Memorial Day Weekend is almost here and it’s time for weekend calendar picks from KC Studio editor, Alice Thorson. This is your last weekend to see Reflecting Class in the Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer at the Nerlson-Atkins Museum, on view through Sunday, May 29. Thursday and Friday, stop by the Mid-America Arts Alliance to see photos by Blake Little. Fishtank Performance Studio has extended performances of the one-woman play Marilyn/God now through June 1. Tomorrow night, see poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera at the Kansas City Library-Central Branch. And on Sunday night, celebrate Memorial Day with the Kansas City Symphony at Union Station. For more ideas this 3-day weekend, visit Kansas City’s most comprehensive arts calendar at kcstudio.org/events.
Reflecting Class in the Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer
February 24 – May 29 | $12
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
This groundbreaking exhibition examines 17th-century Dutch paintings in light of the new Republic’s social structure. Although the Dutch Republic was relatively democratic at the time, class distinctions remained and conveyed a variety of meanings to its citizens.
Through approximately 71 carefully selected and arranged paintings, this exhibition will present the ways in which Dutch pictures reflect various socio-economic groups. Additionally, three place settings featuring the everyday tableware of the upper, middle, and lower classes will bring to life the tangible differences within the Republic’s stratified population.
By exploring how class distinctions were expressed and the associations each group held, a more nuanced picture of Dutch society will emerge. Highlights of the exhibition include Vermeer’s A Lady Writing and portraits by Rembrandt and Hals.
This exhibition was organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
More about this exhibition from the January/February issue.
Blake Little: Photographs from the Gay Rodeo
May 26 @ 11:00 am – 3:00 pm
May 27 @ 11:00 am – 3:00 pm
Mid-America Arts Alliance
Blake Little is a professional photographer based in Los Angeles. He discovered his personal passion for the gay rodeo when he attended his first event in LA in 1988: “The sport, the camaraderie and atmosphere of this first rodeo experience transformed me. I was completely drawn to it and I had to be a part of it. I wanted to be a cowboy.” These photographs capture many of his experiences and the people he met as he became increasingly involved in the International Gay Rodeo Association. In 1990, he was named Bull Riding Champion of the Year at the IGRA Finals. The exhibition chronicles this time, and also explores the diverse and complex natures of individual and community identity in the West.
Marilyn/God – Extended to June 1
May 26 – June 1 @ 8:00 pm
Fishtank Performance Studio
A one-woman powerhouse that looks at how America’s obsession with fame and beauty shaped a single woman’s rise to- and death from- stardom.
Heidi Van and Jeff Church (Producing Artistic Director at the Coterie) surveyed many contemporary solo plays about Marilyn Monroe.
“We settled on ‘Marilyn/God by Rosary’ Hartel O’Neill because it is more than a bio-play – it delves into the mind of Marilyn and challenges her, interrogates her and forces her to hold a mirror to herself and see the past she has left behind,” says Heidi Van, actor and Fishtank Artistic Director.
“I am attracted to the piece because is it more of psychological thriller than a vanity play. It is extremely active – it’s an “in the moment” exploration and very visceral and physical. As an actor I am completely amped-up for it as well as utterly terrified, which seems to be the place to live.”
Read our March/April 2015 interview with Heidi Van.
An Evening with Juan Felipe Herrera
May 27 @ 6:30 pm
Kansas City Public Library-Central Library
The son of migrant farm workers in California, Juan Felipe Herrera traces his love of poetry to childhood and singing songs about the Mexican Revolution learned from his mother. He would go on to become his home state’s poet laureate and, in September 2015, the first Latino poet laureate of the U.S. The New York Times hailed him as one of the first poets to successfully create “a new hybrid art, part oral, part written, part English, part something else: an art grounded in ethnic identity, fueled by collective pride, yet irreducibly individual too.”
Herrera discusses his life and poetry and reads from his works.
His presentation is the inaugural event in the William H. Hickok Series, presented annually by The Writers Place and made possible in part by funding from the Richard J. Stern Foundation for the Arts.
The William H. Hickok Reading Series honors the late co-founder of Kansas City’s literary community center, The Writers Place.
More on Juan Felipe Herrera from the May/June 2016 issue.
Celebration at the Station
May 29 @ 8:00 pm
Union Station Kansas City
At 8 p.m., conductor Aram Demirjian will lead the Kansas City Symphony in a two-hour concert event featuring crowd favorites such as The Stars and Stripes Forever, and Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. Special guests include local jazz greats, saxophonist Bobby Watson and vocalist Kevin Mahogany. The concert culminates with a grand finale when all eyes turn skyward for a stunning display of choreographed fireworks, presented to the beat of patriotic music.
