REVIEW

Head downtown — KCMO and KCK — for art Friday night

Jacob Weller, from "A Future Life of Giants," opening July 10 at The Mercy Seat Gallery (belated because of Independence Day holiday). Weller is a graduate of UMKC, with degrees in art history and history, whose work explores the notion of Epic memory and the cultural practice of summoning ancestral knowledge. "Depictions of nature and the divine are the oldest form of art. A return to the classical past historically occurs when the modern age is plagued by wars and a lack of reason.… The totemic portraits by Weller are amalgations of visual images from various cultures, most noteably Central American and Hawai'i. The art movements which inform this body of work are Art Nouveau, Renaissance, early American Ethnography, and American Graffitti." Image and quoted text: courtesy of the gallery

Tonight is Kansas City, Kansas’ Second Friday Art Walk, and across the river is the much-anticipated annual Kansas City Artists Coalition River Market Exhibition.  Second Saturday tours are on with the Crossroads Community Association, and we have included a preview of Third Friday openings as well.

Check the regular listings for continuing exhibitions all over town, including upcoming closings (Regina Benson’s On the Curve work closes at the Byron Cohen tomorrow, for example; Jerry Bleem’s Repeated Gestures closes next Saturday at Leedy-Voulkos; on the 17th, the student exhibition at the UMKC Gallery closes, as do exhibitions at the Lawrence Arts Center (Jim Brothers and Louis Copt) and Lawrence Percolator.

Click ‘read more’ to see what to do and where to go this week for contemporary visual art.

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Crossroads takes no major holiday July 3

Marcus Cain, "Skin of Self Reflection," mixed media, 12" x 12", is one of the new works in "Soft Bones," opening July 3 at Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art, along with two other solo exhibitions by Jerry Kunkel and Michael Brisson. Cain is known for his patterned paintings but has changed course in his work to produce something he characterizes as a shift in polarities. He says, "What was once hard is now soft; pure color has turned muted; negative space has become positive; and specificity has given way to chance. The distance between drawing and painting has blurred, as lines give way to drips, and edges begin to bleed and fade." Read more about his work at the gallery site or PresentMagazine.com, which has a new article about this exhibition. Image: E.G. Schempf photo, courtesy of the gallery; quoted text courtesy of gallery.

Of course there are some galleries taking a summer break coinciding with the Independence Day weekend (such as the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art’s two main spaces), but remarkably there are a number of Crossroads-area spaces hosting new exhibitions and a handful of others open for First Friday with ongoing exhibitions — like the Surface Design work at the Belger Arts Center, which is not to be missed, or the large-scale striking paintings by Deng Wushu at Byron Cohen. Some have both, such as the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center, with new work by Eric Swangstu and continuing shows by Mary Beth Yates, Leslee Nelson and Jerry Bleem. New work is up at Pi, Plenum, Cocoon, INKubator Press, Blue, Hilliard (to name a few), and at Third Eye and Keyhole, collaboration is highlighted as artists show how their ideas and work develop when thinking together.

It’s also Art Bidz time (with special holiday hours), and there is a new group exhibition opening on Sunday at the Kansas City Jewish Museum. A photography exhibition opens July 5 at the Kansas City Public Library Central branch, and a two-person show starts that night in Lawrence, Kansas, too. Wonder Fair has a one-night event on Monday the 6th, as well.

Celebrate our collective freedom by scanning through the full list below (click ‘read more’). You can also sign up to receive our weekly calendar digests in your inbox — complete with additional images and information (click ‘Stay Informed’ at the left).

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Things will be great for visual arts when you’re downtown

"Information is Incidental" by Kansas City-based Emily Sall and Austin, Texas-based Rebecca Ward, opens tonight at Paragraph from 6 to 9 p.m. The exhibition incluces new paintings by Sall, installation-based work by Ward and a collaborative installation by the two (who had not met). They will talk about their work, which shares a number of characteristics, at 6 p.m. Image: courtesy of Charlotte Street Foundation

Third Fridays’ visual arts in Kansas City, Missouri, are generally focused between Fifth and 20th streets. There is new work at the Urban Culture Project’s spaces and at the Trap Gallery (part of Art in Columbus Park gallery crawl) — and even as south as 47th Street at the Gap retail store on the Country Club Plaza, where from through Sunday, local artists (Audrey Barnhart, Samantha Brunson, Megan Channell, Robert Henry, Colleen Maynard, Chad C McCurdy, Matthew B. Potter, Paul Shortt, Thompson, and Landon Vonderschmidt) are supporting the HALO Artreach program.

