Mixed Impressions presents works in a range of media from the Kemper Museum Permanent Collection demonstrating artists' impressionistic styles in developing geometric, abstract, and representational imagery. For example, Ethiopian-born artist Julie Mehretu's Okemos Drawings (Quartet A) (2008) depicts in four unique drawings an intricately abstracted cityscape formed by a layered web of drawn lines in black and white and color. Mehretu's lines seem even more crisp in contrast to the hazy twilight appearance of Wayne Thiebaud's City Edge (1988), in which the multiple print techniques he uses give a vibrating appearance to the curves and edges of San Francisco's buildings and winding streets. Each artist in the exhibition has developed a language through media and technique to show the varied expressions within impressionistic styles known to engage sensations of changing light and movement in overlapping everyday subjects such as cityscapes, landscapes, and portraits.
