Kansas City has a joyful invitation to slow down, listen and learn: two free exhibitions at The Museum of Kansas City are celebrating Indigenous history and living Native art in the heart of Corinthian Hall. Homeland: The Osage in Missouri and Voices Now: Contemporary Native American Art are on view now through February 21, 2027, and admission to both is free, with no tickets required.
Homeland, on the second floor in the Jean and Tom McDonnell Gallery, centers Osage culture and worldview. Curated by Jimmy Lee Beason II, a citizen of the Osage Nation and professor at Haskell Indian Nations University, it draws on the museum’s collection and loaned materials to explore how the Osage people were affected by and adapted to European settlement and industrialization. Missouri is the ancestral home of the Wah-zha-zhe, the Osage People, originally known as Ni-u-kon-ska, People of the Middle Waters, and the exhibition honors that deep connection to the region’s rivers and landscapes.
Upstairs, Voices Now brings the story into the present with 15 artists of varied tribal affiliations, working in many mediums across generations. Co-curated by Dr. Jami Powell of the Hood Museum of Art and Bruce Hartman, the show is described by the museum as the first contemporary Native art showcase of its kind in Kansas City. Together, the two exhibitions were organized to recognize the 250th anniversary of the United States through Indigenous storytelling, tradition and artistic innovation.
For Happy City News readers, it is an easy, uplifting plan: wander both floors, spend time with the stories, and leave with a richer sense of the peoples whose heritage is woven into Kansas City itself.
Photo: E.G. Schempf / The Museum of Kansas City
