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© 2026 The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
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A Frame of Mind takes a hard look at race in America through the lens of one art museum. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art sits at a crossroads: in the middle of Kansas City, in the middle of the country, and in the middle of America’s shifting cultural landscape. We’re working through the slow and sometimes messy change of a big museum asking what it can be and whose stories it tells. Along the way, host Glenn North meets brilliant Black and Native artists and thinkers in Kansas City who help us see through their eyes.
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A new podcast taking a hard look at race in America through the lens of one art museum, hosted by Glenn North. From The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.
For host Glenn North, you can’t talk about anything in the United States—museums, barbecue, football, whatever—without talking about race. It’s always there in our shared history and in our current moment. In this episode, we get to know the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art with Glenn. It’s at the heart of Kansas City, Missouri, in the heartland of the United States. It’s a place that can inspire pride and poetry. But does everyone feel welcome inside? Learn more about our host, see the art in thi...
Why do Kansas City and the Nelson-Atkins look the way they do? In this episode, we rewind to the beginning of the 1900s. Kansas City was booming from a Cow Town to the Paris of the Plains, and a few city planners and real estate developers saw opportunity. We meet J.C. Nichols, a real estate developer who perfected racially restricted covenants and made big decisions about the Nelson-Atkins when it opened. Along the way, host Glenn North takes us on a Sunday drive. Featuring Congressman Eman...
The original Nelson-Atkins building has 23 panels carved on the outside, high up and kind of hard to see—really see. They tell a story of settler colonialism in the Midwest, filled with harmful stereotypes of Indigenous people. The story is fiction, but it’s told like monumental history. In this episode, we look closer at these public images with Native artists Mona Cliff, Alex Ponca Stock, Lucky Garcia, and Alex Kimball Williams. Learn more about our guests, see the art in this episode, an...
We don’t know the names of the people whose hands and skill literally built the 1933 Nelson-Atkins building, but we know what some of them look like. This episode begins with a photograph from the museum’s archive and dreams about stories that haven’t been recorded. That gets us thinking about what it feels like to go to an art museum and see people who look like you, and one exhibition at the Nelson-Atkins that really broke some ground for Kansas Citians in telling stories about Black Americ...
This is our last episode, but it’s not the end of the story. We go back a few years to when the Nelson-Atkins started to make some moves to celebrate Juneteenth, and why the museum needed to take a breath and listen. We stumble across a performance of the Kansas City 2Step in the museum’s lobby, with Black joy filling the air. And we dream about what could be next. Featuring Sonié Ruffin, Alvin Brooks, Makeda Paterson, Kreshaun McKinney, and De Barker. Learn more about our guests, see the ar...
In Episode 1, Glenn North confronts what it means to be a Black man in America in 2026. Can art help us grasp who we are and how we’ve ended up here? Glenn thinks so. He introduces us to a favorite work by the Ghanaian artist El Anatsui, Dusasa 1. Like many of El Anatsui’s works, this is a large tapestry made up of battered pieces of metal with painful associations, held together by fragile links. Glenn then takes us on his own journey to Ghana, Africa, in conversation with his friend and tra...
In Episode 2, Glenn introduces us to Mound Magician by Radcliffe Bailey. Shaped like a baseball diamond, the large assemblage is filled with details that reference Black history and culture. Bob Kendrick, President of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, takes the field for a lively conversation with Glenn. Using Mound Magician as the wind-up, they explore the impact of the Negro League, Kansas City’s role in shaping race relations—and baseball, and trade stories about legends li...
Being present in the moment means giving your full attention to something or someone, but the present is always suspended in tension between the weight of the past and the promise of the future. In Episode 3, Glenn revels in Black joy in the presence of Bisa Butler’s intensely vibrant quilt Kindred. With artists Kaitlyn B. Jones and Camry Ivory, Glenn pulls at the threads of slavery and pieces together how its legacy makes us all kindred—part of one large dysfunctional, extended family. Guest...
What’s in a name? It gets complicated when Glenn sits down with professional genealogist Kathleen Brandt to trace his ancestors. Looking at his family history under the microscope, Glenn turns to poetry and a sculpture of a young girl peering through a telescope to process some disorienting findings. This all leads to acclaimed filmmaker Kevin Willmott and what it means to break free from the bondage of history to imagine new stories and engage in creative acts of reclamation. Guests Kathleen...
Searching for his origins, Glenn comes face to face with a haunting image of slavery in America: a tiny photograph of a cotton plantation takes him back to the invention of photography as a source for truth-telling today. The scene testifies to the long shadow of slavery and the slow, systematic stripping away of equities that have ruptured Black relationships to the land. Can that same photograph also collapse time and place and regenerate links between generations? This episode brings our s...
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