues depart from Erker’s previous work, which was more monochromatic. As he has pursued the themes of time, memory, and nostalgia over the last five years, it is fitting that photography has influenced the color choices of his paintings.
“I used to work as a photographer,” he explains. “My family kept boxes and boxes of photographs, and I was always fascinated with the photographic errors that would happen in developing color photographs. You could get these really unusual combinations of color or as photographs degrade over time.”
Subject-Matter: Familiar Faces
Erker’s subjects come from reference photos, models, and family photo albums. “Sometimes I have to Frankenstein a head onto a body and add someone else’s arm,” he says. But there are plenty of recognizable faces, and when Erker’s father and aunt walk through the exhibit, they challenge themselves not to look at the labels but instead see who they recognize. Included in Heartland are Erker’s maternal grandmother, paternal grandfather, cousins, a great uncle, and one of his brothers.
“My dad easily picks out his dad. My grandfather was a unique character; he was very tall and thin with long legs,” says Erker. In the painting “Triumph,” he is sitting on the rock with his face turned away from the viewer. Erker’s brother is also in this painting, standing with a torch in hand at the top of the rock. The rock represents the foundation of Erker’s family.
Erker recalled a strong tradition of oral storytelling in his family, saying, “I come from a very large family of good storytellers. When we got together, I would hear these larger-than-life characters telling stories. I was never that good at retelling the stories, but I now use visual narratives to tell them in my own way.”
The process of conjuring nostalgia and revisiting a different time is an important exercise for Erker. He believes it provides a sense of joy for which people are hungry. Moreover, his artmaking is therapeutic and allows him to process change and other events of his life. Working as an art teacher, he wants to equip his students with a similar skillset - the ability to express themselves and understand a visual language.
To this point, he spoke about some of his students attending Art School classes. Here, there is a wide range of opportunities to engage in creativity and practice a visual language. Workshops, camps, and classes are open at the studio and virtually to the public. They also design programs for different groups. Art School engages with the community and also offers Fourth Friday Art Walks as an opportunity to meet artists and see more of what they have to offer.
Art School will host the next Art Walk on August 26th, just in time to see Heartland before it leaves. You won’t want to miss it.
