Blue Gallery

Blue Gallery, at 118 Southwest Blvd in Kansas City’s Crossroads Arts District, is one of the metro’s most award-laden contemporary art galleries — founded in 2000 by gallerist and art consultant Kelly Kuhn, who has built a 26-year home for local, national, and international artists from a converted space on the edge of the neighborhood.

Description

Blue Gallery is a premier contemporary art gallery located on Southwest Boulevard at the southern edge of Kansas City’s Crossroads Arts District. Founded in September 2000, the gallery represents more than 40 emerging to established artists — local, national, and international — with works placed in private and public collections worldwide.

The gallery has earned an extensive award record over its 26 years: KC Magazine’s Best Private Art Gallery in 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007; Ingram’s Magazine Bronze for Best Museum or Art Gallery (multiple years); 435 Magazine’s Best Art Gallery in 2015 and 2017; and the Visit KC Visitor’s Choice Winner for Favorite Art Gallery in 2019. It is widely cited in local press as one of the most prominent artsy-art galleries in the city — one that brings in national names while consistently championing KC-based artists.

Founder Kelly Kuhn functions as gallerist, curator, and director, maintaining a program that values the relationship between artist and collector as a long-term partnership rather than a transactional encounter.

Ownership and history

Kelly Kuhn discovered art history at Graceland University in Iowa and moved to Kansas City to continue her studies at UMKC. She met her husband in Kansas City and built her career here. Beginning in 1992 as an art consultant and gallerist — eight years before founding Blue Gallery — she developed deep fluency in the KC collector and artist community before launching the gallery in September 2000.

Blue Gallery opened at the center of the Crossroads Arts District and has remained in operation continuously for 26 years, weathering the various cycles of the neighborhood’s commercialization and evolving tastes. Kuhn’s program is genuinely bicultural in its orientation, balancing local artist support with national-level artist representation and placement.

Though Kuhn is not a Kansas City native by birth — she arrived from Iowa for graduate school — her 30+ years embedded in the KC arts community and 26 years of sustained gallery operation give her a degree of local dedication that is hard to overstate.

Links

• Official site: https://bluegalleryonline.com/

Sources

Disputes

None at this time.