Obtained from Googling "Art and Community:"

Art is not only great for culture, education, communication between different cultures, or improving a creative skill, art also has healing power. Mental health is a major concern for young people. Artistic practice and creativity are definitely healthy activities, whether it is visual art or music.

Art binds. Culture generates social capital and strengthens a community character. Art brings people together physically — at galleries, museums, performance spaces — and culturally, through its capacity to tell a community shared story, to inspire reflection, and form connections that transcend differences.  Art gives us meaning and helps us understand our world. Scientific studies have proven that art appreciation improves our quality of life and makes us feel good. When we create art, we elevate our mood, we improve our ability to problem solve, and open our minds to new ideas.

by Mary Jo Draper

Here’s what Google has to say about the Arts and Community

Art is not only great for culture, education, communication between different cultures, or improving a creative skill, art also has healing power. Mental health is a major concern for young people. Artistic practice and creativity are definitely healthy activities, whether it is visual art or music.

Art binds. Culture generates social capital and strengthens a community's character. Art brings people together physically — at galleries, museums, performance spaces — and culturally, through its capacity to tell a community's shared story, to inspire reflection, and form connections that transcend differences.

Art gives us meaning and helps us understand our world. Scientific studies have proven that art appreciation improves our quality of life and makes us feel good. When we create art, we elevate our mood, we improve our ability to problem solve, and open our minds to new ideas.

by Mary Jo Draper

Mural Dedication Celebrates Historical African American Steptoe neighborhood

 

 

Although most of the buildings in Midtown Kansas City’s African American Steptoe neighborhood have been demolished, the Westport Presbyterian Church has created a visual reminder to keep its memory alive. The church and several partners will officially dedicate a mural celebrating Steptoe’s Penn School during the Westport Art Fair, Sept. 9 at 6:30 p.m. at the Westport Presbyterian Church, 201 Westport Road, Kansas City, MO.

The dedication of the mural comes as numerous groups and individuals calling themselves “Steptoe Lives” are expressing concerns about Steptoe’s vanishing history on the heels of the demolition of several more of its homes. The Steptoe neighborhood centered around 43rd Street Terrace and Pennsylvania Avenue just south of Westport. After the Civil War, it became a unique place in Kansas City where former slaves could live and buy property. In June 2022, three more Steptoe buildings were demolished to make way for a surface parking lot and a few days later, another home was razed, creating new concern that the physical reminders of the area are being lost.

Mural celebrates Penn School
The mural was designed and painted by Stan Morgan with assistance from Jasmine Ali in collaboration with the Willow Woods Child Development Center. It depicts the three-room Penn School, which opened in 1868 as the first school for Black students west of the Mississippi.  Children in grades one through seven, including jazz great Charlie Parker, attended the school. It was closed in 1955.

Morgan says after he learned about the history of the school, he wanted to make sure other people could be introduced to its important history. As he conceived of the mural, he incorporated the silhouetted images of children into the artwork.

“We also want young people to be aware of the history that is fading,” Morgan says. “We invited children from the Willow Woods Day Care Center to lay down and we drew their silhouettes. Now you see them in the mural saluting Steptoe and the school.”

Mural Dedication Ceremony Kicks Off Drive for Steptoe Commemoration

On Friday, Sept, 9 at 6:30 p.m., during the Westport Art Fair, Westport Presbyterian Church will officially dedicate the mural. Artists Stan Morgan and Jasmine Ali will be on hand to sign the mural and children from the Willow Woods Day Care Center have been invited. Members of the Steptoe Lives coalition, including representatives of the St. James Missionary Baptist Church, the Plaza Westport neighborhood, the families of former Steptoe residents, and Historic Kansas City will also participate.

Following a brief dedication ceremony, those attending are invited inside to watch the documentary “A Step Above the Plaza: Celebrating One of Kansas City’s Most Historic African American Communities.” The film was created in 2007 by Rodney Thompson with support from St Luke’s Health System. It includes interviews with Steptoe residents who talk about the neighborhood, the St. Luke AME and St. James Missionary Baptist churches, Penn School, and other history.

