For more events this weekend, visit Kansas City’s most comprehensive arts calendar at kcstudio.org/events.
Kathleen Battle, soprano with piano, choir, and narration | Underground Railroad — A Spiritual Journey
March 2, 2018 @ 7:00 pm | $30 – $85
Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts
Soprano Kathleen Battle is one of the great divas of our time. Her long-awaited return to the Series, Underground Railroad—A Spiritual Journey, is a moving program of traditional spirituals with choir and piano, with narration drawn from the writings of Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass.
RIGOLETTO
March 3, 2018 – March 12, 2018
Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts
When his comedic cruelty crosses the line, a hunchbacked jester named Rigoletto is cursed by a courtier, threatening his futile attempts to protect his daughter from the depravity of a powerful Duke deadset on defiling her. Verdi’s gritty revenge opera contrasts its haunting, careening storyline with radiant melodies, unforgettable arias, and some of the most recognizable music in all of opera.
_Along_The_Line_New_Play_Festival
March 3, 4 & 5, 2018 @ 7:00 pm | $20
Squeezebox Theatre
Along The Line is a rapid-fire, theatrical response to a specific moment in history. The ideological framework is to document history in a collection of very, very short plays that are realized, devised, and written during a specific time. Volume 3 Plays were written between January 29 and February 8, 2017.
This volume features 75 very, very short plays (all 60 seconds or less.)All plays are presented each night. This truly is a community forum, through an artistic medium.
Russian String Orchestra (formerly Chamber Orchestra Kremlin)
March 3, 2018 @ 7:30 pm | $21 – $25
Polsky Theatre, JCCC
Whether through its highly acclaimed CDs or its mesmerizing concerts, the Russian String Orchestra (formerly Chamber Orchestra Kremlin) delivers warm, high energy performances that stay with listeners long after the last note has been played. Founded in 1991, the orchestra, which comprises some of Russia’s finest young string players, has carved a niche for itself under the creative baton of its founder and music director, Misha Rachlevsky. The signature quality of the orchestra is the depth and variety of its repertoire – more than 1,000 compositions from early baroque to new works written on commission by composers from Russia, Europe and the U.S.
First Fridays Receptions in the Crossroads…
Byron Anway: Gatherings
March 2, 2018 – March 31, 2018
The Bunker Center for the Arts
Join us this First Friday for the first solo exhibition of the year at the Bunker Center for the Arts. The exhibition, Byron Anway’s “Gatherings,” will feature several large scale oil and water color paintings in the South galleries.
Byron Anway is an artist, educator, and musician living and working in Lincoln, NE. Byron earned an MFA from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a BA from Luther College. He has taught at The University of Nebraska-Lincoln, The University of Nebraska-Omaha, Nebraska Wesleyan University, The International School of Brussels in Belgium, and the American Academy-Casablanca in Morocco. Among other venues, his work has been exhibited at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, NE, the Soo Visual Arts Center in Minneapolis, MN and featured in New American Paintings, The West (vol. 126).
Organized Chaos – Drew Lamb and Dee Thrun
February 27, 2018 – March 23, 2018
Jones Gallery
Organized Chaos is a show put together in partnership by Dee Thurn and Spaceship Zulu. Organized Chaos depicts a situation or place that seems to be in chaos, but has an underlying organization and pattern which is evident to those involved in the situation.
Fugitive Color
March 1, 2018 – April 28, 2018
Weinberger Fine Art
The exhibition “Fugitive Color” features artwork from Linda Lighton (ceramics), Kuzana Ogg (painting), and Erin McIntosh (paintings and works on paper). Each artist creates work that is sensorially driven, emphasizing color and balance with biological undertones.
Exhibitions at Leedy-Voulkos Art Center:
VIEWFINDER – Chris Miller, Ben Johnson and Cesar Lopez
Viewfinder is a group exhibition consisting of Chris Miller, Ben Johnson, and Cesar Lopez. The exhibition will present works that explore the power of process as a metaphor for history and storytelling. History is fundamentally narrative, and these artists find fragility in memory, inclusivity in abstraction, or catharsis in the fantastical.
