Editor’s Weekend Calendar Picks, July 5 – 8

Time for weekend calendar picks from KC Studio editor Alice Thorson for First Fridays in the Crossroads and beyond. For more events this weekend, visit Kansas City’s most comprehensive arts calendar at kcstudio.org/events.

Susan Grace – “Blue Ciggy”

July 6, 2018 @ 10:00 am – 10:00 pm | Free
Jones Gallery

Susan is an artist whose work has been widely exhibited at galleries and museums throughout the U.S. Her academic background is in literature and theater, and for many years she taught at universities in the U.S. and in Athens, Greece. However, she always maintained an artist studio practice and eventually left academic life to paint full-time. Although literature continues to inspire her work, more recent sources of inspiration include blues, psychedelic rock, film noir, and advertising posters. Her work mainly focuses on the figure, and she moves freely between representation and abstraction while using fragmentation, layering, and sometimes text to create multiple possibilities for interpretation and experience.

First Fridays at 18th & Vine

July 6, 2018 @ 4:00 pm | Free
Historic 18th & Vine Jazz District

First Fridays are a cultural experience of music, art, food, and shopping on every First Friday year round. Shop local artists and a diverse array of food trucks – all here on the Vine. All of the neighbors in the Historic 18th & Vine Jazz District present lively entertainment! Stop in to the American Jazz Museum and Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, check out live music at the Juke House, Blue Room, Mutual Musicians Foundation, Vine Street Studio, and dance at Kansas City Friends of Alvin Ailey.

Thoughts & Prayers

July 6, 2018 @ 5:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Weinberger Fine Art’s Drawing Room

Weinberger Fine Art will host the closing reception of THOUGHTS & PRAYERS, featuring the work of Linda Lighton and Jessica Wohl, at The Drawing Room located at 1903 Wyandotte, Kansas City, MO 64108 from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. on First Friday, July 6th

The exhibition highlights the work of artists Linda Lighton and Jessica Wohl. Both artist’s work serves as commentary on American culture, politics, and values. The artists explore the relationships between culture and the violence and anger seen today. Lighton has created ceramic sculptures depicting guns, fuel nozzles, and bullets; utilizing objects typically associated with testosterone and brutality to explore their effect on femininity. Her sculptures delve further into this idea through the use of bullets growing out of flowers, lipstick paired with guns, and other unexpected combinations of nature, femininity, and brutality. She states in her artist statement, “All my work is about feminism and feminist imagery. As a woman, I feel to be honest and to have integrity I must reveal and discuss what I know. What I know is in the United States, guns seem to be flowering like weeds, with a reverence for brute force and a resistance to humanity. I believe the best I can do is to keep this conversation alive.”

323CLAY Artists

July 6, 2018 @ 5:00 pm – 10:00 pm | Free
Bredin-Lee Gallery

Join us for First Friday in the Kansas City Crossroads! 323CLAY Artists and their special guest Tara Dawley will be sharing their ceramic work.

Stop in at 1729 McGee and you will find sculptural ceramics, functional ceramics and some photography too.

Opening Reception: Tj Templeton’s “Alpha and Omega”

July 6, 2018 @ 5:00 pm – 10:00 pm | Free
The Bunker Center for the Arts

Bunker Center Artist in Residence, Tj Templeton has been described as a lot of things: visual artist, activist, performer, writer, gallerist, and provocateur. For the past decade this Kansas City native held one title truest to his heart: homesick.

As such, he has built a body of representational and abstract work that explores his love of Kansas City, the feelings and experiences that accompanied him in his absence, as well as the loss that brought back him back home.

Join us during the First Friday Art Walk to celebrate the opening of this exciting exhibition. Refreshments will be served and free parking is plentiful.

A portion of the proceeds from the sales of this exhibition will be donated to the Historic Kansas City Foundation.

Amelia Studio Trunk Show featuring Amy Harding

July 6, 2018 – July 30, 2018 | Free
Leedy-Voulkos Art Center

During the month of July, our featured artist is Amy Harding of Amelia Studio. Stop by and shop her new line of modern functional ceramics that include planters, mugs, jewelry and more.

Amy Harding is a graphic designer and ceramicist from Kansas City. Amelia Studio is her line of modern functional ceramics. Amy first started working with clay nearly 15 years ago, taking classes and workshops locally at the Kansas City Clay Guild, Red Star Studios, and Johnson County Community College, and continues her practice independently and through workshops. Her foundations in graphic design can be seen in the surfaces of her pottery, which include black and white patterns, graphic shapes, and bold colors. The forms are clean and modern, and sometimes serve as a canvas to play with combinations of hazy color — reminiscent of photographic blurs and bokeh — and more focused graphic patterns or botanical illustrations.

The Amelia Studio line includes serving pieces, planters, home goods, and, occasionally, jewelry. Amy works out of her home studio in Prairie Village, Kansas. Her work was recently included in STRIKE: an exhibition of clay and flame, presented by Kansas City Urban Potters, and her work can currently be found at the Kansas City Clay Guild’s Centered Earth Gallery and the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center Shop.

2018 AileyCamp Final Performances

July 7, 2018 @ 6:00 pm | Free
Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts

For 30 years, AileyCamp, a program offered through Kansas City Friends of Alvin Ailey (KCFAA), has impacted the lives of thousands of youth and their families in the Greater Kansas City area. This year’s final performance on July 7 will highlight the talents of the 2018 Missouri and Kansas AileyCampers. This final performance, Joy of Dance, will highlight everything AileyCampers learned throughout the summer, including that the arts require discipline, focus, flexibility and acceptance.

SUMMERFEST 2018

July 7, 2018 @ 7:30 pm | Free – $24
White Recital Hall

July 8, 2018 @ 3:00 pm | Free – $24
St. Mary’s Episcopal

Join Summerfest as they explore “the art and soul of chamber music” in July, 2018.

Our first week centers on the way chamber music speaks to our soul, starting with Nico Muhly’s Gibbons Suite, J.S. Bach’s celebrated solo vocal cantata “Ich habe genug,” and Ernest Bloch’s Piano Quintet No. 1 rounds out the week by reminding us that chamber music allows composers to let their imaginations run free and to mix styles freely in order to express the depth of human experience.