Wild Open Spaces and Structures for Futures Unseen

Open Spaces is still on our minds in Kansas City. The festival showcased work that

embraced the city’s creative growth giving a preview of future potential. Strong installations

made the festival hard to write off entirely, and many of the works were opportunities for

greater programmatic efforts. However, when analyzing the overall costs in relation to

impact, it seems Open Spaces was too big for its own good. Due to a lack of collaboration,

the exhibition held itself back from being foundational in the city’s larger art scene as a

structure to build on for future growth.

Even though it felt like a blip to some, the nine-week-long exhibition was our city’s first foray

into an art fair to put ourselves on the map. A collaboration between outgoing Mayor Sly

James’ Office for Culture and Creative Services and philanthropist Scott Francis, there was

optimism around Open Spaces by leaders and sponsors. Much of this optimism centered

around Kansas City’s desire for inclusion in the international art community. Thinking if we

play like the rest, we can be relevant to their conversation. The work being made here is

sharp and thoughtful, which has much to do with the city’s ample studio spaces, affordable

rent, and ability to spread out and engage in large-scale projects.

Photo from Tour of Blue River Road with the BRR Investigators.

It is important, to begin with the physical work, as it was the most impactful part of Open

Spaces. Many of the strongest installations intersected in themes of water. Water has the

potential to obliterate and heal. Where humans go and settle is guided by the flow of water.

Kansas City is plagued by flooding in the city’s West Bottoms industrial district; a highway

was built right over Turkey Creek, and the city itself exists at the convergence of the Missouri

and Kansas River. Several of the major installations at Open Spaces respond directly to

these civic and ecological issues.

Ebony Patterson’s installation called up as part of Open Spaces.

The exhibition was designed to flow people southeast to Swope Park, a beautiful and

underutilized part of Kansas City. Located southeast of downtown just off of 71 Highway.

After a bit of getting lost by the Open Spaces app’s directions, and the festival’s small and

hard to spot signage, I made it to the head of a hiking trail that was home to an abandoned

hydrotherapy pool. Ebony Patterson’s installation called up placed me in an internal scene of

suspension. Looking at the swath of flowers at the edge of Patterson’s pool, I held my

breath, feeling that I was suspended in the present; one of discomfort that often

accompanies big change. The pool, originally a hydrotherapy space for children with chronic

pain, was now covered in silk flowers, a memorial to healing as a whole.

Public pools in places like Kansas City were spaces of racial turmoil in the last century. This

is one point where Open Spaces made an attempt to highlight the work that needs to be

done in addressing inequality. Here there could have been an engaging public program, with

leaders discussing ways to come together and sustain community. Unfortunately, while that

was not the case, it’s important to note here that Swope Pool was a site of tension in a twoyear-

long civil rights case. In 1951 three people of color filed suit on the public pool, as

segregation remained a “custom of the park.” While Patterson used a different pool for her

project, it’s so crucially important to remember the history of inequality, and learn from our

patterns to not repeat the ways in which non-white members of the community are still often

culturally segregated.

In our need to collectively work towards addressing these pasts and keep them from

drowning us, we must constantly, and mindfully, revisit these histories. This awareness of the

past was present in Nick Cave’s Hy-Dyve. The piece was a large projection map of Cave’s

Soundsuits, an experimental video performance, combined with video of rushing water along

the walls and floor, installed in the old church building of the Hope Center on Kansas City’s

East side. The sounds and water itself create a sense of burial by sea for the viewer in a

constant flow. The piece struck me like being inside of J.M. W. Turner’s painting The Slave

Ship, which depicts the ill or dying passengers of a slave ship being tossed into the sea upon

the captain realizing his insurance wouldn’t cover them otherwise. Turner depicts the horror

of bodies being thrown overboard highlighting the gross mistreatment of black bodies.

This mirrors the continual displacement and discrimination of people of color that still exists

in our city. Both Cave and Patterson’s pieces enveloped me in emotion; not in a place of

mourning, but in a place of awareness, stillness, and recognition of the present instability.

Through a deep desire for cleansing and renewal, we honor these feelings — the universal

human experiences of suffering, pain, anger, and agony— there is a hope that we can grow

into something more. Water can corrode the strata of rock that has built up over centuries by

the sediments of oppression, separation, and hate.

