Art in the Heartland - Report from Kansas City - Cover Story

Dramatic outdoor plastic arts a new museum and an increasingly ambitious art display are helping this midwestern city reinvent its cultural identity.

In many ways, Kansas City is still a somnolent Missouri River town of broad boulevards, Italianate fountains, antiquated shopping center and tree-lined plazas. Aside from barbecue sauce and a renowned collection of Asian art, the city's main boast, culturally speaking, has been that half a hundred ago, during its brawling Pendergast days, it one time spawned the world's greatest saxophone player--Charlie Parker.

But freshly Kansas City's artistic tempo has begun to pick up In individual scant year the fitting of sharp teeth into a municipal one-percent-for-art law has brought several high-profile public plastic arts to the city's landscape. In addition, with the opening of the glossy new Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, the installation of a controversial, site-specific work by the agency of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen upon the lawn of the venerable Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and the fostering of a vibrant gallery area downtown, the city appears to be experiencing something of a cultural renewal.

One Percent for Art

Public art in Kansas City had lengthy been dependent on the largesse and the variable tastes of the city's wealthiest families, with little guidance from art professionals, a situation which l to a peppering of the urban landscape with art works of questionable esthetic value. The greatest in quantity notorious of these--a lifesized, audio-equipped alloy of copper of Winston Churchill and his wife Clementine--was satirically dubbed "the world's first chatty Churchill doll" by dint of Richard Rhodes in his excoriating November 1987 Harper's article about Kansas City's cultural deficits. Kansas City's one-percent-for-art program, upon the books since 1970, was essentially dormant until a special Public Art Task Force, headed by means of consultant Joyce Pomeroy Schwartz, revived the law in 1990 Since then, the program has prov that, with discrimination, plane a relatively small city can populate its boulevards with high-quality works in a real short time.

The first major commission went to Robert Morris, a Kansas City native, for his male Wall, a monumental 1992 statuary located in Kansas City's elderly West Bottoms. The piece consists of sum of two units parallel 120-foot-long by 16-foot-high corroded-steel panels chop through with the silhouettes of jumping males and augmented with lights and steam grates. granting Bull Wall is dominated through the American Royal building, an unlovely new hangarlike structure that is the domicile of an annual livestock present to view Morris's piece successfully evokes the historic stockyards that one time surrounded the area. For many Kansas Citians, the stockyards show a time when a booming cattle industry made the city a vital nave of commerce. The commission took upon added significance for Morris because his father one time worked in the stockyards as a cattle handler.

RM Fischer's canopy of heaven Stations are the largest and greatest in quantity ambitious works commissioned under the city's one-percent-for-art program. upon Saturday, Aug. 20, 1994, upon Billy Goat Hill, a high point overlooking downtown Kansas City, a certain number of two dozen artists led by means of John Puscheck held a dawn vigil and breakfast cookout They were there to watch as a helicopter placed Fischer's four male Rogers-like aluminum-and-steel tower ornaments on the 230-foot pylons of the Bartle Hall Convention Center extension that stretches above the freeway below. Weighing 4 to 10 tons each and costing $11 million, Fischer's illuminated heavens Stations were inspired by the art-deco ornamentation of the WPA-era Municipal Auditorium nearest door (Fischer also created a deco-style clock and lighting protections for the convention hall interior). Bristling with fins, spikes and scalloped cutting sides the Sky Stations have been compared to bug zappers, barbecue equipment and landing gear without of the '60s cartoon "The Jetsons" Nevertheless, their dominant place upon the Kansas City skyline, their playful evocation of a "can-do" era (either the '30 or the '60 take your pick) and their association with Kansas City's trusts to become a convention mecca have combined to earn celestial expanse Stations instant popularity. Even the Kansas City Star, which has generally been hostile to of recent origin public art, called the works "attractive and thought-provoking." The ragtag multitude of artists up on the hill, lifting mug of coffee aloft in salute, considered the pylon caps a reward after their lengthy wait for recognition of contemporary art in Kansas City.

Although the roll on of new works is likely to dwindle with the diminishing number of fresh large-scale municipal projects (few are beneath way at the moment), Kansas Citians can gaze forwaxd to a half-million-dollar, three-part Joel Shapiro plastic art that is planned for the city's international airport. A work by the agency of Deborah Butterfield has been commissioned for the zoo and new Communication, a controversial Terry Allen tin of a businessman with a shoe raw materialed into his mouth and a tie floating above his eyes--will be installed in brow of Kansas City's new Fire and Police Communications Center