Tomorrow is First Fridays and we have a selection of opening receptions and events from KC Studio editor Alice Thorson, along with other events for this beautiful fall weekend. For more ideas, check out Kansas City’s most comprehensive arts calendar at kcstudio.org/events.
TONIGHT…
Autumn Winds
October 5, 2017 @ 7:30 pm
Medallion Theater
The KCCO is thrilled to open this season with wonderful celebratory works by Mozart and a piece written for the Kansas City Chamber Orchestra by composer Forrest Pierce. Set in the beautifully restored Medallion Theater, the concert will also feature soloist Margaret Marco on Oboe d’Amore. Celebrate a new fall season with the warmth and beauty of great music!
FIRST FRIDAYS…
Soviet Realities
October 7, 2017 – October 31, 2017
Telephonebooth Gallery
Friday Preview, Oct. 6th, 4 – 8pm; Opening: Saturday, Oct. 7th, 2 – 5pm
Kansas City native Marc Saviano is a multimedia artist, activist, and co-organizer of the annual DIY publishing fest, KC Zine Con. In 2017 Marc traveled for 3 months in Russia, exhibiting stickers and posters from his “God Bless Generica” project in 5 galleries across Siberia.
Tim S. Brown, also a Kansas City native, studied art in Pittsburgh, PA. Currently works in IoT maintenance. He has run Telephonebooth gallery since 1995.
Gallery Statement
After 1919 rise of Lenin in Russia, dialectic of management theory won. For the next 70 years State was fraternity of parade Marxism, bad production and vodka. Soviet Russia in practice, a system of tributes and pillage covered over with empty talk of “communal ownership”.
In this reality of top-down double not-think, people adapted with double irony at their communal labor in the worker’s state being always enjoyed as private benefit by elites.
“glad to toil for potatoes on this great caviar Comrade, but was more necessary for use by great minds and the important endless revolution”
So it happened that Russians invented polite inversions to speak truth while living under fatuous morons.
In Red ‘Merka there is not Stalin but similar confusions of self interest and logic by oligarchy and their servants. A good example is the term “global warming” being too stressful for elites with investments. So media can only say “climate change” as it gets hotter. And yet not all of us have stopped measuring the weather.
Red ‘Merka is a land of proud rhetorical freedoms, a supreme bully pulpit and the most expensive captured democracy untaxed dollars can buy. There are likely many more parallels ‘Merka has with Soviet Russia. So the title Soviet Realties is about exploring these contemporary analogs.
–Tim S. Brown, September 2017
Linden by Marcie Miller Gross
October 6, 2017 @ 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Mid-America Arts Alliance
Linden, a new exhibition from Kansas City artist Marcie Miller Gross, debuts as part of Every Street is Charlotte Street, celebrating twenty years of partner organization Charlotte Street Foundation’s Award Fellows. It will open for First Friday on October 6 from 6–8:00 p.m. at Mid-America Arts Alliance, 2018 Baltimore Ave in Kansas City, Missouri. It will be open again for First Friday on November 3, with other public viewings by appointment through November 3.
Through an incremental means of building, Miller Gross, a Charlotte Street Fellow in 2004, studies repetition, mass and void, physicality and weight, compression and release. Her work is informed by repetitious activity and simple gestures of the hand, as in folding, stacking, and cutting. Linden is inspired partially by a recent residency to Berlin. Says Miller Gross, “my focus on the city led me to draw connections between the powerful sites of the Berlin Wall Memorial, the Chapel of Reconciliation, and the history and significance of trees and forests in Germany. In this urban context, I found the lushness of the lindens, from darkness to sublime, profound in their sense of hope. The trees buffer, envelop, shelter, offering repose and sanctuary, in their verdant loft. The lindens were a looming protection and a timeless witness to the city’s ghosts.” This residency was supported in part by an Inspiration Grant from ArtsKC.
Every Street is Charlotte Street is a cross-platform program featuring twenty years of Charlotte Street Award Fellows. Twenty partners in total across the metro Kansas City area are joining with Charlotte Street to celebrate this unrestricted cash award for artists, and the over 100 artists who have received it.
Caitlin Cartwright
October 5, 2017 – October 6, 2017
Leedy-Voulkos Art Center
Opening to the public October 6, 2017, for First Friday.
Caitlin Cartwright is a painter and social change artist. She has spent several years living and working abroad in Madagascar, Namibia, and India. Ms. Cartwright has her BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art and recently earned her Masters degree in Sustainable International Development. She uses art as a tool for economic empowerment, peace-building, and healing and wellness. Her combination painting-drawing-collages are vibrant and visual narratives. Her works have been shown both nationally and internationally.
Ms. Cartwright designed The Nambula Girls Club, an afterschool club that she designed as a Peace Corps volunteer with a Namibian colleague, that seeks to help fill the void caused by many of the area’s inherent hardships. The club focuses on academic and health education to help young teen girls visualize and achieve a positive future. Despite their severe resource limitations, the girls applied entrepreneurship and teamwork by transforming a bag of candy into revenue to establish a small business in 2009. The Namibian girls gathered recycled materials to make baskets to sell, as it is traditional for mothers to teach basket making to their daughters.
Through Ms. Cartwright’s work, a valuable cultural skill is being preserved. The baskets were sold through informal networks that ultimately reached throughout the country and were taken to the U.S. Girls Club members began taking photos of their classmates and community members, which similarly inspired a new “line” as the girls learned the magic of capturing experience, taking portraits, and building community exchange.
