Come to Cakewalk Chapel & Event Space for our First Fridays pop up! We have 14 incredibly talented vendors joining us and selling their incredible products, art, and baked goods!

First Fridays at Border Brewing Company

Join us at Border Brewing Company in the heart of the Crossroads Arts District for First Fridays! Start your weekend off right with fresh, locally-crafted beer in our welcoming taproom, featuring a rotating selection of creative brews to please every palate.

This month, we’ll have live blues music on the patio to keep the vibe going all evening long, plus Brit Boy Street Food will be serving up their signature UK-inspired fare inside the taproom.

Explore the neighborhood’s vibrant art scene, then swing by for a pint or two as you unwind and soak in the energy of the Crossroads. Whether you’re a beer enthusiast or just looking to experience something new, our friendly staff and community vibe ensure a great evening out.

See you this First Friday — cheers!

For the past ten years, Four Chapter Gallery has enjoyed partnering with the Kansas City Art Institute Fiber Department to spotlight the work of just one of their exceptionally talented graduating senior class. This year, they will celebrate artist Erica Alexander.

In Prepare a Table, Alexander focuses on slow, repetitive processes including hand stitching and natural dyes that invite both the artist and viewer to pay attention and draw near. Her intricate fiber works and sculptures deal with themes of community, reciprocity with nature, and traditional craft passed down from mother to daughter through generations.

Alexander dyes her fiber with organic materials she has either found or grown during the summer months. Each items finds meaning as she recognizes the places she found each item as well as the history behind each piece of material. She notes there is a beauty in seeing the hand of an artist in textiles — tangible evidence of the people who made those items which, in her case, revolve around deliberate process, planting patience and love into the objects. Important to think about — she notes — in a world of fast fashion.

There will be an artist talk on Friday, May 2 at 6:30pm.

Jerry Kunkel’s paintings speak to our individual appetite for self-reflection, born of a collective and universal desire to comprehend, both physically and emotionally, the world around us. He often weaved narratives in a poetic or humorous fashion, sometimes constructing the work with no apparent end in sight, allowing the consequent juxtapositions of images to create a story. His work superimposes original and found imagery with the addition of text as an attitudinal descriptor, or an extra, content-specific image. In addition, the frequent incorporation of the illusion of plywood or other non-precious surfaces adds the element of the everyday and has pervaded his work for years.

Jerry was interested in our momentary reaction to everyday stimuli, that moment that summons a private response – a response that we may not feel compelled to share for a variety of reasons; perhaps because it doesn’t seem important, that our response is not fully formed, or we simply don’t care to think about why we really don’t care. In the end, whatever it is, he would say “trust what emerges and embrace uncertainty.”

Kathy Liao is known for her large figurative works that translate her lived experience and history into colorful, luminous, multi-layered compositions, that often portray herself and family. During the isolation of the pandemic, Liao’s paintings revealed the loneliness and distance of that experience and made it tangible.

In Liao’s newest work, We Met in a Dream, the intimacy of story is mirrored by the intimacy of scale. Liao uses the immediacy of working in a small size to summon stories from her memories, or the trance of a dream, to the poetry of painting and collage. These explorations are full of movement, leaving clues and pointing the way.

“I woke up one day from a dream where my little sister turned into a fly. I reached and grasped for her, to protect her, to keep her safe. I felt deep panic, guilt, and dread. In the moments before waking, I cupped three dead flies and I couldn’t tell which one was her.

I started a dream journaling practice a year ago. Each drawing is a strange affirmation and quiet unraveling of the human drama in my mind. My work exists in the fluid state between experience, memory, dream, and place. In an attempt to translate the fleeting and subconscious, at the intersection of history and time, the drawings shapeshift and settle into allegories of their own.” -Kathy Liao

Biography

As a Taiwanese American artist, Kathy Liao looks for patterns and repetitions that weave through the immigrant families’ experience in her mixed-media work. She is the recipient of various recognitions, including the 2023 Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship, 2022 21c KC Artadia Award, 2020 Charlotte Street Foundation Visual Artist Award, and a public art commission for the new Kansas City International Airport. Her work was shown in galleries and museums in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Kansas City, and many other cities nationally and internationally. As a mentor and educator, Liao lectured and presented at multiple institutions and conferences nationwide. Formerly, Liao was Director of the Painting and Printmaking department at Missouri Western State University. She was nominated “Most Influential Professor” in 2019. She is currently the organizational services program officer at Mid-America Arts Alliance.