Friday kicks off the second annual Kansas City Chalk & Walk Festival, too, which continues at Crown Center Square through Saturday. Click to read more about other family-friendly visual art events, as well as plenty of exhibitions that are entering their final week of showing. We’ve even included a preview of some openings and events starting next Friday.

Don’t forget that the Jerome Nerman Lecture Series at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art is on Monday, June 22 with Do Ho Suh. And, though it’s not strictly visual art-related, earlier on Monday, the Charlotte Street Foundation is holding an informational meeting for its new studio space residency program for performing artists (application due July 10 – learn more here).

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Street fest meets art walk in KCK; openings and closings in KCMO tonight

This "Violet" work is by Lawrence, Kansas, artist Nancy Loo Bjorge, who was born in Shanghai and raised in Hong Kong; her work, along with a collaborative multi-media video with Jim Jewel and Marty Olson, opens June 12 at the 6th Street Gallery of the YWCA of Greater Kansas City, which is celebrating Chinese culture with this month's exhibitions. Also at the gallery, a traveling international exhibition that portrays "how Falun Dafa practitioners have met the persecution with uncompromising courage, responding to hatred, torture, and murder with a spirit of great compassion and forbearance in order to uphold justice, freedom, dignity and humanity." Image and quoted text: courtesy of gallery

Click ‘read more’ to start planning your contemporary visual art experiences for June 12 through 18. Kansas City, Kansas’ usual Second Friday Art Walk has extended hours as part of the Downtown KCK Street Festival, which includes music and performances. More details, including a map of participating galleries and venues, are on the KCK Arts Network site here.

New work opens at the Albrecht-Kemper in St. Joseph, Missouri, the MCC Longview gallery in Lee’s Summit, and at Grand Arts and the Frame Gallery in Kansas City, Missouri. Cara and Cabezas Contemporary and the Kansas City Artists Coalition are hosting last-chance receptions, and Saturday has a number of one-time visual arts opportunities, too.

Finally, last night opened the Smoky Hill River Festival, a celebration of the arts that lasts all weekend in Oakdale Park in Salina, Kansas, and includes music, children’s art and entertainment, a fine arts fair (where at least one Kansas City artist, Laura Nugent, has a booth again this year), the Four Rivers Crafts Market, and many colorful and interactive installations by “Artists in Action” – many from the Kansas City metro area, including Juniper Tangpuz, Matthew Dehaemers and Gear, and other well-known regional artists like Stan Herd, Colin Benson, Jason Peters, and Elizabeth Stevenson.

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Thursday events (2) reminder, June 11

Arts Council of Metropolitan Kansas City
906 Grand Avenue
Kansas City, Missouri
816-994-9226
Monday-Friday, 9 a.m.-4:30 p.m.

Unveiling of the 2009 ArtsKC Fund Campaign Results
Reception: June 11, 5:30 p.m., with program and performance by Octarium at 6 p.m., both at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art at Johnson County Community College. Please RSVP to Liz Albers at 816-994-9223 or by e-mail.

Korruption
1717 West Ninth Street
Kansas City, Missouri
816-842-1078
*Please note: 12th Street Bridge closed for repairs through summer 2009; detour signs are posted, but click for more information.

Last Man of Idaho
Screening of new film by Ascot J. Smith, including a silent auction of art from the film, merchandise from B-Bop Comics and a multitude of potato-themed appetizers. Tickets are $5 at the door (event is for those age 21 and over). More information here.
June 11, 7 p.m.

