Richard Youngs is a beautiful man.

Found

Got this e-mail today from one of the librarians at Lee's Summit West. Thought it was worth sharing.

Found

There is a blue Walmart bag in the LMC that has an assortment of items in it, but we cannot identify the owner. It arrived in our area sometime after we left last night, and before we arrived this morning. See below for contents:

8 X 10 of Michael Jackson
plastic loaf of bread
scarf
Thriller cd
plastic orange
etc.

Amazing Show at Kemper Crossroads Gallery

This artist is a kindred spirit...

"Keltie Ferris is a postdigital painter, employing formalist strategies and materials—oil, acrylic, sprayed paint, and oil pastel—to create enigmatic and visually seductive abstractions. Her quick, gestural marks, hard-edged forms, and diaphanous passages of sprayed oil paint demonstrate rigorous investigations of spatial illusion, color, and surface texture. Motley textures, marks, and palettes hover and collide into one another, creating complex compositions of competing strata of visual information. While recalling the works of Joan Mitchell, Sigmar Polke, Ross Bleckner, or Albert Oehlen, Ferris’s methodically structured paintings uniquely evoke the digital networks and urban topographies of the twenty-first century. And, with titles such as Jobriath (the first openly gay pop star) and Lady Stardust (David Bowie’s 1972 hit), our minds are punctuated with a broad range of associations from identity politics to pop-culture icons."

Bulls Renew Rose's Contract

Follow My Curriculum

If any of you are interested in what I do on a daily basis I have recently started a new blog. The art department at Lee's Summit West thought it a good idea to track our weekly work for students who miss school so they can catch up by starting a blog. The blog is also useful if you are interested in learning more about art or art events in Kansas City.

So if you are interested or bored...LSTITANART.BLOGSPOT.COM

Saying Goodbye to Reading Rainbow

I remember in First Grade Miss Mize leading us down the hallway of Prairie View Elementary School and escorting us to seats in another teachers classroom. I sat in the back corner of the room, farthest from the door but nearest the curtain divide between this room and its neighbor. The teacher removed a giant shiny disk, the size of a record, from a sleeve placing into what I now know to be a laser disc player. The lights went low and the television began to glow. Suddenly the catchiest theme song I'd ever heard came on and before the first verse could end sixty first graders were singing along.

After watching LeVar Burton that day my elementary career would never be the same. Reading Rainbow was both exciting programming and an education tool that encouraged reading habits in me that I still carry today.

After 26 years this PBS classic is coming to an end. With new theories in how students learn to read and plateaued ratings the plug is being pulled. With two dozen Emmy's Reading Rainbow will go down with the greatest of children's television......

Bay of Pigs

Just copped this new EP from Destroyer. It is quite a departure for Daniel Bejar who is known for his Bowie-esque/Dylan-esque/Shoegazer disjointed surrealist art rock albums. This is much more minimal than what I've heard from him as well as dancier. Here is what Merge Records says....

""Bay of Pigs" is the longest of Destroyer songs, and Destroyer's first foray into ambient disco. The song was recorded throughout the winter of 2009 with Destroyer collaborators/members John Collins and David Carswell at JCDC Studio in Vancouver. "Bay of Pigs" is an account of the 1961 American invasion of Cuba. The music for "Ravers" was played entirely on analogue synthesizer, and recorded in April 2009. It explores some of the more meditative realms of 20th Century classical composition. The song is a casual rumination on parties, political parties, madness and suffering (for one's art)."