Arts Forum

I was at this event Monday night.

I'd seen an article in the Kansas City Scar about it that day, then Corinna emailed me to see if I wanted to go.

Well, it was ont he way home from work, it was arts related, and there was free Boulevard beer. How could I say no? I even ran into my friend Julie.

Mayor Sly James was posing the question, how can Kansas City become more of a hub for the arts? A good question when you look at what the arts scene does for quality of life and property values. When I was in high school, you couldn't even buy drugs in Downtown Kansas City—nobody lived there so there was nobody for a dope peddler to sell to.

Today they have an overpriced grocery store to sell gourmet food to the yuppies and hipsters who pay outrageous rents and condo mortgages to live there. And the arts, from opportunists like Stretch (of Grinder's fame), to less commercially savvy artists, to the Kauffman Center are all a big part of why they do.

I think Kansas City sometimes suffers an inferiority complex on the hipness front. The whole cowtown thing, and that song from the musical Oklahoma does not help.

We don't have a huge population, we can't compete with Chicago or New York if it takes millions of people to be hip.

But competing with New York for density in the midwest, that's like trying to compete with Hawaii for tropical-ness. What we do have is a half-billion-dollar performing arts center, a bit of a jazz scene, some brilliant street art, and by the way the Nelson and Kemper museums, stellar art institutions both, are free to any schmuck that walks in off the street. As big as the Met or the Art Institute at Chicago? Nope, but bigger than a city our size has a right to expect, and I think I paid $18 to enter the Modern Wing in Chicago a couple years back.

Can more be done? Sure. For one thing, I wish the city would quit trying to wage war on tag art. They don't bother the legal walls, Fox Beverages, that sort of thing. And we might be more tolerant than some other cities, but I've seen some of my favorite pieces of public art covered over with gray paint by city workers, and I think that's a shame.

This gets me a little ahead of myself. I was way early for this event, and I took the shot of the MK12 sign while I waited, but not just that. I have over fifty photos of tag art/murals I had not previously noticed or documented downtown from Monday evening to share with you.

I'd gotten off work early and then got a huge tailwind as I cycled down there, so I found myself with over an hour to kill downtown with a camera, tripod and even a little daylight left. I went a little crazy.

When we broke up into small groups at the Arts Forum, and were asked what we treasured about Kansas City's art scene, I spoke up first, said the tags, the murals. As the meeting went on, I found myself photographing people in the room, including a guy who contributed to the conversation between sketching and doodling in a pad with some intensity. After, I met him and noticed his nametag said, 'Sikes.'

I fell out, saying, "Dude, I just spent an hour shooting a bunch of tags and murals, including yours!"