Tiffany Meesha Thompson, whose public-art consulting business, Petrichor Projects, was engaged by the city to help bring a new look and a long-term solution to the park (photo by Jim Barcus)
The Barney Allis Plaza, a park above a city parking garage, has been a downtown dead zone for decades. An occasional oasis for gatherings and photo shoots, the square block has been an underachieving segment of the streetscape even despite occasional efforts to redesign, rebuild and make it more attractive. A north-edge fountain along 12th Street, a pop-upped pergola and other efforts to enhance its elusive accessibility have forever failed to give the park sustainable life.
Now, in the rubble of another demolition and reconstruction project, it might be possible to see a more enticing future.
That’s certainly how Tiffany Meesha Thompson envisions it. Thompson, via her public-art consulting business, Petrichor Projects, was engaged by the city to help bring a new look and a long-term solution to the park’s identity. The city is taking another swing at Allis Plaza as part of a major repair to the Municipal Parking Garage. As an architectural team headed by HOK and contractor McCown Gordon Construction works to redesign Allis Plaza, Thompson’s role has been to incorporate a public-art element that could take the park to new heights.
Thompson started out by working to break the rules. Historically the Municipal Art Commission was charged with requesting and selecting successful proposals under the city’s One Percent for Art program. That policy devotes a designated slice of every city-funded building project for a public sculpture or artwork. Witness, for example, the art-filled KCI Airport terminal.
Thompson, in consultation with James Martin, the city’s public art administrator, successfully negotiated a plan to bring in a team of curatorial advisors who could help extend the pool of potential artists to major figures from around the globe. Together they hoped to attract proposals that would result in something bigger than, say, a single piece of art plopped onto the site’s hardscape. The idea is to turn Allis Plaza into a cultural landmark that also has potential to generate economic development.
The advisers, including curators at the Nelson-Atkins, Kemper and Nerman museums, wound up considering more than 251 artists and studios who had responded to a formal request for qualifications, a typical step that precedes design concepts.
The response to the call reflects how much Kansas City’s identity has risen as a place where culture is taken seriously, Thompson says.
What Thompson and the curatorial advisers hoped to achieve instead were artistic schemes that could be integrated into the overall redesign. Interactivity, delight and inherent magnetism were on their mind — think of the plaza that contains Anish Kapoor’s mirror-surfaced “Cloud Gate” (or “The Bean”) at Chicago’s Millennium Park. The budget is projected at a minimum of $2.18 million with expectations that additional private dollars might be raised to support an ambitious plan if necessary.
Interesting that this comes at a time when a plan to create the erstwhile South Loop Park (now renamed after former Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt), just two blocks to the south, apparently has de-emphasized a public-art component.
Thompson’s principal role in the process extends from a career of more than two decades of art consulting, planning, teaching and curating. She has worked in Kansas City, where she curates exhibitions at the gallery space within the Crossroads Hotel, and far beyond. Recent collaborations with architectural firms, such as El Dorado, and others have resulted in a public art project in Minneapolis and the creation of a sprawling cultural space in a desert landscape in Saudi Arabia. The Kansas City project is akin to her work with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Houston, which she challenged to think about “how to curate beyond the gallery walls and into the public realm.”
In April the city and Petrichor announced a short list of seven finalists, each of whom received a stipend to develop design proposals. The finalists included such well-known multi-genre, American art-world stars as Ghada Amer, Sanford Biggers and Hugh Hayden. Among the international artists on the short list are an art and architectural studio from Belgium and a Canadian team, Daily Tous Les Jours, which specializes in animating public spaces.
A winning proposal was expected to be announced this summer, probably as this edition of the magazine was going to press.
This piece of long-underused prime real estate is surrounded by hotels, the Kansas City Convention Center office buildings, the Folly Theater and Municipal Auditorium.
“Barney Allis Plaza is one of the most visible civic spaces in our downtown, and we see this project as an opportunity to reflect who we are and what we value as a city,” James Martin told me. “Through bold, site-wide public art and an open, inclusive process, we’re hoping to create a space that’s both beautiful and deeply meaningful — one that feels alive with history, creativity, and community. Our goal is to make the plaza not just a place you pass through, but a place you want to be.”
As the demolition, reconstruction and proposed public-design project continue, we can only imagine, for now, how a new, inventive vision for this core city block might serve to complement, energize and knit together the street life that the beating heart of downtown Kansas City so urgently needs.
THREE THINGS
The writer Gillian Flynn, Kansas City’s gift to the world of noir thrillers on page and screen (“Gone Girl,” “Dark Places” and more), has a new venture. It’s her own imprint, Gillian Flynn Books, within the Zando publishing house. This spring she threw a celebratory launch party in a swanky New York event space, which counted your correspondent among the attendees. Her roster of female authors has so far produced true-crime-inspired novels, horror fiction, a nonfiction narrative (Stacy Horn’s terrific and disturbing “The Killing Fields of East New York”), and a series of novels by Margot Douaihy about an amateur sleuth, Sister Holiday, who happens to be a “chain smoking, heavily-tattooed queer nun.” No word yet on when Flynn, who proudly represented her Midwestern roots that night, might return with her own new book.
Another creative former Kansas Citian was the late movie actor and director Dennis Hopper (1936-2010), a onetime student at the Kansas City Art Institute whose career included such cultural mileposts as “Easy Rider” and “Apocalypse Now.” My radar made a wonky blip when it encountered a new recording project, “Life, Death and Dennis Hopper.” It’s by the Waterboys, a long-running, punk-spawned U.K. band led by Mike Scott, now of Dublin. The first track on the disc evokes Hopper’s native state, “Kansas” — he was born in Dodge City — with a sense of dreamy longing captured in the one-off vocals by Steve Earle — “you can rely on me, Kansas, to kiss your ass goodbye.” (Fiona Apple and Bruce Springsteen also make cameos on the record.) Scott’s 20 songs, plus five instrumentals, reflect a spectrum of American literary, artistic and musical experiences from Hopper’s era. “It’s not just Dennis’s story,” Scott told The New York Times. “It’s a story of the times.” Worth repeated listening. And see Scott’s promotional documentary about the project here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mM0RngKHIs.
My late-life, fan-boy obsession with Bob Dylan in these pages might feel like a broken record. Or maybe it’s a rolling stone. But here’s more: Along with hearing another one of his Rough and Rowdy Ways concerts in Tulsa earlier this year and a plan to catch Dylan (who turned 84 as I am writing this) and 92-year-old Willie Nelson in their Outlaw tour later this summer, I’ll be making a return engagement to the biennial World of Bob Dylan symposium in Tulsa in late July. This is a largely academic conference and gathering of a wide range of Dylanologists, put on by the Institute of Bob Dylan Studies at the University of Tulsa. I’ll be presenting a paper exploring an under-recognized connection between the Nobel Laureate poet and the great American song-stylist Billie Holiday. A Tulsa bonus: The Bob Dylan Center, unrelated to the university, will be opening a new exhibit that week on the dawn of Dylan’s electric era, the one depicted in “A Complete Unknown.” Stay tuned. And stay forever young.
