Time for weekend calendar picks from KC Studio editor, Alice Thorson. The 24th annual Heart of America Shakespeare Festival presents performances of Twelfth Night tonight through Sunday. Stop by the Nerman Museum tonight at 6pm for the opening reception for two great exhibitions, Super Indian and Supper Club, showing through September, or see Kansas City Symphony at Kauffman Center for their recording preview concert. On Saturday, you can hear the Minnesota Boychoir at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. or check out the 4th annual Kansas City Dance Festival at the Folly Saturday night. And enjoy even more Shakespeare at the Kansas Library downtown with members of Metropolitan Ensemble Theatre performing readings of Shakespeare all afternoon. For more event ideas, visit Kansas City’s most comprehensive arts calendar at kcstudio.org/events.
Twelfth Night at the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival
June 14 – July 3 | Free
Southmoreland Park
In their 24th season, the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival presents Twelfth Night, June 14- July 3, 2016, Tuesday through Sunday evenings at 8:00PM in Southmoreland Park, right off the Country Club Plaza. Admission to the Festival is free, with donations encouraged.
Super Indian: Fritz Scholder 1967 – 1980
Supper Club • Scott Anderson
June 23 – September 25
Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art
An opening reception for Supper Club · Scott Anderson will take place from 6 to 8 p.m., in the museum’s atrium. Supper Club opens in conjunction with Super Indian: Fritz Scholder 1967-1980, an exhibition organized by the Denver Art Museum.
Scott Anderson’s process-based paintings search for balances between romanticism and skepticism, history and the contemporary, abstraction and figuration, and the recognizable and the subconscious. Anderson’s guttural desire to paint combines with his self-aware gestures and dream-logic narratives to produce work that is color zealous, figuratively ambiguous and politically surreal – his paintings have appropriately been described by writer David Pagel as “dystopian abstraction.”
For Supper Club, Anderson broaches the timely topic of food, a subject that has been readily explored from Dutch still-life painting and its visualizations of wealth to post-modernist chunky mark-making as a stand-in for visceral desire. Anderson, however, tackles the contemporary concerns of social rituals like dinner parties, food policy discourse, popular culture and personal memories of a hungry teenager suburban community. Beginning with these meal narrative situations, Anderson’s process captures the Dionysian experience of making a painting – painting and eating are consumption, a shuffling of matter, digestion, alchemical transformation, evacuation, regurgitation, re-eating, pleasure. The paintings refuse to present a recognizable whole story, but rather assemble an alternative, dystopian reality using the leftovers, the table scraps, the ort, and the refuse. The results are a melting pot of modernist painting vernacular that hinge on political satire, or as Anderson aptly declares in an especially luscious and complicated composition, it’s “Farm to Table Dinner Theater.”
Featuring more than 40 rarely seen, monumental paintings and lithographs by the renowned 20th century artist Fritz Scholder (1937–2005), Super Indian: Fritz Scholder, 1967–1980 is the first exhibition to explore how Scholder blended figurative and pop art influences to create colorful, compelling and revolutionary images. Influenced by abstract expressionists including Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, as well as painters such as Francis Bacon, Francisco de Goya and Paul Gauguin, Fritz Scholder’s work was purely his own. His art reveals the raw reality of being an American Indian through the eyes—and palette—of an artist who once vowed never to paint Indians.
Drawing its title from the iconic painting Super Indian No. 2, the exhibition begins with Scholder’s controversial Indian series, started in 1967, and ends with his 1980 Indian Land paintings, which marked a seismic shift in palette and subject matter. Visitors to Super Indian will be taken on a thematic exploration following the development of Scholder’s style and themes: Early Indian series, pop art, psychological portraiture, stereotypes and representation and dark, mysterious subjects. The central elements that are most evident in his work are his focus on the figure, vibrant color and energetic brushwork. A selection of lithographs will show how the Luiseño-enrolled artist used the medium as a way to push the boundaries even further in terms of subject and color.
Kansas City Symphony Recording Preview Concert
June 23 @ 7:00 pm
Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts
BARBER Symphony No. 1
SIBELIUS Symphony No. 7
SCRIABIN Poem of Ecstasy
Join Michael Stern and your Kansas City Symphony for a concert featuring repertoire from our next exciting CD project with Reference Recordings. Tickets for this exploration of one-movement symphonies start at just $14.
Minnesota Boychoir Performance
June 25 @ 11:15 am – 12:30 pm | Free
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
The Minnesota Boychoir, under the direction of Executive and Artistic Director Mark Johnson, will tour Kansas City June 22-27. The Minnesota Boychoir sings sacred and secular music in a variety of styles, representing many cultures and languages. These performances are free and open to the public. A freewill donation will be received at each concert. Additional information can be obtained by visiting www.boychoir.org.
4th Annual Kansas City Dance Festival
June 25 @ 7:30 pm
Folly Theater
Kansas City Dance Festival presents today’s most exciting cutting edge forms of dance all in one riveting night. From modern to ballet and contemporary dance. The festival features the best and brightest dancers from Kansas City mingled with artists across the nation. This year’s festival will feature a world premier from International star choreographer Garrett Smith, an exuberant work by Ballet X’s Artistic Director Matthew Neenan, and a sensual pas de deux that stands the test of time by the late Vicente Nebrada among much more!
Shakespeare and the Art of the Word – Metropolitan Ensemble Theatre
June 26 @ 2:00 pm
Kansas City Public Library-Central Library
The Library’s 10th season of Script-in-Hand performances concludes with an original Shakespeare-inspired production – a collage of readings of some of the Bard’s greatest texts, scene enactments, and images of text from the First Folio. Created by Karen Paisley, the Metropolitan Ensemble Theatre’s producing artistic director, the production highlights popular and well-known passages while flushing out older, more obscure ones, introducing and reintroducing Shakespeare in a visceral and exciting way.
Members of the Friends of the Kansas City Public Library are invited to a reception with cast members following the performance. The reception is provided by Cosentino’s Market. You may join the Friends during the event and attend the reception the day you sign up. Learn more about membership at kclibraryfriends.org.
