21c Salon, A View From Home
Five local artists in the Open Spaces Exhibition will talk about the city and the Open Spaces artworks on Thursday, Aug. 30, at 5:30 p.m. at the 21c Museum Hotel in the historic Savoy Grill Building, 219 W 9th Street, Kansas City, Missouri.
On Thursday, Aug. 30, at 5:30 p.m., the 21c Museum Hotel will host a convergence of Historic Restoration, Contemporary Art and local artists at the 21c Salon: A View From Home. Five Kansas City artists will speak about the Open Spaces Exhibition in the renovated Savoy Grill Building at 219 W 9th Street. Enjoy the art of the 21c Museum Hotel and the Open Spaces installation of Brad Kahlhamer’s extraordinary wire and bell hanging artwork.
Sydney Pener, Exhibition Workshop
Ask your teen if they’d like to cast molten metal to create their own body art. Sydney Pener’s Gravity Casting and Metalsmithing workshop makes creating adornments into serious fun. People 13 to 18 can register for the free Saturday afternoon Open Spaces workshops at openspaceskc.com/#schedule.
The Ragged Few and Jared Tyler, The Village Stage
If you like a country sound that can roll into rock, join The Ragged Few on Saturday, Sept. 1, at 2:30 p.m. in the Open Spaces Village in Swope Park! If you’re looking for a loyal, hardworking country song, you’ll love to hear Jared Tyler play from his new album at 4:30 p.m. Like all of Open Spaces, both shows are free!
Kansas City Liberation Big Band
They come together by staying outside the box. They call it Liberation. You can hear the Kansas City Liberation Big Band work the stage for Labor Day in the Open Spaces Village in Swope Park on Sunday, Sept. 2, at 4 p.m.
The Kansas City Liberation Big Band likes to set jazz free. Hear the band’s big, outside sound in the Open Spaces Village in Swope Park, Sunday, Sept. 2, at 4 p.m.
Engaging the Open Spaces Exhibition
How do you find the Open Spaces Kansas City Arts Experience? The art is spread around town.
- Go to “Plan Your Visit” at openspaceskc.com.
- Download the Festival Program.
- Choose artworks, using the neighborhood maps.
- Visit them!
The Village, Weekend of 9/1 and 9/2
Each weekend, the Open Spaces Village welcomes a fresh array of artists and musicians for you to discover for free! This weekend, enjoy the excitement of Cuban Rumba music, take a Sound and Sight Walk in the woods with artist Karen McCoy or bring the kids to a workshop for decorating Mexican sugar skulls. Find these and more Open Spaces events under Plan Your Visit, at openspaceskc.com.
Triangle Learning Programs for Open Spaces
Open Spaces offers workshops in contemporary art! Led by teaching artists, the Triangle Learning series explores Open Spaces artworks through discussion and activities ranging from writing poetry to interpretive movement to multimedia collage. All are welcome, and registration is FREE. Find the workshops at openspaceskc.com/education.
Open Spaces workshops in contemporary art are called Triangle Learning Programs: Find them and register at com/education. Space is limited.
Exploring Open Spaces
Jill Downen’s Folly from a Future Place and Michael Schonhoff’s Deep States
One of the pleasures of exploring Open Spaces is drawing lines between its exhibition artworks. For instance, from Westwood Park on 47th and State Line to a little roadside clearing just off Swope Park’s Golf Drive, a line can be drawn between Michael Schonhoff’s sculpture, Deep States, and Jill Downen’s installation, An Architectural Folly from a Future Place. Take a surprising, new perspective on the boundaries of Missouri and Kansas in Schonhoff’s shimmering sculpture, and then consider what a political boundary means as you drive up State Line Road to Gregory Boulevard. Take Gregory across town to Golf Drive and sit a while on Downen’s wall, a boundary intentionally broken in the middle, which invites you to consider how lines and boundaries define our movements, memories and thoughts. The meanings of these formally profound artworks will extend to the city map between them, and into your imagination as an explorer of Open Spaces.
