This last year was a busy one for the writers whose insightful stories, profiles and reviews graced the pages of KC Studio. Four of them also published books in 2023-24. Here’s a quick look at each.
“Modern Art: A Global Survey from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present” by David Cateforis, Oxford University Press, 2024
For sheer ambition, it’s hard to beat a compendium that covers 593 pages, including extensive footnotes!
The author, who serves as chair of the Kress Foundation of the Department of Art History at the University of Kansas, spent six years compiling this overview of modern art and architecture, one designed to look beyond the Eurocentric lens the subject is often viewed through.
The book received the 2024 Most Promising New Textbook Award from Oxford University Press, but to say it’s a great textbook would damn it with faint praise. Brimming with insights into artists and movements both familiar and obscure, Cateforis’ primer is a surprisingly good read!
“I’m providing interpretations, but I’m not claiming they’re the only possible interpretations,” he told an interviewer about his efforts. “I want it to be useful to teachers and to the general reader.”
So yes, the Picassos, O’Keeffes, de Koonings and Matisses are here, but so are names many of us haven’t encountered, like Lina Bo Bardi, Kenzō Tange and M.F. Husain. Better yet, the book drops details on how different cultures have shaped their own brand of “modernity.”
Video and digital art have also been invited to this party. In fact, purchasers of the book gain access to a website replete with more photos, films and study guides.
“States of Swing: The History of the Kansas City Jazz Orchestra, 2003-2023” by Libby Hanssen, Kansas City Jazz Orchestra, 2023
As both writer and musician, Libby Hanssen is well-suited for a deep dive into how this homegrown musical aggregation survived to see its 20th birthday.
If you want to check the group’s roster for any year, it’s here. So is the answer to which guest artists were featured at what venue during two decades of concerts.
The book is topped off with some fine photos, both historical and current. The Kauffman Center and the KCJO look great together!
But most importantly, Hanssen’s narrative is well-researched and refreshingly candid. She illuminates how the founders’ zeal for promoting KC’s jazz past crashed head-on into some modern realities. The book chronicles breakups, reorganizations and the heartbreaking death of saxophonist and director Kerry Strayer, just as the orchestra was gaining steam.
And yet somehow, even with a pandemic thrown in, the organization emerged with its enthusiasm intact. And even bigger plans for the next 20 years.
Clint Ashlock, the band’s director, may have said it best when he told a documentary crew, “I get to participate in this brilliant history. A very small part of it, but man, it’s a deep, meaningful history.”
“Descent” by Harold Smith, independently published, 2024
The book’s title is small and simple, perched on a black background, tucked between a few vibrant, colorful brush strokes.
There’s no author’s name on the cover, nor any indication of what lies within. But what’s inside this book is nothing short of amazing.
“Descent,” first published in a different iteration in 2003, is reborn here. It begins and ends with nearly 100 of Harold Smith’s paintings and assemblages — the stark, in-your-face portraits of Black men that the Kansas City artist has become known for, captured in masterful photographs by E.G. Schempf.
Some include objects like a cigar, a liquor bottle or a chess set. A few feature musicians and their instruments. All are bursting with an inner fire that defies viewers to look away.
The breathtaking visuals bookend a story Smith has written. In it, a man descends into a fever-dreamed world where Kansas City landmarks blur with the slave trade, drug use, dead American presidents, and most significantly, Mother Africa herself.
His prose is raw and sometimes humorous, sometimes alarming, not unlike the elements that coalesce in his paintings.
In 2022, Smith, who also teaches art and produces videos, was awarded the prestigious Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant.
“Descent” makes it abundantly clear that the award was well-deserved.
“4 Concretures” (including 8-Card Trading Pack) by Brandan Griffin, Theaphora Editions, 2024
“There exist four types of concretures: Cement, Cryssle, Mixrrr and Moldture.”
That’s how Brandan Griffin introduces the mashup of language, logic, symbols and chemistry in his short book of poetry called “4 Concretures.”
He adds, “Concressence is the process by which all concretures come into being…
Lost? Don’t worry — “4 Concretures” doesn’t come with a test.
However, each volume does include a package of trading cards that allows the user to play in “leisure, visionary and battle modes.”
Oh, and “Mixrr is discursive and Moldture is formal.”
Griffin seems to be world-building at the most elemental level. In doing it, he flings out phrases which (for lack of a better term) are a real hoot to wrap your tongue around. Such as…
On its own, the 1-way logic of supervenience
fails to account for the
neurological glue
that allows the multi-sentence topology
of CONCRETURES to hang together
“4 Concretures” follows Griffin’s 2022 poetry collection, “Impastoral” (Omnidawn). Along with the work that Griffin contributes to KC Studio, he and his wife, Hannah Risinger, are owners of New Material Books, which curates small press books and hosts writing workshops.
P.S. The trading cards are really cool.