Meraki – Rashelle Weissenbach
The exhibition, Meraki, features new paintings by Rashelle Weissenbach. Meraki is a Greek word meaning “To do something with love or soul, or equivalently to put something of yourself into your work.” Weissenbach uses the canvas as one would use a journal creating an abstract visual narrative and, through the use of her poetic titles, leads the viewer towards emotional interpretation.
Accumulation – Sarah Hearn
Sarah Hearn is a visual artist and citizen researcher. Her artwork, rooted in drawing, photography, installation and participatory culture explores the shifting boundaries of science and science fiction. Sarah has exhibited in galleries and art spaces across the United States and has contributed to international collaborations in Brooklyn, Berlin and Reading, UK. Hearn’s project Invisible Landscapes was subject of a 2016 solo exhibition at the University of Notre Dame. Formerly she was a Charlotte Street Foundation studio resident and a visiting artist at Cow House Studios in County Wexford, Ireland. Her artwork represented the United States in the World Creativity Biennial of 2010. In 2015 her city-wide project Urban Colonization engaged audiences to hunt for artificial lichen colonies hidden throughout Kansas City.
Sarah is Program Manager at Artist INC. She served as Artist INC facilitator for Kansas City and a Liaison for Austin and OKC. Sarah was also a Co-Director of PLUG Projects, a Kansas City based curatorial collaborative dedicated to contemporary artists. She earned a BFA from the College of Santa Fe, and a MFA from Rochester Institute of Technology.
Conscious Detachment – Christel Highland
Known, Knowing and Unknown – Caroline Colby-Gonzalez
Caroline Colby-Gonzalez is a figurative painter hailing from Miami, Florida. She graduated from Florida International University in 2014, earning a BA in Art History and a BFA with a focus on Painting. After graduating, she was accepted to a two-year, faith-based residency program with Transform Arts in Kansas City, Missouri which concluded in December of 2017.
During her residency, she curated her first show entitled Banal Magic: Latin American Artists Transmute the Ordinary, which featured emerging artists of Latin American descent and took place at the Four Chapter Gallery. In addition to volunteering at the Four Chapter Gallery as an art installer and maintaining her studio practice, she assisted in teaching elementary school students art history-based art lessons and high school students the fundamentals of drawing.
Her work has been collected privately and featured in the Freedom 58 collection to bring awareness to survivors of human trafficking. She has exhibited her work in the Museum of Florida Art and Culture, the Four Chapter Gallery, and most recently the Kansas City Artist Coalition during the 35th Annual River Market Regional Exhibition.
She currently lives in Midtown and maintains her studio practice at Vulpes Bastille, east of the Crossroads.
Exhibitions at Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art:
MARCUS CAIN : Alignments
Marcus Cain’s new series of paintings, Alignments, are inspired as reply to the constant stream of information experienced in our hyperactive world. Cain is interested in, what he calls, “ a territory between looking and seeing” and these paintings hasten to reflect and respond to our common experience of action and reaction.
Employing the humblest of tools, Cain stamps the surface of his canvas with pieces of wood dipped in color. The repeated marks accumulate and reveal, or conceal, intervals of pattern that cluster together, and then break apart. Woven color divides space and suggests shadow and light, the movement, gravity and atmosphere of our world. Cain says of these paintings, “Collectively these works are meditations on personal and universal mythologies, acts of transformation and discovery and loss in the natural and man-made world.”
Marcus Cain holds a B.F.A. from the Kansas City Art Institute where he is Alumni Director. His work is in the permanent collections of the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Sedalia, MO; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS, and numerous others.
CARY ESSER : Second Surface
A master of ceramics, Cary Esser, explores the aesthetic and technical edge of possibility within the medium in her new series of wall reliefs, The Second Surface. Esser’s inspiration for this series comes from two sources, the experience of visiting the ancient caves of Cappadocia, Turkey and of seeing historic examples of the Native American Parflech, softened rectangles of folded hide that form carrying cases. Motivated by the history, a sense of enclosure and mystery, and the experience of light and shadow, Esser has created her own Parflech series of envelope-like forms that are both strong yet vulnerable.
Esser’s Parflechs are defined by uniform skins of texture ranging from a sleek, black, sheen to a soft, dry, white crackle and everything in between. The form seems held by the surface, often as delicate as a breath, fragile yet resilient. The combination of the two is inseparable, poetic and powerful as they conspire to reveal or conceal an interior that can be glimpsed but never fully known.