Three Open Spaces artworks on UMKC’s campus
As young people return to studies on UMKC’s campus, they’ll do well to know that three new artworks have arrived there for the Open Spaces Kansas City Arts Experience, and all three grapple with the weight young people carry in order to know their worlds. Randy Regier’s Dreams of Flight, installed in the Toy Museum, recreates the environment of child’s play in the era of the Cold War. His work explores how fear can deliver prejudice into young minds in the forms of toys and commercial advertisement. In the Art Gallery, Federico Solmi’s video installation, The Great Farce, enters the fantasy space of video games to explore how social investment in consumerism and high-tech media create corruption and hypocrisy. Flávio Cerqueira’s Any Word Except Wait, installed in front of the Fine Arts Building, recreates the experience of intellectual perseverance in our age, when many young people, deprived of social power, must persist to learn and to deliver what they know, in atmospheres of fear and prejudice against them. Regier’s work, which spans dozens of objects at three Open Spaces sites, creates a labyrinth between fact and fiction, one that young learners will do well to remember. Solmi’s 9-channel video opus studies the powers that confusingly orchestrate images around us, making knowledge evasive and strange. Cerqueira’s single figure in bronze stands to honor a steady commitment to knowledge despite the many burdens of social reality.
Open Spaces Vignettes
Weird stones near Swope Park’s Limestone Glade Trail: Shawn Bitters’ Burn Out
Open Spaces artist Shawn Bitters reminds us that the mouths of volcanoes . . . are mouths. When volcanoes sent up magma tens of millions of years ago, rocks formed in mid-air. Bitters finds these specimens in museums, and he photographs them. He compares their forms to human language, imagining their shapes to be signs, or even statements, made through a mouth of the Earth. Fascinated with the human desire to make stories about nature, the Kansas University art professor and printmaker has forged a unique connection between the wild past of the planet and human language.
The artist asks his photographed rocks why they seem to be telling a story. Is it the way their shapes still show signs of the force that threw them through a long-ago sky? To increase that sense of intention or meaning in the displaced, misplaced, photographed rocks, he screen-prints bright colors onto their pictures and calls these re-prints “weird stones.” They look like mysterious symbols. This art puts Bitters in an unusual place between the planet’s distant, physical past and the present age, dominated by abstract human codes. Open Spaces has given Shawn Bitters the chance to explore his rare artistic vantage between nature and culture, and then leap from it in the direction of the wilderness: For his new work, he has printed 30 of his photo-screen-prints onto metal surfaces, which gives the stones the strength they need to make their return to nature.
Shawn Bitters says, “I’m a printmaker, a paper guy.” But in Burn Out, he appears to have left the age of paper and headed into geological time. At the head of Swope Park’s Limestone Glade Trail, Open Spaces visitors enjoying the colors of a fall day will come upon Shawn Bitters’ 2-D, brightly colored rocks. Some people might figure out the story encoded on their surfaces or sense that the weird stones call up volcanic voices. But the artist expects many will come away with their own stories to tell about a wild space in Kansas City.
Jill Downen’s An Architectural Folly from a Future Place invites you to join in its artistic project.
The Thomas H. Swope Memorial, built in 1918, uses the lessons of Romantic landscape architecture to capture its Kansas City environment and set it in memory. It ushers us to a rich vista over parkland and it comments on our city’s good fortune. Open Spaces Exhibition artist Jill Downen has honored the memorial’s historic and artistic effect and added an important dimension of insight in a space just beyond it, with An Architectural Folly from a Future Place. Downen’s luminous, white concrete wall, caringly sited near the steps to Swope Memorial, invites rest and reflection while coaxing us onward, toward “a future place.”
The idea of a folly is to serve artistic rather than practical purposes, but Downen’s folly outdoes that definition. Its artistic statement includes an invitation to use it. The form of this folly invites us to survey where we are and imagine where we might be. So, to the romantic memorial of Kansas City’s past, Downen has added an open inquiry on our future. It is a fragment — a low wall with a piece missing from the middle, angled at one end. We think of fragments as statements about the past, outcomes of breakage. But this gem of formal insight shores up what seems broken and moves ahead from what is incomplete, while asking us to join in its sense of the future.
The width and height of the wall make it a good bench. Resting on it, we relax on a threshold of city and forest, a quiet roadside spot between a busy clubhouse, the woods’ edge and the steps to Swope Memorial. Sitting on or walking around it, we find that this angular chunk of concrete has a remarkable tenderness. Its wide, white surfaces are soft to both eye and hand. Its edges draw angles around our perspective as if we had entered into the shapes and shadings of a geometric painting. Downen has inlaid a half-inch wide, elegant line of blue stone in the wall, providing a smooth, steady horizon. Fingers might be inclined to trace the polished line, which seems to guide passage forward. Passage is also encouraged by the fissure in the wall, an opening just fit for stepping through. An Architectural Folly from a Future Place is a meditation of its own, but not exactly a folly without practical purpose: for the period of our Open Spaces art exhibition, it gives us a place to rest, reflect and move beyond where we are as individuals and as a city.
