Kris Ercums

Since joining the Spencer in 2007, Kris Ercums spearheaded Project Redefine, which reconceived the Spencer’s permanent collection galleries into longterm thematic exhibitions that included:  Nature/Natural (2010), Corpus (2011), Empire of Things (2012), and Forms of Thought (2014). Ercums has also organized international artist-in-residence projects at the Spencer with artists from China, Japan, Korea, and Mexico including: Up/Down: A Project by Wang Tiande (2009); Mobile Landscape: Kim Jongku (2010); Jin Shan: It Came from the Sky (2011); Prepared: Strategies for Activists with Chen Shaoxiong (2012); I Love Xijing­–Xijing School (2013) at the H&R Block Art Space, Kansas City Art Institute; and most recently Comanche is Dead: A Project by Diego Teo (2013). His recent exhibitions include Extra/Ordinary: Video Art from Asia (2010), which investigated new ways of transforming familiar experiences and daily routines into moments of expanded meaning, and xy (2009), an examination of the social construction of masculinity through objects drawn from the Spencer’s permanent collection. Ercums also organized the 2016 exhibition, Temporal Turn: Art and Speculation in Contemporary Asia, exploring a rich mosaic of ideas about time and history from a generation of artists embedded in what has been dubbed “the Asian Century.”