Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art

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Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art, located at 2004 Baltimore Ave in the Crossroads Arts District, is the longest-running contemporary gallery in the Crossroads — founded in 1985 by artist and gallerist Sherry Leedy, a Kansas City Art Institute alumna who has spent four decades championing regional and national contemporary work.

Description

Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art is one of the oldest sustained contemporary art galleries in Kansas City and the Midwest. Operating continuously since 1985, the gallery occupies the first floor of the historic Opie Brush Building on Baltimore Avenue, designed by Greenlee Schmidt Architects with a sleek, loft-like interior. The gallery represents a rotating roster of emerging, mid-career, and internationally established artists working across painting, sculpture, photography, ceramics, mixed media, and works on paper.

With over four decades in operation, SLCA has served as a resource for collectors, institutions, and curators at the highest levels — placing more than 150 works in museum collections and representing artists held in over 100 museums worldwide. The gallery is widely credited as an instrumental force in the revitalization of the Crossroads Arts District, arriving before the neighborhood was recognized as a cultural hub and helping lay the foundation for what it became.

Sherry Leedy herself is a practicing artist whose large-scale soft pastel drawings are held by the Los Angeles County Museum, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, and several corporate and university collections. Her dual identity as artist-gallerist gives the program a depth of curatorial commitment that distinguishes it from purely commercial operations.

Ownership and history

Sherry Leedy earned a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA from the University of Kansas, then taught at KCAI, Johnson County Community College, and the University of Northern Iowa before establishing her gallery in Kansas City in 1985. She received a National Endowment for the Arts / Mid-America Arts Alliance Fellowship in 1984, the year before she opened.

The gallery’s founding predates the Crossroads renaissance by roughly a decade — Leedy arrived on Baltimore Avenue when the district was still industrial and underutilized, and her presence helped catalyze the transformation that followed. The gallery has remained at its Baltimore Avenue address through multiple generations of the Crossroads boom, anchoring the southern end of the arts corridor.

The gallery self-identifies as “the first and longest running contemporary art gallery in the Crossroads Arts District” — a claim supported by the consistent public record of continuous operation since 1985, updated as recently as February 2026 on third-party review platforms.

Sources

Disputes

None at this time.