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Visions Dark and Dreamy
Dark Days, Bright Nights,” an exhibit of contemporary Finnish painting at the Kemper Museum, gathers familiar vocabularies and styles, including figurative expressionism, narrative realism, stripe paintings and graffiti art. But the spirit of this show, curated by the museum’s executive director, Barbara O’Brien, is something intriguing and different.
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Ornamentation Everywhere
Still lifes and flower paintings don’t usually summon adjectives like “rebellious,” “subversive” and “transgressive.” But spend a little time in “Ephemeral Beauty: Robert Zakanitch” at the Nerman Museum, and you may see the connection. It’s a bower of a show, filled with mural-scaled evocations of lush organic growth, riotous color, exuberant brushwork and flowers, flowers, flowers.
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Post Punk
“Punk is dead. Get over it,” writes Stephen Proski in FVTVRE PVNK, a manifesto that marked his break with the Kansas City punk rock scene.But Proski never let his association with the punk scene define him. Over the last decade Proski, a writer, painter, graphic designer, guitarist, singer and underground club owner, has had a diverse creative presence in Kansas City.
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Dual Personality
As a student in the early 1970s at the Kansas City Art Institute, Jerry Eisterhold found himself pondering wine in addition to graphic design. It was a brief phase, yet one that foretold the future. “I thought it would be a cool thing to be a wine aficionado,” Eisterhold remembers.