Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art - Collection

Collection

The Kemper collection includes more than 700 works created after the 1913 Armory Show to works by present-day artists. Artists in the permanent collection include Robert Motherwell, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Jim Dine, Helen Frankenthaler, David Hockney, Bruce Nauman, William Wegman, Nancy Graves, Dale Chihuly, Arthur Dove, Louise Bourgeois, Andrew Wyeth, Fairfield Porter, Georgia O'Keeffe, Frank Stella, Lesley Dill, Romare Bearden, Christian Boltanski, Robert Mapplethorpe, Garry Winogrand, Kojo Griffin, Jim Hodges, Wayne Thiebaud, Hung Liu, Marcus Antonius Jansen, and Stephen Scott Young. In 2000, the museum received 15 works by artists including the photographer Nan Goldin from the collection of Peter Norton. Along with the collection, the museum also maintains a schedule of self-organized and traveling exhibitions. Each year, the it presents 10–12 special exhibitions in its galleries.

The museum opened in 1994 with an exhibition of rare early series of 28 watercolors by O'Keeffe, known as the "Canyon Suite" (1916-1918), that had never been shown publicly as a group. In 1999, the paintings' authenticity was challenged because the paper used for some of them could not have been obtained in the United States from 1916 to 1918, when O'Keeffe taught art at West Texas State Normal College in Canyon. The National Gallery of Art subsequently excluded the "Canyon Suite" from O'Keeffe's catalogue raisonne, and Gerald Peters Gallery refunded the $5 million that the Kemper Museum paid for them.