Exhibits
Backstage Pass explores how Rolling Stone—through the work of Baron Wolman, its chief photographer from 1967-70—captured and helped define one of the most important eras in music history. Through 35 framed photographs, contact sheets, and original magazine covers, it offers an opportunity to experience how Wolman and the magazine’s editors and other photographers guided the creation of the “rock star” persona from concert to cover to icon.
The exhibit is curated by Ben Ahlvers, gallery director of the Lawrence Arts Center in Lawrence, Kansas. It is co-presented by ExhibitsUSA, a program of the Mid-America Arts Alliance.
This retrospective exhibit, the last in a yearlong series curated by Kansas City Art Institute students, spotlights selected works from the rarely viewed folk art collection at Kansas City’s westside Mattie Rhodes Center. Objects range from sculpture, ceramics, textiles, and toys to masks from Latin American, Hispanic and Pueblo Indian artists of the Southwestern United States. Included are pieces made by children from the Mattie Rhodes Art Center, where educational material has been developed from pieces in the collection.
The Library’s Genevieve Guldner Gallery becomes a space to examine and explore the techniques and cultural histories revealed in the pieces. The exhibit is curated by Olivia Clanton, a Kansas City-based artist and facilitator who earned a degree in fiber from KCAI with an emphasis on socially engaged art practices.
It is underwritten by the Richard J. Stern Foundation for the Arts and Pam and Gary Gradinger.
Just a four-minute walk from Kansas City’s old First National Bank – now the home of the Central Library – some of the biggest names in American entertainment once made their way to a small photography studio and a man they trusted to cast them in just the right light.
From 1915 to 1930, Orval Hixon photographed hundreds of rising stars of vaudeville, stage, and early film. More than two dozen of them would be immortalized on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Their images, as captured by Hixon, are featured in the Library’s latest exhibit of his work in the gallery named for Hixon on the lower level of the Central Library.
Co-presented by James R. and Joyce A. Finley, Charles David and Linda Hixon, and the Richard J. Stern Foundation for the Arts – Commerce Bank, Trustee.