June swoon: fashion show, block party and all the rest in Crossroads and Lawrence

Most photographs do not do most visual art justice. One of the hardest things about First Friday — any Friday — in Kansas City is choosing which one-night-only events and exhibitions to visit. This installation by Minh Pham is at Red Door Gallery at 18th and Walnut tonight and deserves attention. "Reciprocity" is made of black string pinned to floor, wall and ceiling surfaces in the second-floor room, with white thread woven intuitively throughout. It transforms the three-dimensional space into a sort of hyperspace, says Pham. He explains: "The black and white strings represent the constant push and pull of all things, the yin and yang. There is no good without bad, no order without chaos … everything exists in a constant flow of reciprocity. Space without the chaotic movement of light is empty and lifeless. Light without the order and structure of space is meaningless. In making this piece, I allowed my intuitive mind to compose string into a static picture of the cosmos, and yet, my mind is theoretically a manifestation of the cosmos. What happens to one without the other? Can they even be separated out?" Image and text: Dusty Fann photo, courtesy of the artist

Most Surface Design Association Conference exhibitions for Off the Grid are continuing, with galleries in the Crossroads opening their doors as usual for First Friday; other exhibitions continue — Leedy-Voulkos, Byron Cohen, Sherry Leedy, Base, Mattie Rhodes, Beggar’s Table, Mojo, Pi, etc. — and at Kemper in the Crossroads and the Kansas City Art Institute galleries, new work opens tonight. New work is also at Buttonwood in Midtown, Red Star Studios, Eljay’s in the City Market, Late Show, Landon, Digital Labrador, Momentum, Third Eye (and others; please read below).

One-time events tonight include the annual Westside Block Party at la Esquina, an architect-selection and new space announcement by the AIA-KC, an exhibition of work by Alex Hamil at Nara restaurant’s event space, and demonstrations at the INKubator Press, where you can also enroll in summer classes.

Saturday is the ninth annual West 18th Street Fashion Show on the 100-block of West 18th starting at 8 p.m. (Summer in Space, listed under birdie’s), and second Saturdays are also when Art Bidz hosts its monthly auction. Don’t forget the Kansas City Art Institute’s Art and Design Auction tomorrow night, too.

Next Thursday, the Arts Council of Metropolitan Kansas City announces the results of the 2009 ArtsKC Fund campaign with a performance by one of the fund’s beneficiaries; that night another ArtsKC Fund grant recipient, Ascot J. Smith, screens his new film, Last Man of Idaho. The list is long, and we’ve included a few exhibitions that are closing soon, as usual. Click ‘read more’ for the listings and more images.

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Surface Design Association conference exhibitions and more

"Girl Country" by Brooke Letourneau is part of her "Accumulation" exhibition, tonight only at the Barbershop Gallery in Midtown Kansas City, Missouri, from 6 to 9 p.m. and featuring traditional and digital photography, along with a variety of mixed-media artwork produced during the artist's studies at Pittsburg State University. Image: courtesy of the gallery

The Surface Design Association (founded in 1977 after an initial conference at the University of Kansas the previous year) has about 4,000 members all over the world and once again is bringing its semi-annual conference to Kansas City, Missouri. Some exhibitions are already open, and many are hosting special hours today and Sunday. The SDA’s gallery guide for the conference is here, with images of some of the work and descriptions of featured artists. Review’s calendar below lists SDA and other fiber-related exhibitions on view currently, as well as other Fifth Friday openings, receptions and one-time events. A list of exhibitions closing soon is also included as usual.

In addition to numerous exhibitions, the SDA conference this year, Off the Grid, includes a trunk show and a vendor fair, both at the Marriott Country Club Plaza, 4445 Main Street, Kansas City, Missouri. The trunk show is like a textiles-version of a fine arts fair and features national and international artists who are selling their own hand-dyed clothing, scarves, fabric and art, Friday, May 29 from 6 to 9 p.m. Combined with the vendor fair, which runs May 29 from 8:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. and from 6 to 9 p.m.; May 30 from 8:20 a.m. to 6 p.m., and May 31, from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., there will be about 65 different artists. Learn more at www.surfacedesign.org, and click ‘read more’ to see full calendar listings.

Tonight is also Final Friday in Wichita, Kansas, with the ribbon-cutting for this year’s Sculpture WalkAbout taking place at 6 p.m. on Mosley Street (across from Hotel Old Town) and numerous galleries, such as Fisch Haus, Commerce Gallery, and CityArts open late and hosting receptions.

In the Kansas City metro area, the Prairie Village Art Fair hosts more than 60 artists displaying work for sale at 71st Street and Mission Road, today from 5 to 9 p.m., tomorrow from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

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