Category: Articles
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Students and Audiences Alike Reap Benefits of UMKC Graduate Theatre Program
Area theatergoers who haven’t experienced productions by UMKC’s graduate theatre program are missing out on some great shows, such as the funny but shocking “Oh, Beautiful,” by Theresa Rebeck, and William Congreve’s “The Way of the World.” As theatre professor Ted Swetz announced in the planning for Congreve’s Restoration-era comedy, “Get ready, for the shackles have been hilariously thrown off.”
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Couple Shares Love of Regionalism in Exhibit of Feisty Depression-Era Talent Joe Jones
When Jim and Virginia Moffett began buying pictures around 1990, they were advised by Henry Adams, then curator of American art at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, to “stay within your region.” Adams believed that focusing on artists with local connections would enable the Moffetts to have a superior and more organized collection. Now, a quarter-century after they began collecting, the Moffetts are concentrating on organizing various museum exhibitions [...]
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Cristina Muñiz: “The Powers of Overcoming”
Although she completed her B.F.A. at the Kansas City Art Institute just three years ago, Cristina Muñiz has been making art for more than 20 years. It shows in the mature personal vocabulary she has evolved, fired by memories of growing up in a big Mexican-American family in San Antonio, but reaching out to encompass the broader realm of human experience. “What I push my work towards is to a point where it doesn’t exclude anybody,” Muñiz says.
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Innovative Housing: Nurturing Artists and Neighborhoods
All too often, artists who breathe life back into comatose old neighborhoods are forced out when the revival spawns high rents. Some Kansas City artists have fallen victim to this cycle in the Crossroads and West Bottoms. Kansas City is working on several fronts to solve this problem, such as [...]
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Tom Toro’s Take, May/June 2017
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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Artist to Watch: Vanessa Thomas
Lawrence-based singer Vanessa Thomas works as a vocal coach, accompanist, church music director, and full-time single mom to her four children, all while regularly performing nationally with Grammy Award-winning maestro Doc Severinsen. Vocally, she is known for her seamless four-octave range and her unusual musical versatility.