Additionally, Ms. Cartwright conducted her professional practicum with the House of Mangaldas Girhardas Hotel in Ahmedabad, India, working with artisans from January to April 2013. The goal was to document artisan’s stories and share them on a new, technologically innovative and far-reaching platform. She went to artisan’s homes and sat with them and their families, learned about their lives and their craft and photographed, filmed and interviewed members of the community who graciously shared their story with Ms. Cartwright for the first time, in their own words. Ms. Cartwright then created a website which became content for QR (Quick Response) coding. The QR codes were attached to the artisan’s products and visitors of the hotel could scan these codes with their mobile devices and immediately be connected to a holistic look at the story of the person responsible for such beautiful craft. This technology allowed visitors to take the stories with them and share them back home and put artisan stories and experiences on an unprecedented platform for sharing.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
October 1, 2017 – October 31, 2017
Jones Gallery
A series of original paintings by Michael Young
Opening Reception: 5-9PM, October 6, 2017
structure
October 6, 2017 – November 24, 2017 | Free
studios.gallery
The Studios Inc Exhibition Space is pleased to present structure, an exhibition featuring current and past resident artists Jill Downen, Tanya Hartman, Jarrett Mellenbruch, Dylan Mortimer, Brett Reif, Colby K Smith and Gerry Trilling. Exhibit on view from 10.06.17 to 11.24.17 with an opening reception Friday, 10.06.17 from 5:00 – 9:00 PM.
studios.gallery is the one-stop shop for KC’s greatest artists. The gallery hosts a large and varied collection of work donated by artists from our Residency Program. studios.gallery is an exhibition space and art lending
program included in the Studios Inc non-profit organization. The studios.gallery exhibit rotates four times a year which allows fresh new works to be displayed from Kansas City’s most prominent artist. Proceeds generated from sales through studios.gallery are used towards funding of Studios Inc programs.
FIRST FRIDAYS AT 18TH & VINE
October 6, 2017 @ 4:00 pm – 10:00 pm
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, and Vine Street Studio, and dance at Kansas City Friends of Alvin Ailey or our own Steppin’ on the Vine. In the Spring, Summer, and Fall, enjoy First Fridays between Vine and Woodland with outdoor jazz, blues, and neo-soul. by In January, First Friday moves into the Gem Theater and the Lincoln Building at 18th & Vine to keep First Fridays hot even if the weather is cool.
Helix Presents Kansas City Friends of Alvin Ailey
October 6, 2017 @ 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
Helix Architecture
We’re excited to be partnering with Helix Architecture, 1629 Walnut Street, for a fun First Friday. Helix has generously offered their beautiful space to host KCFAA for food, drink, and a presentation of AileyCamp the Group.
From 6:00 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., we’ll be living it up in the Crossroads with Helix. If you plan to come, please RSVP to help us plan enough refreshments for everyone!
Back at 18th & Vine, we’ll still be offering our regular First Friday FREE hip-hop classes at 5:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m., taught by D’Eirre Jackson in our studio.
Then, from 7:30 p.m.-8:00 p.m. you can join us and De Barker (Kansas City’s Queen of Line Dance” on 18th Street between Highland and Vine for an explosion of dance. Learn some of the classics and what’s new in Line Dance!
THE OUTWIN: AMERICAN PORTRAITURE TODAY
October 5, 2017 – January 7, 2018
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art is honored to be the only Midwest venue to host The Outwin: American Portraiture Today, an exhibition on view at Kemper Museum October 5, 2017 through January 7, 2018. Every three years, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery invites artists across America to investigate the art of portraiture through the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. Established in 2006, it is the premier national competition celebrating excellence and innovation in portraiture.
Jurors of the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition selected 43 winning works from more than 2,500 entries. The featured artists tackle topics of pertinent cultural and political significance, including investigations of race and gender, the fragility of childhood in our increasingly complicated world, and the psychological impact of migration.
Jump’in Down Route 66
October 6, 2017 @ 8:00 pm
Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts
Let The Good Times Roll down the highway with jumping rhythm-and-blues classics from Louis Jordan, Nat King Cole, Ray Charles, and more!
SUNDAY…
THE BOSTON EARLY MUSIC FESTIVAL CHAMBER ENSEMBLE
October 8, 2017 @ 2:30 pm
Folly Theater
Pre-concert lecture • 1:30pm
A conversation with Stephen Stubbs and Paul O’Dette, co-artistic directors of the Boston Early Music Festival
Co-artistic directors Stephen Stubbs and Paul O’dette unite an all-star roster of musicians from the Boston Early Music Festival–the largest and among the most important festivals of its kind. An ensemble of six instrumentalists and four singers performs an enchanting selection from the chamber duets of Agostino Steffani punctuated with instrumental interludes. Considered his crowning achievements by his contemporaries–as well as the composer himself–Steffani’s duets became a model of contrapuntal writing for later composers, including George Frideric Handel and Johann Sebastian Bach.
Annual Lerner Hauskonzert
October 8, 2017 @ 7:30 pm
The Home of Leslie Bowles Lerner
Women Power – an all female composer program including internationally renowned-KC composer Chen Yi, Anna Magdalena Bach, Amy Beach, Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre, Barbara Strozzi and much more!
