KC STUDIO

January 4, 2016

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.

January 4, 2016

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.

January 4, 2016

Crowdfunding Kickstarts the Arts in Kansas City

From films to exhibitions, galleries to transgender lingerie ventures, new projects get a boost from Kickstarter. A little seed money can turn an old Chevy..

January 4, 2016

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.

December 31, 2015

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.

December 29, 2015

How Pop Culture Paves the Way to the Classics

One writer’s path to Swan Lake… It was 1981. I got a Walkman and three new cassette tapes for Christmas: Working Class Dog, Super Trouper,..

December 21, 2015

How to Increase Arts Participation in Our Community

Have you ever found yourself in limbo on Friday evening thinking, “There’s this amazing arts community in KC, but how do I plug in quickly..

Just In

December 17, 2015

Kansas City Cultural Institutions in the News

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art earned first place in a recent Yelp ranking of the best museums in the U.S, beating out such august contenders..

December 15, 2015

“Venus Rising” Contains More Than a Female Body

One of the gems of the Nelson-Atkins’ American painting collection is Raphaelle Peale’s Venus Rising from the Sea—A Deception. Often acknowledged as the artist’s most important work, it was a natural choice for inclusion in the exhibit, “Audubon to Warhol: The Art of American Still Life,” now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.