Nick Cave’s Hy-Dyve as a part of Open Spaces.

It is up to us to rebuild what corrodes and create new systems that better serve communities

with fairness and equality. Occasionally we get to watch as the structures that were built

wash away. This idea creates a sense of optimism when addressing oppressive power

structures, in that we can realize that not everything built is infallible. The Blue River Road

Investigators took me on a tour that proved that point. Cities often build roads and bridges in

areas that the earth, in this case, The Blue River, decides to remove. The project, an official

part of Open Spaces, pointed out the absurdity and beauty of what is now dubbed the

“Annex” of Blue River Road, an entirely impassible section of roadway that has been washed

away into the river. This piece was an incredibly clever move by the BRR Investigators to use

funding and support from Open Spaces to point out past failed civic projects. On the tour, we

discussed the current deteriorated state of the roadway and our conversation brought some

hilarious and occasionally practical repurposing ideas to consider. The road signs that have

become canvases or target practice, new mountain bike trails have formed alongside places

for teen debauchery. Ultimately, the BRR Investigators don’t provide a solution but probe us

to look deeply into the trust we put in our institutions to maintain infrastructure and prevent

decay.

Trey Hock, one of the BRR Investigators stands atop the damaged barrier at the start of the Annex of Blue River Road.

Brazilian artists Leonardo Remor and Denis Rodriguez’s video piece at the Belger Art Center

ran on a loop in a dark room for thirteen minutes. Inside the gallery, providing respite from

the summer heat, Waterfall as Cinema looked at water as a place for civic purpose and

peace. A staircase in a Brazilian city is purposefully flooded as an act of cleaning and

renewal. The water rinses this busy gateway and creates a momentary waterfall, turning a

city passway into space of beauty and wonder. These artists all proved that these larger

cultural discussions can be provoked through making and sharing the work with the public.

The questions remain, however, if the scale of Open Spaces was too big to achieve a clear

purpose for the city.

Waterfall as Cinema Leonardo Remor and Denis Rodriguez at the Belger Art Center as part of Open

Spaces.

The festival can be summed up through the cheeky title of Jill Downen’s work which

highlighted one of the most elaborate monuments in Swope Park. An Architectural Folly from

a Future Place lies directly next to Swope Memorial, a naturally occurring point of beauty and

sweeping vistas of the city. I think it is foolish for Kansas City to build an entirely new festival

to “put us on the map.” Looking within the city itself, there are plenty of artist-run

organizations and nonprofits working to do this already. Why couldn’t they have led this

exhibition? The scale of ambition with the festival was solidified in a plaster casing, a single

point perspective led by Dan Cameron, the sole curator and artistic director for the event. He

came to Kansas City with international curatorial experience but limited knowledge of what

was happening here. Ultimately, this impacted the opportunities for collaboration that would

have increased both the financial and cultural impact.

Recently on KCUR’s Morning Edition, Host Gina Kauffman focused on a conversation that

addressed the audience numbers of the festival as “measurably unfulfilled” and how the

program overall was more of a scavenger hunt for those already knowledgeable about the

local art scene. In talking with guests like Mo Dickens (who wrote a piece for us discussing

his opinion on the festival) spent hours every Sunday during Open Spaces to try and see

everything that was happening. Cameron spoke of the sublime nature of discovery, and the

success of the festival despite low recorded attendance numbers. To quote a recent KC Star

Article

“As far as turnout, that really wasn’t in my wheelhouse,” Cameron said Thursday. “The

idea was to present excellent programming for the people who did turn out. I think 90

percent of it was in the excellent category.”

As an arts organizer in Kansas City’s artist-run community, I have the privilege of access to

the already existing scene, and what it provides to the city. I also learned how much the art

community values programming, and that all artist-runs know how make things happen with

very little. While I recognize the city’s intentions, by boosting up local artists up alongside

prestigious international conversations, we can cultivate a dialogue worth talking about. That

is the mission of many small art organizations already that bring artists in on shoestring

budgets and facilitate dynamic programming that engages with our art scene.

