Category: Articles
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High-tech, Hybrid, Hyper-experimental
Opera — that all-encompassing genre of performance — both skews and skewers reality. J. Ashley Miller intends to do both with his first full-length opera, Echosis. Echosis is the retelling of Ovid’s classic Greek story of Echo and Narcissus through the lens of the cyber gaming world.
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Nostalgia Trip
Say what you will about the interstate system, the most fabled thoroughfare in American history remains Route 66, which in 1938 became the world’s first mega-highway paved end to end. Wending from Chicago to Santa Monica, Calif., the 2,448-mile, two-lane highway carried countless travelers before being decommissioned by the federal government in 1985.
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Road Show
Most Americans are too young to remember the discouraging roads that confronted long-distance travelers before President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Federal Highway Act, enabling the creation of the U.S. Interstate Highway System in 1956. Sixty years later, the virtually completed system’s 47,500 miles of interconnected divided highways continues to promote safety and expediency for motorists while maintaining a vital impact on the nation’s way of life.
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Julius A. Karash on Business and the Arts
Jeff Owens, a high-profile artist/filmmaker and developer in Kansas City’s Crossroads area, recalls a time when he actually benefitted from the ghostly atmosphere that permeated a largely abandoned neighborhood. “It was extremely quiet, hardly any activity going on,” Owens told me. “I could do all kinds of things movie-wise.
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KC Collector Helps Launch Artist-Run Super PAC
That’s what artists Hank Willis Thomas and Eric Gottesman have to say about the current American political climate. Their frustration, shared by many Americans, is not unique. But their solution, the creation of an artist-run super PAC called “For Freedoms,” is without precedent.
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Siah Armajani: Bridge Builder
This fall, over 30 drawings, sculptures and architectural maquettes by internationally renowned artist and architect Siah Armajani will be on display at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. “Siah Armajani: Bridge Builder” will showcase five decades of work focusing on bridges, highlighting Armajani’s technical expertise as well as his symbolic and political investment in the bridge form.
