HSS..to be used by another artist, this time in Kansas City in a public display
Ambitious Avenue of the Arts
This year's planned installations include sound and a lot of fabric
By AlICE THORSON
The Kansas City Star
Downtown Central Street this summer will offer moments of brightness, humor, deception, critical inquiry and other close encounters of the unexpected kind, courtesy of the 2004 Avenue of the Arts.
The six artists who will create temporary artworks for the annual summer display were selected in November and are refining their proposals. On balance, it's a younger group than those commissioned in the project's preceding four years.
Joining Kansas City artists Rachel Hayes, Hesse McGraw and Laura Berman on this year's roster are Maria Velasco, associate professor of art at the University of Kansas; Michael Jones McKean, a peripatetic artist who is currently in residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, Neb.; and Baldwin, Kan.-based Mark Cowardin.
Their artistic vocabularies are quite different, but the proposals share a conceptual bent and an emphasis on experience over objects.
Velasco, for instance, will create a stereoscopic tourist telescope, through which viewers will see a recorded image videotaped by the artist -- instead of the actual view ahead. The piece is planned for 10th and Central streets.
McGraw, who graduated from KU in May 2001, is devising a sound installation that will use directional speakers to add new sounds to a downtown intersection, probably at Ninth and Central streets. Since leaving Lawrence, he's been an active force in the Kansas City art scene as a curator, former senior editor of Review and director of Paragraph gallery.
According to the artist, pedestrians will enter a different sound "zone" at each of the four corners. The piece will employ Hypersonic Sound technology, invented in 2003 by the American Technology Corp., that "allows sound to be contained in a localized space.
"To my knowledge," McGraw said, "this will be the first sound installation to utilize the speakers."***note..(he's not the first, but he can think so, if he wants)***
James Martin, curator of the Sprint Art Collection, served on the seven-member artist-selection panel that awarded this year's commissions.
"This is the second year I've done it, and this time it was much more difficult to make a decision," he said. "The quality of the works submitted was very high. I think what impresses me the most is that each of these works is very urban-oriented and really takes into account the surrounding site."
Based on her proposal, expect Rachel Hayes, a 1999 graduate of the Kansas City Art Institute, to contribute this year's shot of visual razzmatazz -- commensurate with the iridescent towers created by Derek Porter Studio for the 2003 Avenue of the Arts.
Hayes, who recently completed an artist-in-residence in Roswell, N.M., will envelop the skywalk at Bartle Hall with a gigantic version of her signature vinyl and fabric abstractions -- seen recently in the Dolphin gallery north window and in a summer group show of gallery artists at Joseph Nease Gallery. She estimates that the project will take 6,000 yards of fabric, for which she is seeking donations, and require a boom-lift/crane to install.
"My idea is that people will be able to walk through the skywalk and see through my piece," Hayes said. She hopes to rig some lights inside the skywalk to illuminate the work at night.
Porter Arneill, Kansas City's public art administrator, is enthused at the ambition of the 2004 artists. "Each one of them is kind of raising their own bar," he said. As in previous years, each artist receives $4,000 to realize his or her project.
Transforming the commonplace
Mark Cowardin, who recently returned to the area from Tucson, where he earned his MFA in sculpture from the University of Arizona, will add whimsy and humor to the Avenue of the Arts with his three "illogical plumbing fixtures."
"Having lived in the desert Southwest for a few years, I was struck by what I perceived as absurdities in water usage," the artist said. "These absurdities quickly found their way into my art in the form of illogical plumbing fixtures."
Last fall Cowardin showed a pair of oversized faucets mounted on scraggly tree roots in a group show at the Bank gallery downtown. For the Avenue of the Arts, he will fabricate and install three cartoony sinks with elongated steel pipes in three vacant holes where trees used to grow on the east side of Central between 13th and 14th streets. The work, titled "Out in the Open," is part of his ongoing "Water Tower" series, which "centers around the idea of connections between humans and natural resources, with water being one of the most common themes."
Laura Berman, an instructor in the printmaking department at the Kansas City Art Institute, has been a regular exhibitor at Tim Brown's Telephonebooth Gallery on Troost since moving here from North Carolina in 2002.
"As a relatively new transplant to the Midwest," she said, "I am continually fascinated by Kansas City's historical and present roles in the formation of American culture."
Berman's piece for the Avenue of the Arts will feature giant cutout photographs of children playing cowboys and Indians and is meant, she said, "to provide metaphors for various aspects of Americana."
The artist periodically will intervene in these appropriated black and white shots, substituting color images of everyday objects for the guns and bows and arrows wielded by the children in the originals. The location under consideration is the side of the parking garage on the southwest corner of 10th and Central streets.
At the southwest corner of Barney Allis Plaza, Michael Jones McKean will install an artwork he describes as "part self-contained garden utopia, part do-it-yourself home project."
The piece, he said, "will be a theatrical explosion of hardware store finds counterpoised with retro-fitted big box store gadgetry."
Joining James Martin on the artist selection panel were Rachael Blackburn, director of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art; Janet Simpson, executive director of the Kansas City Artists Coalition; and artists Ed Hogan and Jenny Mendez, Arneill and Jim Calcara.
Calcara, a principal of Kansas City's CDFM2 Architecture Inc., conceived the idea for the Avenue of the Arts as a way of generating street-level activity downtown. In October his firm received a 2003 Business in the Arts Award from the Business Committee for the Arts Inc. and Forbes magazine for its role in developing the project.
The Avenue of the Arts will end in 2004, however, unless additional funding is found. The combination of 1 percent for art program funds generated by Barney Allis Plaza renovations and monies from the Avenue of the Arts Foundation will be tapped out with the realization of this year's display.
Calcara thinks the award will help with fund-raising; Arneill, too, is looking around.
"I think it's a wonderful program for Kansas City, and I'm actively seeking sources of continued funding," Arneill said. The annual budget, which includes $24,000 in artists' commissions, is about $30,000. |
