Come and go as you please, have a drink, learn a little bit about what’s to come at The Bird and LAUGH, DAMMIT!

Featuring comedy from:

• That’s No Movie (Live Improvised Movie)
• Ty Clay (Stand-Up)
• The Bird Comedy Theater Players (Improv)
• & More!

Also featuring art from West Everts!

Donations Appreciated!

The Bird Comedy Theater is Kansas City’s newest comedy theater, located in the historic Hemingway Building in The Crossroad’s Arts District. Featuring improv, sketch and stand-up, every Thursday through Saturday!

www.TheBirdKC.com

Spring has sprung and 1739 Gallery would love for you to stop by and get a refreshing perspective on art in all different versions! We will have some of the most amazing local artists, small businesses and boutiques, DJ and local chef. Come prepared to fill your homes with some local grown plants and produce as well as an esteemed piece of art from your neighborhood vendors… See you 6/3 from 5 – 10pm. Open to the public!

We can’t wait to share our space with you! Come and visit us every First Friday from 5pm — 10pm. We have 3 artists as our First Friday feature this month in our art gallery — Endia Lasker, Alli Johnson and Kenneth Johnson III. We also have some small businesses that are ecstatic that they get to share their products and for you to be able to purchase directly from them. We will have lite eats and a local DJ for your enjoyment. See you Friday, First Friday that is!

First Friday Opening Reception: Troy Swangstu solo exhibition.

Join us on May’s First Friday for the opening reception of one of the region’s epic talents: Troy Swangstu.

Paola, Kansas-based painter, Swangstu is bringing us fresh work inspired by his daily observations: In the words of the artist.

“I believe that a good painting always begins with an experience or an accumulation of experiences. When my life became focused on farming in my early thirties, I was desperate to reconnect with art, and the stuff of my everyday life was the most obvious resource for subject matter. Working with cattle, bulls became a symbol for the fertility of the entire herd, and so it became in my work. The bulls became increasingly stylized, increasingly remote from the source of inspiration, not an animal observed, but a symbol projected. Dogs, another constant fixture of farm living, became the bull’s nemesis, eventually transforming from domestic animals to wolf-like symbols of predation. My color palettes range from the earthen to the hyper-saturated, and the choices I make in this regard are as intuitive and emotionally charged as my relationships with my subjects. ”

Hung Liu is primarily known as a painter of Chinese subjects, typically from the 19th and 20th centuries, whose paintings are based on historical Chinese photographs. Given the historical, often tragic subject matter she represents, her style is a kind of weeping realism. Liu’s newest paintings, however, are based upon the Dustbowl and Depression era photographs of American documentary photographer Dorothea Lange, whom Liu has long admired.

Shifting focus from Chinese to American subjects may seem a surprise to Liu’s audience, at first. But by training her attention on the displaced individuals and wandering families of the American Dustbowl, Liu finds a landscape of overarching struggle and underlying humanity that for her is familiar terrain, having been raised in China during an era (Mao’s) of epic revolution, tumult, and displacement. The 1930s Oakies and Bindle-stiff’s wandering like ghosts through Liu’s new paintings are American peasants on their way to California, the promised land.

In her paintings for the Byron Cohen and Sherry Leedy Galleries, Liu – who is known for a fluid style in which drips and washes of linseed oil dissolve the photo-based images the way time erodes memory – has developed a kind of topographic realism in which the paint coagulates around a webbing of colored lines, together enmeshed in a rich surface that belies the poverty of her subjects. In this, the new paintings are more factually woven to Lange’s photographs while also releasing the energy of color like a radiant of hope from beneath the grey-tones of history.

This approach first emerged from an accident in which Liu, who was sketching figures from an image projected on a blank canvas, ran out of charcoal and, to finish the drawing, resorted to colored chalk. Reminded of her Chinese academic training in which orange lines are often used beneath neo-classical and realist propaganda painting, she began experimenting with colored lines, soon in oil paint. The paradoxical result has been a softening of the ground and a hardening – a kind of mapping – of the figures, whose edges and outlines and details are sharpened by the colorful lines and squiggles that both stiffen and liberate them. In short, looking hard at Lange’s photographs has changed Liu’s painting, allowing her empathic sense of touch, and her deeply intuitive knowledge of color as a liberating force, to make contact with the stories underlying their surfaces – stories which, whether Chinese or American, continue emerging like hope for all who still seek a place in history.