Image belongs to Neal1960 (flickr).
In the Crossroads District downtown, “First Fridays” is the night each month where you can walk the streets and find most of the area’s dozens of galleries open, not to mention some great hole-in-the-wall restaurants and musicians jamming on the blacktop.
When we went a few weeks ago, we ran into the NerdBots studio in the Arts Incubator building and chatted a little with the artists–a husband-wife team who make these remarkable, humorous robot sculptures out of discarded scrap metal. (They do a great job branding their stuff, too. See their site.)
They asked us to vote for them on the Art in the District site, and I said we would. I just did. And this site is pretty nice. If you want to get a feel for some of the artists and galleries you can find in Kansas City’s Crossroads district, check it out. Most of the sites I’ve found about the Crossroads are cursory at best.
Making progress through Andy Crouch’s Culture Making, which is proving to be a fantastic read.
Reading some authors is like scanning a blank wall with occasional windows. Reading Crouch is like walking through a fully furnished downtown loft with picture windows that open on the Missouri River and urban arts district (showing my KC bias there). Point is, Andy Crouch can flat out write.
Culture Making is not that book you “read for content.” Some authors make the occasional good point. A few authors do it with personality. And a mere handful write with consistent insight, voice, and artistry. Crouch is in that minuscule group, and the fact that he’s writing about cultures, creativity, and the arts makes it extraordinarily appropriate.
OK, I’ll stop raving. Here’s a piece from chapter 2:
The fact that I can give you a fairly complete description of the Gryphon Cafe depends on its participation in a broader culture, one that includes coffee shops, ponytails, realtors and bourgeois bohemians. But the culture of the Gryphon Cafe—the things it makes of the world, the horizons of possibility it creates within its walls, the new culture that its denizens make in response—is not exactly like any other coffee shop. The Gryphon Cafe is not just making something of the vast world of coffee or the current boom in “third places” all over America fueld by Starbucks; it is also making something of the lovely building it inhabits at the corner of Wayne and Lancaster Avenues, of local artists who hand their work on its walls, of the availability of artfully scruffy twenty-somethings who somehow can afford to live in an affluent community on barista’s wages.
Great book, and very helpful in exegeting an urban context like Kansas City.
We’re hoping to hit up one or both of these…