Esser is the Chair of Ceramics at the Kansas City Art Institute. Her work is in the collections of Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Sedalia, MO; Archie Bray Foundation, Helena, MT; John Michael Kohler Art Center, Sheboygan, WI, and numerous others.
“m·w·a·s·o·c”
March 2, 2018 – April 22, 2018
Cerbera Gallery
Cerbera Gallery is proud to present “m·w·a·s·o·c” | monochromatic with a splash of colors during March and April ’18. The exhibition focuses on editions, photographs and paintings from the 1950s to the present day and features renowned national and international artists, including a few local highlights. Except for the center piece by German artist Oliver Ross all other works are monochromatic and focus on one color or hue, including a captivating wall mural by local artist Rif Raf Giraffe – Not Your Friendly Neighborhood Flying Giraffe!
The exhibition also features works by American minimalist sculptor, video artist and painter Richard Serra (born November 2, 1938) who is known for working with large-scale assemblies of sheet metal. Serra was involved in the Process Art Movement. Since 1971, Serra has made large-scale drawings on handmade Hitomi paper or Belgian linen using various techniques. In the early 1970s he drew primarily with ink, charcoal, and lithographic crayon on paper. His primary drawing material has been the paintstick, a wax-like grease crayon. Serra melts several paintsticks to form large pigment blocks.
For the first time in Kansas City: Norbert Frensch (born 1960 in Mainz, Germany) is a German painter. Frensch studied from 1980 to 1986 at the College of Fine Arts in Hamburg. In his conceptual series of works, the artist reflects the phenomena of perception – between visibility and imagination – with the means of painting. The “black” pictures, which have been produced since the beginning of the 1990s, have made Frensch’s work well-known and have appeared in several solo exhibitions in museums internationally. In their sensual presence, the “blacks” take up the genre of still life and vary it with the painterly principle of the Clairobscur in an seemingly endless sequence.
Chris T. Cornelius | “Domiciles” exhibition
March 2, 2018 @ 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm | Free
Travois
To further its mission of supporting and promoting North American indigenous artists, Travois First Fridays will feature artist Chris T. Cornelius and his “Domiciles” exhibition on Friday, March 2 as part of the Crossroads Art District’s First Friday series. Travois is located at 310 W. 19th Terr. in Kansas City, MO., and the exhibition is open to the public from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Chris T. Cornelius, a citizen of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, is an associate professor of architecture at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who focuses his research and practice on the architectural translation of culture; in particular, American Indian culture. He is the founding principal of studio:indigenous, a design and consulting practice serving American Indian clients. He served as a cultural consultant and design collaborator with Antoine Predock on the Indian Community School of Milwaukee (ICS). ICS won the AIA Design Excellence award from the Committee on Architecture for Education. Cornelius holds a Master of Architecture degree from the University of Virginia and a Bachelor of Science in Architectural Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
In his artist statement, Cornelius said the work in this exhibition “examines the nineteen-month American Indian occupation of Alcatraz Island from November 20, 1969 to June 11, 1971. The occupiers took the island through by asking the U.S. Government to honor a treaty they had made 100 years prior. They did not want the island for financial or political gain; they wanted it to create an American Indian cultural center that included American Indian Studies, and American Indian spiritual center, an ecology center and an American Indian Museum. My work supposes, ‘What if they got what they wanted?’ and I will be designing the results.
“The visual representations presented here are process drawings and are a means to visualize the importance of that occupation in that place; at that time. It is an important time in our country’s history when American Indians were speaking openly about their distrust of the American Government, their policies, and American Indian life. For me, the work reflects on the importance of those events and is a way of bringing attention to the same issues in 21st Century America.”
Cornelius is the recipient of numerous awards and honors. He received the inaugural J. Irwin and Xenia S. Miller Prize. Other awards include, an Artist in Residence Fellowship from the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution; multiple wins in the Ken Roberts Architectural Delineation Competition (KRob). Professor Cornelius teaches at the undergraduate and graduate levels including a seminar course on visual thinking and mapping. He will join a group of indigenous architects led by Douglas Cardinal who will be representing Canada in the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale.
