KC Studio

In Memoriam | James Brinsfield, one of Kansas City’s leading abstract painters, died Sept. 21, 2024, at the age of 77, with his partner Alice Thorson at his side. Brinsfield’s illustrious career spanned more than four decades, beginning in Chicago in the early 1980s. In 2011-12, the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art presented a survey of Brinsfield’s paintings from 2007 to 2011. His work was featured in dozens of group exhibitions, both in commercial galleries, nonprofit art spaces, and museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Milwaukee Art Museum, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art. Brinsfield’s art garnered reviews in Art in America, New Art Examiner, ART PAPERS, The Washington Post and The Kansas City Star, among other publications, and entered the permanent collections of the Rockford Art Museum, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, and The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, as well as numerous private and corporate collections. In 1997, he was the first Kansas City painter to receive a Charlotte Street grant. Brinsfield was also a writer, curator and teacher. He wrote music and book reviews and articles on music and art for the Kansas City Star and KC Studio. He curated exhibitions of Kansas City artists and taught as a lecturer at the Kansas City Art Institute from 1998 to 2016. Read more about his life and work at https://lnkd.in/ginCWXWp #kansascity #kansascityart #artists #artwriters

Dolls have been around for centuries, the earliest ones dating from 2,000 to 3,000 B.C. Throughout history, they’ve changed drastically, mimicking the time periods of the people who make them. The The National Museum of Toys and Miniatures wants to shed light on the dolls of Black children and bring forth their little-known history. The exhibit “Portraits of Childhood: Black Dolls from the Collection of Deborah Neff” takes an important step in this direction through its display of 135 handmade Black dolls dating from 1850 to 1940, as well as dolls from the 21st century and ambitious accompanying programs. Read more at https://lnkd.in/gCij3vHP #museums #africanamericanhistory

Read the October edition of KC Studio's Monthly Arts Brief, featuring cultural arts updates from the Sep/Oct 2024 magazine. #artsmagazines #culturalarts #residentartists #artsgrants

Visual Art Review by Emily Spradling | A piece of fabric can have many lives — strewn about our homes, on streets, in store fronts. But for every wearable item, there are also leftovers and scraps that can either be discarded or repurposed. Fashion designer, fine artist and educator Hadley Clark knows much about the varied and often wasteful lifecycle of garments. In her first solo exhibition of sculptural garments, “I Made This for You and Me” at University of Missouri-Kansas City Gallery of Art, Clark utilizes remnants and repurposed materials to reframe garments as domestic items, like curtains, tablecloths and wall hangings. Read more at https://lnkd.in/gx__6kvA

“Material World,” on display at the Artspace, is a cohesive foray into ecological art that goes outside the studio to find its ecology... In line with the Artspace’s connection to the Kansas City Art Institute and its social practice program, “Material World” is consistently participatory, a fully enmeshed ecology of theory, action and worldly beings. At a basic level, this exhibition lets its materials take the fore... For instance, Elaine Buss's “Lebenswelt” encourages visitors to touch, modify, add to and take from its roomful of carefully arranged found-and-foraged materials. Other artists like Cydney Ross paint using soils as naturally occurring pigments; Karen McCoy even uses her own body to create a soil-based human figure on paper. The materials say: art exceeds the human. Read more of this visual art review by Brandan Griffin at https://lnkd.in/gB86baBb #artgalleries #artschool #kansascity #kansascityartists

Not long ago, Ernie Nolan, the Unicorn Theatre’s new artistic director, posted a video on the Unicorn website to introduce himself to the community at large as well as to Unicorn patrons. “Hello, everyone, I’m Ernie Nolan and I am thrilled and honored to say that I am the next artistic director of the Unicorn Theatre,” said Nolan, who seemed to personify the phrase “bursting with enthusiasm.” Read more at https://lnkd.in/dP7gqUTQ #kansascity #theatre #performingarts #artisticdirector

The story of the Marshallese diaspora is still largely unknown to most Americans despite the efforts of Lawrence Sumulong, a Brooklyn, New York-based photographer, whose collection of photos of the Marshallese can now be found in the University of Arkansas Library’s Special Collections. The story will be told, again, at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art beginning Oct. 19.

Keep up with the cultural arts scene in #KansasCity and the surrounding regions. Sign up for KC Studio's weekly newsletter today at https://lnkd.in/ge4ZgfaX

Anyone who has enjoyed the singular exhibitions at the Linda Hall Library over the years will be delighted to learn there will be more of them with the recent appointment of Scott Perich as the library’s first vice president of exhibitions and project management. Read more at https://lnkd.in/gJ-HmeUd

Julius A. Karash on Business and the Arts: #KansasCity, long renowned for its artistic prowess, is on the cutting edge of the art/wellness movement. “Arts and creativity are inherent in who we are, and that became more evident through COVID,” said Dana M. K., president and CEO of the ArtsKC - Regional Arts Council. “People clung to creative and artistic activity to cope with loneliness and isolation. It gave an opportunity for people to connect. I wanted to focus on how the arts benefit us.” So Knapp contacted Susan Magsamen, founder and director of the International Arts + Mind Lab, Center for Applied Neuroaesthetics, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Read more at https://lnkd.in/ghChcUAt