BY NICOLE PHELPS
February 5, 2025

Super Bowl LIX has Kansas City in the headlines this week, but if you’ve come looking for news about Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs you’ve landed in the wrong place. This is a story about the native Kansans, designer Jeremy Scott and artist Katherine Bernhardt, who are the subjects of a new exhibition at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park. “A Match Made in Heaven,” which opens to the public on February 7, puts a spotlight the pair’s shared pop cultural references.

KC’s winning record notwithstanding, football might be the only bit of Americana that Scott and Bernhardt haven’t mutually explored. A spin through the Nerman’s galleries reveals many, many other parallels and overlapping passions. Both designer and artist have things for fast food, junk cereal, Bart Simpson, and soda, but as midwesterners, they call soda “pop.”

Though they share more than just a home state—Scott and Bernhardt were both born in 1975, meaning they’re contemporaries—they had never met before the museum’s executive director JoAnne Northrup approached them with the concept for the joint show in 2023. But from their first encounter, they were “two peas in a pod,” says the designer. “Katherine is funny, she’s quirky, and she also loves Memphis [as in the Memphis Design Group], like me.” Bernhardt was just as game. “I thought, wow, we’ve basically done the same things—like all the same things.”

In the museum’s main galleries, Scott and Bernhardt’s pieces talk back at each other. There’s a toothpaste pairing, though Bernhardt’s a Crest girl and Scott appears to prefer Aquafresh (A NWT version of the toothpaste dress is up for sale on Poshmark, by the way). And on the aforementioned subject of pop, as in the carbonated drink, Bernhardt likes Diet Coke while Scott sips “the real thing.” The Big Mac dress of Scott’s design that Katy Perry wore to the “Camp” Met Gala in 2019 is positioned next to a Bernhardt canvas of Hostess Cup Cakes.

So where do their complementary interests in pop cultural artifacts come from? Is there something in the water in Kansas? Bernhardt, who starts with spray paint on upright canvases, then puts them on the floor and adds watery acrylics, which give her work its drippy panache, chalks it up to plain coincidence, though of course there’s nothing plain about what either of them do. “I think a painting of things is better any day than an abstract painting,” she says. Scott has the same kind of aversion to conceptual fashion. “I’m a director at heart,” he says. “I love a scene, a scenario, and I think things should be alive and vibrant and boisterous and fun—that’s where the energy comes from.”

For the 10 years he creative-directed Moschino, Jeremy Scott split his time between Milan and California, where he owns two John Lautner homes in LA and Palm Springs. As a young designer, he put on his shows in Paris, and palled around with Karl Lagerfeld. But Scott has never forgotten his roots. It was the rare backstage conversation in which he didn’t mention growing up in Kansas, and even rarer when his family members weren’t seated in the front row. Tomorrow, he’s giving his mom and pop a new reason to dress up—an opening night party, practically in their own backyard. And, as it happens, Scott actually will be tuning in for Sunday’s big game. Naturally, he’s rooting for the hometown team. “You want to see the three-peat,” he cheered, “because it’s never happened.”

The exhibition, “A Match Made in Heaven: Katherine Bernhardt x Jeremy Scott” runs through August 3, 2025 at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art.

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