Category: Articles
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Tom Toro’s Take, July/August 2018
Tom Toro is a cartoonist and writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harvard Business Review and Audubon, among others. Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, he now lives in KCMO with his wife, Marissa Wolf, a theatre artist who is the Director of New Works at KC Rep.
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A Novel Approach
In July 1814, 16-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin departed her home in England and travelled to France with the already married poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Two years later, during the summer of 1816, they took up residence in Geneva, Switzerland, where, housebound by abnormally low temperatures that earned 1816 the epithet, “the year without a summer,” their companion George Gordon (Lord) Byron, suggested that the group engage in writing ghost stories.
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Fringe Effect
Without KC Fringe, the local theater scene would not be what it is. The Fringe, which will present its 14th annual potpourri of performances, film, visual arts and youth activities spanning 10 days in July, got off to an unwieldy start in its inaugural year— mainly because nobody had attempted a fringe festival in Kansas City before. KC Fringe, like other fringe fests around the country, took its cue from the Mother Ship: The Edinburgh Fringe, which began in 1947 in Scotland.
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Mona Hatoum: Reimagining the Familiar
Can a wheelchair pose a threat? Does menace lie in a bunk bed? Is there a hidden agenda lurking in a kitchen — as an ominous electric buzz humming through chairs and tables suggests? In the art of Mona Hatoum, the familiar can be disorienting and unsettling, challenging our assumptions and upending our expectations. “Terra Infirma,” an exhibition on view at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis through Aug. 11, spans the four-decade career of the Palestinian multimedia and installation artist.