Brian Hearn

Brian Hearn is an interdisciplinary arts writer, curator and consultant active in both film and visual arts. For two decades he has shared his passion and expertise with arts organizations large and small, from art museums to film festivals, galleries to collections. He and his wife Sarah recently collaborated on a new art project, a baby boy.

Emerging Artists in the Spotlight – Let Your Freak Flag Fly at Alter: Art Space

Emerging Artists in the Spotlight – Let Your Freak Flag Fly at Alter: Art Space

It’s been called Big Fun Art and it’s making major waves throughout the art world. Kansas City has a fresh new venue for this multidisciplinary ain’t-nothin’-but-a-party art movement — that is, if you can find it. Enter Alter: Art Space, quite literally birthed last summer in the West Bottoms by recent Kansas City Art Institute graduates, Boi Boy and Bo Hubbard, who proudly refer to themselves as its “moms.”

Emerging Artists in the Spotlight: Foxes in the Fortress

Emerging Artists in the Spotlight: Foxes in the Fortress

What’s an emerging artist in Kansas City to do after art school? Caranne Camarena, like so many of her fellow Kansas City Art Institute painting majors circa 2012, had to decide: Stay or go. Return to hometown XYZ? Embark for coastal art capitals or Chicago? Maybe grad school? Stick it out in KC with a group of friends and splash into the frothy local scene? About halfway through her senior year, Camarena and her non-artist parents were kicking around ideas for real estate investment.

“May Tveit: Universal Boxes,” Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art

“May Tveit: Universal Boxes,” Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art

The humble cardboard box has been a massive success story. Cardboard boxes are a symbol of global transport and circulation of goods, and therefore labor and capital. Even by art world standards, which can be snobby about materials and media, cardboard continues to be employed by artists because it’s cheap, readily available, and easy to […]

The High Art of the Throw-Away

The High Art of the Throw-Away

Six artists make the most of materials found, discarded, avoided or unappreciated in the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art’s “Ephemera” exhibit, which opened in time to be seen by visitors to the 27th International Sculpture Conference, from Oct. 25 through 28, in Kansas City. Presented in pairs in three spacious first floor galleries, the artists source wildly different artistic media from the throw-away world of global capitalism or forgotten elements of nature.

Cat Mahari: Centering Blackness

Cat Mahari: Centering Blackness

If you have seen Cat Mahari perform, you don’t forget. True to her name, she moves with a fierce feline swagger. Her presence in a room can be equivalent to a mic drop. Fearless? Yes. Challenging? Definitely. Mahari is a battle-tested warrior. When she roars her truth you will pay attention. Her confidence is grounded in lived, embodied experience and intense study. It comes through her work as “centering blackness.”

Kansas City and the Rise of Gay Rights

A small exhibition about an outsized legacy proves that small groups of committed people can change the world in profound ways. “Making History: Kansas City and the Rise of Gay Rights” at the Miller Nichols Library tells the story of how Kansas City became the unlikely site of the first national organizing efforts for LGBT rights more than 50 years ago. The 12 exhibition panels begin by asking the question, “How does change happen?”