Time for weekend calendar picks from Alice Thorson for this beautiful Easter weekend. This is your last weekend to see Unicorn Theatre’s production of Informed Consent, closing April 1st. A new exhibition of art exploring humankind’s deep connections and fascination with the plant kingdom opens at the Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence. Saturday, celebrate Easter with the kids at the White House Egg Roll at Truman Library and Museum. Saturday night, enjoy poetry readings at the KCAI Crossroads Gallery, or enj0y the boogie-woogie piano stylings of singer Eden Brent at the Folly. Sunday night, celebrate the official laugh of Kansas City’s new jazz and community radio station, KOJH-LP 104.7, at the Mutual Musicians Foundation. For more ideas this Easter weekend, visit Kansas City’s most comprehensive arts calendar at kcstudio.org/events.
Informed Consent
March 7, 2018 – April 1, 2018
Unicorn Theatre
A genetic anthropologist, Jillian, is driven to map out futures and reveal histories through DNA, desperately fighting to save her own young daughter from developing early-onset Alzheimer’s. When the opportunity arises to research the genes of an isolated Native American tribe that could hold the key, Jillian sets out on a mission to make a break-through discovery. Inspired by the conflict between a Native tribe and an Arizona university, Informed Consent takes on the personal and national debate about science vs. belief, and whether our DNA should write our life stories.
Big Botany: Conversations with the Plant World
March 27, 2018 – July 15, 2018
Spencer Museum of Art
Big Botany: Conversations with the Plant World will explore humankind’s deep connections and fascination with the plant kingdom through artworks from the Spencer Museum’s permanent collection, a number of significant loans, and site-specific commissions by four artists-in-residence: Ackroyd & Harvey, Sandy Winters, and Mathias Kessler.
The exhibition will be organized through several themes: artists’ studies of plant forms; historic and contemporary plant lore; ecological sustainability and biomechanical plant hybrids; plants in a post-human world; and works dealing with scientific research on how plants sense the world and communicate. One aim of the exhibition is to cultivate viewers’ empathy for plants by addressing the tendency of humans to dismiss plants as a static backdrop to their fast-paced lives.
Themes in Big Botany will be explored further through an exhibition catalogue published by the Museum that includes short contributions from a variety of artists, curators, poets, philosophers, ecologists, and more. Additionally, a research symposium coinciding with the exhibition’s opening will bring together scholars and researchers to share their work on plant studies. Dr. Daniel Chamovitz, Dean of the Faculty of Life Sciences at Tel Aviv University, will deliver the symposium’s keynote lecture titled What a Plant Knows on March 27.
Harry’s Hop n’ Hunt
March 31, 2018 @ 10:00 am – 12:00 pm | Free
Harry S. Truman Library & Museum
The White House Egg Roll is coming to Independence! Since 1878 American Presidents and their families have commemorated Easter by hosting an Egg Roll on the South Lawn of the White House.
This year the Harry S. Truman Library & Museum will bring the tradition home to the heartland. In addition to the White House-style egg roll on our own South Lawn, there will also be an Egg Hunt for kids 12 and under, and Story time on the Steps with famous faces from around town. Rumor is that the Easter Bunny will be stopping by to join the family fun too!
A Common Sense Reading Series: John Gallaher, Bridget Lowe & Marcus Myers
March 31, 2018 @ 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm | Free
KCAI Crossroads Gallery: Center for Contemporary Practice
John GALLAHER is the author or co-author of five poetry collections, most recently, In a Landscape (BOA Editions, 2014). His poetry has been published in literary journals and magazines including Boston Review, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Field, The Literati Quarterly, jubilat, The Journal, Ploughshares, and in anthologies including The Best American Poetry 2008. He is an assistant professor of English at Northwest Missouri State University, and co-editor of The Laurel Review.
Bridget LOWE is the author of At the Autopsy of Vaslav Nijinsky (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2013) and her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, A Public Space, Best American Poetry, Boston Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Kansas City, where she was born.
Marcus MYERS advises gifted & talented high school students, teaches composition to high school seniors and college freshmen, and works as one of the founding co-editors of Bear Review. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Cortland Review, Hunger Mountain, Mid-American Review, The National Poetry Review, Pleiades, The Rumpus, Salt Hill, Tar River Poetry, TYPO and elsewhere.
Cyprus Avenue LIVE! presents Eden Brent
March 31, 2018 @ 8:00 pm
Folly Theater
Nicknamed “Little Boogaloo” by her Mississippi mentor Boogaloo Ames, Eden Brent is much more than her signature boogie-woogie piano and juke-joint blues holler. She is a celebrated songwriter and dynamic performer, with numerous nominations and awards including eleven Blues Music Award nominations since 2009 and three BMA trophies. Her most recent Yellow Dog Records album, Jigsaw Heart was nominated for BMA Acoustic Album of the Year, continuing a streak of nominations for her last three albums.
Born in the heart of the Mississippi Delta in Greenville, to a family of riverboat captains and guitar pickers, Eden’s story could’ve been written by Tennessee Williams or any number of Mississippi’s colorful authors. The Greenville bridge is named for her grandfather Jesse, the Waterways Journal “Riverman of the Century”. Her father, Captain Howard, famous for his Hank Williams renditions and grand story-telling, is a bona-fide living “River Legend”, and her mother Carole was born a sharecropper but became a big band singer and fashion model, working at Chicago’s Chez Paris in the 1950’s.
She has released four solo albums: Something Cool 2003; Mississippi Number One 2008; Ain’t Got No Troubles 2010; and Jigsaw Heart 2014, and is currently on the Yellow Dog Records label.
KOJH-LP 104.7 Official Launch
April 1, 2018 @ 5:30 pm – 7:30 pm | Free
Mutual Musicians Foundation
You are invited to the official launch of KOJH-LP 104.7. Kansas Cities New Jazz, and Community Radio Station. Located at The Historic Mutual Musicians Foundation, KOJH will be the first radio station to broadcast from the Historic 18th and Vine Jazz District of Kansas City in over 80 years.
We invite you to engage in our volunteer opportunities and share your ideas for shows, and station content.
Beverages and hor devours will be served prior to a brief presentation and ribbon cutting, followed by Live music and what id sure to be a historic Jam Session (so bring your instruments and sit in).
We look forward to seeing you at the Foundation to help us to celebrate this momentous occasion.
