Each sculpture in “A Lesson Before Dying” challenges the viewer to interrogate the objects’ layered meanings and their role in constructing racial narratives. Photo: Dana Anderson

An open hand, wooden block letters, a cowbell, a suspended head. While these might have any number of connotations, each has a particularly nefarious one in Kevin Demery’s solo exhibition “A Lesson Before Dying” at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: innocence, forced tutelage, slavery, execution. These signifiers describe the racism embedded in each object and the lived experience of Black Americans—the subject of much of his work.

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Demery, an instructor at the Kansas City Art Institute, emphasizes conceptual sculpture within his studio practice. Relying on the charged histories and embedded meanings of commonplace objects—afro picks,........

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