Land Acknowledgement

The Kansas City Art Institute acknowledges that the campus is built on the ancestral territory of the Kiikaapoi, Osage, Kaw, and Očeti Šakówiŋ, the original caretakers of the land we are standing on today. Oto and Kansa are the two native languages of this land.

We respectfully acknowledge the many peoples who have stewarded these lands — the lands we may know as Missouri and Kansas — throughout the generations. These stewards include the Kansa, Osage, Otos, Missouri, Shawnee, Chickasaw, Illini, Ioway, the Očeti Šakówiŋ, Quapaw, Pottawatomie, Hopewell, and Mississippi Peoples. 

 We acknowledge the many peoples who have passed through or relocated near these lands. This includes the Wyandot, Cherokee, Delaware, Kickapoo, the Sac and Fox, Shawnee and Potawatomie. We acknowledge that the land on which we gather at KCAI is land known as Cession Tract #123, ceded by the Great and Little Osage People in 1825. 

 Before the Indian Removal Act in 1830, there were seven recognized tribes in Missouri: Chickasaw, Illini, Ioway, Otoe, Missouria, Osage, and Quapaw tribes.

 KCAI commits to recognize and strives to advocate for the more than 98 Indigenous American tribes represented in the Kansas City metropolitan area.

About KCAI FIBER

Fiber as a medium crosses boundaries and interfaces with art, design, craft and technology. Inherently multidisciplinary, the field of fiber encompasses, among others, painting, printing, dyeing, pattern design, sewing, quilting, garment construction for fashion and costume, weaving, knitting, crochet, basketry techniques, felting, spinning and paper-making.

The curriculum emphasizes skill development and the generation of ideas through a materials-based process of making. You’ll learn processes of traditional fiber art combined with the use of new digital tools. The need for a tactile experience in response to the digital environment is the most exciting development in our field. Fiber is more relevant and diverse now than ever before.

Our curriculum covers a broad range of traditional and experimental practices in a variety of textile-related areas that are unique within the U.S. Our students immerse themselves in the vocabulary and language of fiber from their sophomore to senior years. During their senior year, students choose a concentration and develop a body of work that culminates their studies and will be exhibited in a senior thesis show.

Faculty and Staff

Pauline Verbeek-Cowart, Professor and Chair

Pauline Verbeek-Cowart, Professor and chair of the Fiber Department, has been on the faculty of the Kansas City Art Institute since 1997. A native of the Netherlands, she received her BFA (1982) in Fine Art from the Maryland Institute and her MFA in textile design from the University of Kansas (1995). Ms. Verbeek-Cowart’s academic and Fine Art careers have garnered her numerous awards including the Kansas City Art Institute’s Distinguished Achievement Award (2014), Excellence in Teaching Award (2007), Outstanding Special Project Award (2003) and the 2008 Kansas Arts Commission Master Fellowship in Visual Art/Fine Craft. Her creative research involves all areas of constructed textiles but is primarily focused on weaving. Most of her weavings span several feet in both directions and comment on the nature of woven surfaces. Through structure, material, image and/or surface treatments, she demonstrates that weaving is unique in building an image. She is one of the leaders in the use of new technologies in hand-weaving and has also conducted research using industrial looms in the Netherlands and the US. Her industrially woven work crosses boundaries between Fine Art and applied textiles and is directed toward structurally textured fabrics for apparel as well as home-furnishings. Her work has been exhibited extensively in both national and international venues including France, Austria, Germany, Japan, Korea and Australia.

Contact: pcowart@kcai.edu

Kim Eichler-Messmer, Associate Professor

Associate Professor Kim Eichler-Messmer's work is grounded primarily in textiles, through which she explores nature and built environments using pattern, color, structure, line, and rhythm. Eichler-Messmer earned an MFA in textiles from the University of Kansas and a BFA in studio art from Iowa State University. Her work has been exhibited across the US and abroad, including shows at the Iowa Quilt Museum (Winterset, IA), QuiltCon, Penland Gallery (Penland, NC), India Quilt Festival (Chennai, India), and Tokushima Cultural Center (Tokushima, Japan). She was an artist in residence at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, and Prairieside Cottage + Outpost. She is the author of “Modern Color: An Illustrated Guide to Dyeing Fabric for Modern Quilts” and her work has been featured in “Quilting with a Modern Slant” by Rachel May, “The Essential Guide To Modern Quilt Making” edited by Heather Grant, and “The Uppercase Compendium of Craft and Creativity” by Janine Vangool. In addition to making one-of-a-kind hand-dyed art quilts, she designs fabric and has collaborated with Pottery Barn Teen on an exclusive quilt design. She spends her summers growing natural dye plants, working in studio, and teaching at craft schools and retreats including Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts , Penland School of Craft, and A Gathering of Stitches Slow Stitching Retreat.

