The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum has received a $50,000 grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Inc. to support the spring-semester exhibition Sharon Lockhart — Lunch Break.

Organized by Sabine Eckmann, Ph.D., director and chief curator of the Kemper Art Museum, the exhibition will open Feb. 10, 2010, and remain on view through April 19, 2010.

Established in 1987, the Warhol Foundation aims to foster innovative artistic expression and the creative process by encouraging and supporting cultural organizations that, in turn, directly or indirectly support artists and their work. The foundation is focused primarily on supporting work of a challenging and often experimental nature as well as curatorial research leading to new scholarship in the field of contemporary art.

Sharon Lockhart is a conceptual artist known for exploring the relationship between film and still photography. In Lunch Break, Lockhart observes the daily routines of workers at the Bath Iron Works, a major shipyard and U.S. Navy supplier located in Bath, Maine.

The exhibition will include two filmic installations, LUNCH BREAK and EXIT, in which slow-moving and static cameras subtly capture workers' rhythms and movements as they take their breaks, socialize or leave for the day. Three related series of photographs — focusing on the workers' lunch boxes, group portraits and independent vendors working within the shipyard — exhibit cinematic qualities of staging and casting while simultaneously revealing a quiet humanism.

Warhol Foundation Grants are made on a project basis to curatorial programs at museums, artists' organizations and other cultural institutions to originate innovative and scholarly presentations of contemporary visual arts. Projects may include exhibitions, catalogues and other organizational activities directly related to these areas. The program also supports the creation of new work through re-granting initiatives and artist-in-residence programs.

The grant to the Kemper Art Museum was one of 46 awarded so far this year and one of only two awards to Missouri institutions.

The Charlotte Street Foundation City received a three-year, $150,000 grant for its Urban Culture Project, which provides free studios to artists in downtown Kansas City.

The Kemper Art Museum previously received Warhol Foundation funding for the exhibition Reality Bites: Making Avant-Garde Art in Post-Wall Germany, which debuted in 2007.