Underneath my love for all the works I had seen, bubbling to the surface was my own wideeyed

astonishment at the money being spent. Yet very few of these events were directed

towards serving local artists. Dan Cameron was a paid curator for this event. Artists who run

galleries and alternative spaces are expected to foot the bill and volunteer their labor. It is

seen not as a job but an occupation. This distinction classifies the labor of art, and the

cultural spaces around it in the artist-run realm, as something to occupy our time. These

artist-run spaces are some of the deepest advocates for the community. They create

contexts for and conversations about what artists are exploring. They are rich in risk,

advocate for the sticky, the uncomfortable, the experimental, and the avant-garde. Kansas

City’s art history is dependent upon them.

Yet these spaces are becoming fewer and fewer, as rents increase wildly and the labor of the

art workers involved follows a distinct expectation of volunteerism. It isn’t the art that is the

problem, it is the systems that devalue the labor of cultural work. These are the actions that

give the city its wealth as cultural capital. Artists create these spaces to provide alternatives

to the status quo, and to make space for other artists in their community to grow and deepen

engagement. The emotional and physical labor of running art spaces, and making art, is

devalued on an international level. While this isn’t just a Kansas City problem, locally, grants

for this work often don’t exceed $6000/yr in funding, and when they do they’re highly

competitive. The standards that artist-run spaces are held to in terms of audience reach

metrics and local cultural impact are much more scrutinous than the evaluative strategies

currently being placed on Open Spaces. There needs to be a paradigm shift in the way that

the city invests our tax dollars, and whether the community really needs this type of event.

a bouquet of silk roses and dying leaves next to a bench near called up.

Open Spaces worked directly with the city, and because of that, there were restrictions on

what could count as a space for partner organizations. While there were several partnerships

with organizations I would consider artist-run, such as Charlotte Street Foundation, other

spaces couldn’t be included due to issues of accessibility or staffing. Disclosure: Informality

applied to be a partner with Open Spaces as a critical writing and educational outlet, and we

were denied funding. Most of these artist-run spaces, the ones who give Kansas City its

avant-garde hot sauce, were not included in the program.

Getting down to brass tacks, I had to ask the question: How many art spaces could we have

funded with the money from Open Spaces?

Well, just taking into account that: “the City of Kansas City, Missouri has invested

$500,000”

The average artist-run exhibition costs $1500 to put on. That would fund 333 ⅓

exhibitions a year.

The average budget for an artist-run space (that pays for exhibitions, pays artists, and covers

the full cost of rent and exhibition overhead) with current rent prices in KC, MO is roughly

20,000/yr That would fund 25 spaces a year or 4 spaces with a budget of 125,000 a year.

While not all artist-run spaces require that level of funding to operate, it would allow those

spaces overhead, hiring of two full-time staff members and have plenty of funding for parttime

staff, paying artists, and additional overhead.

It’s unproductive to simply call out poor planning. I feel that the art community was still

impacted by the exhibition as a whole, even though there wasn’t as much inclusion and

collaboration as ideal. While the funding and participation from artist-run spaces were

minimal, the work made an impact for those who saw it.

Trey Hock, one of the BRR Investigators stands underneath 635 near the North Annex of Blue River

Road at the end of our tour.

To close, I think about James McAnally’s perspective from Temporary Art Review, looking at

the art scene in St. Louis. In his essay on Wild Building he asserts the practice as the

creation of new structures with the end goal considering what futures these investments can

have in the city as a whole. How could Open Spaces have built structures that could be filled

later, assuming the future we had not yet seen. How could this event have considered the

after more clearly, and how it could sustain Kansas City’s art scene through a model that

extends into the future and sustains what came before, and what comes next? It is important

that we don’t repeat the issues with the first Open Spaces, and inactively allow the creation

of a McBarge of international biennales

Now, post Open Spaces, we have an opportunity as an art community to recenter and

consider what we want from future collaborations with the city to look like. We can ask for

there to be a curatorial panel and vouch to be on it, we can bargain for more participation

from these small artist-run spaces, we can give a voice to more marginalized communities.

In order to be more relevant internationally, we need to focus on how we can be the best

locally. How can we get involved in the future of this project? We can get together and

collectively work alongside the team to create more productive programming. It is crucial that

we, and the city, be more intentional moving forward, and know the types of conversations

we want these events to co-create, rather than set the path for future erosion.

Open Spaces took place in the Kansas City, Missouri metro from August 25–October 28,

2018. For more information on the exhibition visit, https://openspaceskc.com/exhibition/