For a collective of 17 Lawrence artists with children, parenthood looks like a frog watching over its tadpoles from a lily pad and a glittering, pink ceramic heart. It also looks like a painting of a building on fire and a blunt quote — “They are feral. Good Luck.” — lettered on canvas like it was carved into a bathroom stall.
All of this imagery circulates Cider Gallery, united under the exhibition title “Breeders.” The collaborative show about raising children is the brainchild of local artist and teacher John Sebelius.
Sebelius has spent the last year and a half collaborating with other visual artists and creators of tiny humans such as Mona Cliff, Stan Herd, Angie Pickman, Kevin Willmott and more.
“Breeders” will open during a 5 to 9 p.m. reception on Friday, April 24 at Cider Gallery, 810 Pennsylvania St., and run for a month. See this link for a full list of participating artists.
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A sister show, “Offspring,” will open simultaneously at Seedco Studios, 840 Delaware St. No. 7. That exhibition features work from the children of the artists who contributed to “Breeders.”
Sebelius said that every contributing artist is at a different stage of their parenthood journey; some have newborns and some have kids in their 30s. Sebelius, the father of a 5-year-old daughter and a 2-year-old son, knew he couldn’t be the sole parental voice for the exhibition.
“I think it would have been far too difficult for me to just do a solo show about being a parent. It’s like doing a show about the ocean,” he said. “… But if you allow others to be part of that creative process, it kind of takes the burden off, and it makes it so much more joyful and experimental.”
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All of the artists in the show are established names, but “Breeders” allows them to break away from their defined styles to play with new visual languages.
Sebelius encouraged collaborators to take starting pieces he gave them, rip them up and change them.
He told the artists, “I know what I can make, and you know what you can make, so let’s make something that we didn’t know we could do.”
Sebelius got what he asked for. He indicated a triptych he created with Megan Embers and Katie Winter.
In one panel, Embers took his quiet painting of his grandfather’s lake in Norton, Kansas, and now a bold rainbow transforms the landscape. In another, thread traces a path across a fabric grid of Old West Lawrence, marking where the three artists’ friends and loved ones live.
Much like raising a child, creating “Breeders” took a village.
“Being a parent in Lawrence and being an artist in Lawrence are very similar as people here are kind and are willing to put in the work, and people want to root for one another,” he said.
While “Breeders” explores the parents’ euphorias and agonies, “Offspring” lets the kids get in a word edgewise. It offers the unburdened joy of marker drawings of cats alongside flower shells made of pistachio shells and glue.
“If you’re the child of an artist, you usually go to exhibitions or shows, and it’s about your parents and your parents’ voice,” Sebelius said. “So giving them their own space to kind of comment on how they see the world, what they want to make is important.”
Will Willmott, a Lawrence-born artist living in Kansas City, Missouri, has pieces in both shows. His father, Kevin Willmott, is an Academy Award-winner and professor emeritus in the Film & Media Studies department at the University of Kansas.
Will said he didn’t have the stereotypical disappointed parent as a young artist. Rather, Kevin encouraged him to explore that arts. Will has even collaborated on his father’s films, but he had never shared a canvas with Kevin before “Breeders.”
“Having this experience … as an adult just felt like a celebration of our creative visions and perspectives,” he said.
For his “Offspring” pieces, Will took photos of his paternal grandparents and layered them with a radioactive palette, drawing on his Afrofuturist roots. He said he wanted the images to feel like unearthed artifacts.
“Depicting my ancestors, I feel like I’m always kind of standing on the shoulders of giants, whether it’s with Afrofuturism or with the show of ‘Offspring,’” he said.
Attendees at the Friday opening can expect a Taco Zone pop-up at Cider Gallery, with Capri Suns and Squeezeits at Seedco. Shawn Brackbill and Sebelius created a VHS video collage of clips from classic parent movies, layered with trippy, chopped and screwed-style editing that will play in the corner of Cider while Brackbill DJs.
“We want to kind of take over the whole neighborhood and just make it this fun, creative family experience,” Sebelius said.
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Wulfe Wulfemeyer (they/them), reporter and news editor, has worked with The Lawrence Times since May 2025. They can be reached at [email protected].
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Nathan Kramer (he/him), a multimedia student journalist for The Lawrence Times since August 2024, is a recent graduate of Free State High School. He also served as a news photo editor for Free State’s student publication, where he worked as a videographer, photographer and motion designer. See more of his work for the Times here.
