It’s hard to tell when you are living in a golden age. Woody Allen made that point in his recent movie “Midnight in Paris,” where even some of the great writers and artists in Paris of the 1920s longed for other places and times.
Check your watch, Kansas City. This is our finest hour. This is our golden age, here and now.
For the last decade, something amazing has been happening in this city. Something has been growing, and last year it all finally came together. Since the millennium turned, the greater metro has invested about $3 billion in facilities for entertainment and the arts. We expanded the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, refurbished Arrowhead and Kauffman stadiums, built Kansas Speedway, Sprint Center, the Power & Light District and Johnson County’s Nerman Museum, among others. Then, in 2011, we hit critical mass.
The summer began with the June opening of Livestrong Sporting Park, a night as thrilling as any in the city’s sports history. It ended on a picture-perfect September weekend with the opening of the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts.
In between, any night of the week, there was something exciting going on. Maybe it was a nationally touring rock act at the restored Midland, or maybe a local act like Hearts of Darkness at the underrated open-air venue Crossroads KC.
Something was changing, though. You could feel it on the streets. See it in the faces.
There was new attitude, an unspoken confidence. It felt as if Kansas City had gone almost overnight from a city always trying to convince others how good life is here to a city that simply knows it to be true.
In 2011, then, Kansas City came of age. And mostly because of art.
We may have been built on wheat and cattle, but today creativity is key to so many of the businesses that define us. Hallmark, for example. Or ad agencies. And, of course, the dozens of local galleries and art studios in the Crossroads that sparked downtown’s revival.
Those businesses exist, in large part, because the Kansas City Art Institute has been pumping out people highly trained in the visual arts for generations, creating a population remarkably versed in and passionate about aesthetics. In the same way, University of Missouri-Kansas City’s excellent conservatory — where Professor Zhou Long last year won a Pulitzer Prize — helped to create an atmosphere of tremendous support for performing arts.
Hiring Michael Stern to conduct the symphony and building him the most acoustically perfect venue on Earth is evidence of that. As is the Todd Bolender Center, our new home for the Kansas City Ballet.
So is the rise of Quixotic Fusion. The homegrown arts collective that blends dance, aerobatics, music and visual effects was just selected to present at the prestigious TED conference. Quixotic aerialist and dancer Megan Stockman is simply a civic treasure, as uniquely gifted in her art as Professor Zhou and Michael Stern are in theirs.
Ultimately, a city is made of individuals who might never get their names in the paper or win awards but whose effect on the life of a city nevertheless grows through time like the proverbial flap of a butterfly’s wing. Kansas City has so many excellent metalsmiths, for instance because Chuck Crawford of Shawnee Mission East spent decades teaching silversmithing. Kansas City owes the richness of this moment to the hard work, passion and talent of unsung heroes like him and Kelly Kuhn of Blue Gallery and fashion designer Christel Highland.
So the beat goes on as UMKC considers a downtown arts campus. Kansas Speedway has a new casino opening in the spring, and next summer baseball’s All-Star Game comes to Kauffman Stadium for the first time in nearly 40 years. There’s no question things are changing here, or that something special is in the air.
Hampton Stevens is a writer for The Atlantic, ESPN the Magazine and other national publications. He lives in Kansas City with his dog Ginger.
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