Contact: keichler-messmer@kcai.edu

Marie Bannerot McInerney, Professor

Marie Bannerot McInerney is a multidisciplinary studio artist and educator. Her site-responsive installations and discrete works in concrete, silk, handmade paper and canvas consider human agency within the framework of ecological systems, mystical thinking, and natural phenomena. She is a 2018 Charlotte Street Artist Award Fellow, a 2024 recipient of the Stone and DeGuire Contemporary Art Award and participated in residencies at Studios Inc and The Luminary. McInerney has exhibited across the United States and abroad including shows at the Bellevue Arts Museum (Bellevue, WA), Mildred Lane Kemper Museum (Saint Louis, MO) Friedrich Schiller University (Jena, Germany), and Han Tianheng Art Museum Shanghai (Shanghai City, China) as well as solo exhibitions at The Tarble Arts Center (Charleston, IL), Studios Inc. (Kansas City, MO), and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonvill, AR). McInerney co-authored an essay in the book, Probing the Skin: Cultural Representations of our Contact Zone and was awarded a Cultural Exchange Grant from the U.S. Embassy in Berlin to present work. Her formative years were spent in Houston, TX before she earned a BFA at the Kansas City Art Institute and a MFA at Washington University in Saint Louis.

McInerney believes there is great power in collaboration and has served as co-director and co-curator in two curatorial collaboratives: PLUG Projects (Kansas City, MO) and The Independent Art Market (Saint Louis, MO). She worked in the costume and fashion industry for over a decade as a knitwear designer and manufacturer for SKIF International and as the head dyer/painter for the costume shop at the Opera Theatre Saint Louis. Actively engaged in the field of hand papermaking she served on the board of directors for both Hand Papermaking and North American Hand Papermakers. McInerney is a professor in the Fiber Department at the Kansas City Art Institute.

Contact: mmcinerney@kcai.edu

Rebecca Vaughan, Lecturer

Rebecca Vaughan creates sculptural installations and evolving social practice projects. Often these include such elements as those of gender-specific experiences: bread-baking, fiber-based techniques, matrilineal traditions of hand poke tattooing, as well as construction tools and equipment. Vaughan is a member of ArtNauts, an art collective which exhibits only in countries healing from conflict and contention. She previously served as the Artistic Director of PlatteForum, a non-profit which hosts artists-in-residence from all over the world. Ms. Vaughan was the Program Director for the Art Students League of Denver and was the Chair of Fine Arts and Head of Sculpture at the Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design. 

She has exhibited her work at the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art, and a solo show at the 39th Sarajevo Winter Arts Festival in Bosnia and Herzegovina. She has shown widely in the Colorado region as well as in New York, Palestine, Mexico, Canada, China, Columbia and Brazil. Her work has been in publications including the Chicago Art Journal and KnitKnit. Vaughan has received state grants from the Colorado Council on the Arts and Humanities and the Ohio Arts Council. Previously she worked as the project manager for Ann Hamilton's 2008 Circles of O performance, and assisted in other projects in Dialog: City, a city- wide arts event for the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver.

Contact: rvaughan@kcai.edu

Hadley Clark, Lecturer

Hadley Clark moves fluidly between fine art and garment design, having earned her BFA in Painting from The University of Kansas in 2001 and a second BFA in Fashion Design with Honors from The New School | Parsons Paris in 2010. Clark maintains a fine art studio practice and an eponymous fashion label. Clark’s work includes handmade wearable coverings as well as wall and floor-based sculptural pieces, all of which draw from her belief in the vitality of material reuse, and botanical dyeing processes. 

Clark’s work has been featured with the Hammer Museum Restore (Los Angeles, CA), Cumulus International Design Conference (Paris, France), the Gothenburg Fashion Fair (Gothenburg, Sweden), and Milk and Honey (Taipei, Taiwan), and she has worked for Tillman Lauterbach, Diane von Furstenberg, Lee Jeans, Ugg, and Ghada Amer.  Residencies: Studios Inc. (Kansas City, MO) Haystack (ME), Texere (Oaxaca, MX); work featured in W Magazine, Women’s Wear Daily, Nylon and others.

Contact: hclark@kcai.edu

William Plummer, Fiber Technician (beginning Fall 2024)

William Plummer is an artist and writer based in Kansas City, Missouri. They hold a BFA in Fiber and Art History from the Kansas City Art Institute. In 2021, they participated in the Elsewhere residency program as a Kansas City Exchange Fellow. From 2018 to 2020, they collaborated with three other planaria-inspired artists and scientists on the exhibition Body of Inquiry: the Art, Biology, and Being of Flatworms. Plummer’s work is informed by their cross-cultural heritage and queer experience, often exploring themes of projection, translation, and transformation. 

Contact: wplummer@kcai.edu