Reviews are the lifeblood of an art scene, but with cutbacks in The Kansas City Star’s cultural coverage and the demise of KCMetropolis, the number of reviews of KC exhibits and performances has been in decline.
Reviews are essential to a lively discourse on the arts in Kansas City. They acknowledge accomplishment, share ideas and insights, assess strengths and weaknesses, explain and contextualize. Some organizations say that reviews stimulate ticket sales, contributing to the health of the area’s art economy.
Although KC Studio magazine’s six times a year publishing schedule does not lend itself to timely reviews, happily, there’s more to KC Studio than what you read in these pages. Do you miss reviews? Hit the online reviews tab to read about the shows everyone is talking about as well as hidden gems you might otherwise miss.
Thanks to the Lighton Fund, for the past three years, we have published two online visual arts reviews per month, covering galleries from Overland Park to the Crossroads, the West Bottoms to St. Joe.
For the past two years, our theater critic, Robert Trussell, has been posting theater reviews, providing our theater-loving readers with overnight coverage that enables them to see the shows after they read about them. KC Studio extends sincere thanks to Mike and Julie Kirk and to the Leonard and Irene Bettinger Philanthropic Fund for making our 2018-19 theater reviews possible.
This fall, KC Studio received more good news on the reviews front, with a commitment from the Muriel McBrien Kauffman Foundation to fund additional performing arts reviews each month, enabling us to begin coverage of music and dance during the 2018-19 season.
We invite our readers to make a habit of visiting kcstudio.org, to find six reviews per month of gallery and museum shows, concerts, plays and dance productions, written by our expert staff of contributing writers.
And you’ll be getting reminders, thanks to a grant from the Leonard and Irene Bettinger Philanthropic Fund to help us push awareness of reviews, as they are posted, on social media. For the record, here are some of the reviews that you’ll find on our website since the season opened:
In the visual art:
- Dana Self on “Michael Rees: Pneumatopia” at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art
- Elisabeth Kirsch on “Welcome to the Neighborhood” at La Esquina Gallery
- John C. Tibbetts on “Sid Garrison: Backstory” at Kiosk Gallery
- Brian Hearn on “Angela Dufresne: Making a Scene” at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art
- James Martin on “Cultural Legacy: What’s Going On?” at the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center
Reviews of theater, music and dance:
- Robert Trussell on Kansas City Actors Theatre’s “Moon for the Misbegotten”
- Robert Trussell on the Lyric Opera of Kansas City’s “West Side Story”
- Robert Trussell on Kansas City Ballet’s “The Wizard of Oz”
- Libby Hanssen on the Kansas City Chorale’s performance of the “Kastalsky Requiem” at the National World War I Museum and Memorial
- Robert Trussell on “Sweat” at the Unicorn
And stand by for 12 more reviews in November and December! KC Studio: We’ve got the arts in Kansas City covered.