Mural Dedication Ceremony

When: Sept. 9, 2022

  • Mural dedication: 6:30 p.m.
  • Showing of Documentary on Steptoe: 7 p.m.
  • Cost: Free
  • Where: The mural is located behind the Westport Presbyterian Church, 201 Westport Road on the wall of the Willow Woods Child Development Center. The easiest way to reach it is to go to the parking lot at Archibald and Central behind the church and walk toward the back door of the church. Look for signs for the mural dedication.

by Mary Jo Draper

What the Audience Said About Our Most Recent Theatre

The audience loved our most recent theatre production, "Bottle of Fire,"  performed June 22-July 2. The original play was written by  by Scott Myers and directed by Jacqueline Gafford. It tells the story of a A Black family and a White family who discover a hidden connection in the past and a surprising connection in the present.The fates of two brothers, one running for Congress, and two sisters, one a creative Pentecostal minister, intersect in this timely stage play that entertains and provokes you to think.

Here is just a sample of some of the feedback we got:

Such great acting! Fantastic!

Love the play!

Very well done!

Show was done with care and provided many things to think about

Really enjoyed “Bottle of Fire”, it was excellent!

Great show! I couldn’t wait to see how it turned out.

Great show!

Excellent!

Very interesting script.

Actors chemistry very good

Timely, relevant subject matter. Nice stage setup.

Great play!

Excellent acting!

Loved the Pentecostal preacher!

Great playwriting, directing, acting!

by Mary Jo Draper

Wendell Pierce on Art and the Community

"Our thoughts are to the individual as art is to the community."

Wendell Pierce, Black actor and activist who recently played Willy Loman in “Death of a Salesman” on Broadway

by Mary Jo Draper

Composing a Life, by Mary Catherine Bateson

published in 1989

Mary Catherine Bateson (December 8, 1939 – January 2, 2021) was an American writer and cultural anthropologistwho believed that life is an improvisational art form. From her Introduction to the book:

“I believe that our aesthetic sense, whether in works of art or in lives, has over-focused on the stubborn struggle toward a single goal rather than on the fluid, the protean, the improvisatory. We see achievements as purposeful and monolithic, like the sculpting of a massive tree trunk that has first to be brought from the forest and then shaped by long labor to assert the artist’s vision, rather than something crafted from odds and ends, like a patchwork quilt, and lovingly used to warm different nights and bodies.* Composing a life has a metaphorical relation to many different arts, including architecture and dance and cooking. In the visual arts, a variety of disparate elements may be arranged to form a simultaneous whole, just as we combine our simultaneous commitments. In the temporal arts, like music, a sequential diversity may be brought into harmony over time. In still other arts, such as homemaking or gardening, choreography or administration, complexity is woven in both space and time.”

*or like one of Stan Morgan’s collages, created from “found materials.”

by Mary Jo Draper

We Are Made of Music, We Are Made of Time

In her 1942 book Philosophy in a New Key, the trailblazing philosopher Susanne Langer defined music as “a laboratory for feeling and time.” But perhaps it is the opposite, too — music may be the most beautiful experiment conducted in the laboratory of time.

In “the wordless beginning,” spacetime itself was crumpled and compacted into that spitball of everythingness we call the singularity. Even if sound could exist then — it did not, of course, because sound is made of matter — it would have existed all at once. Infinite numbers of every possible note would have been ringing at the same time — the antithesis of music. It is only because this single point of totality was stretched into a line that time was born and, suddenly, there was continuity. Suddenly, one moment became distinguishable from another — the strange gift of entropy, which makes it possible to have melody and rhythm, chords and harmonies. continue reading

Violinist Natalie Hodges on the Poetic Science of Sound and Feeling, from the Marginalian Newsletter by Maria Popova

by Mary Jo Draper

From The Donald Edwards Quintet’s advertisement for a new CD, posted on August 20, 2021:

Timing is everything, and as Donald Edwards continues to make recordings, we are able to hear the clarity of his development as a composer and artist. The Color Of US Suite throws the door open to the levers of power and opportunity in rebellion against systems engaging in fundamentally inimical propositions against the humanity of Black people. Art is not created in a vacuum, it represents the culmination of the total breadth of one’s life experiences represented through a creative medium. It is a direct reflection of the tenor of the times in which it is created. So where talent meets preparation and discipline, at the cross roads these attributes come together for the best expression of artistic genius. Learning and knowing continues to be a hallmark of exceptional talent - the more you know, the more you can do. This recording carries with it the total range in expressions of the freedom concept, the obsession with hope through the infatuation of dreams - the disappointment, anger, and love for the framing of our evolving paradigm from within the prism of democracy.

Art in a Time of Chaos

This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal. I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge — even wisdom. Like art.

–Toni Morrison: from an essay titled “No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear,” included in the 150th anniversary issue of The Nation.

by Mary Jo Draper

Michael Bauer on Creativity

Who is creative? All of us are – the entire human race. The creative person is open to change, refusing to believe that the present way of doing things has to remain constant forever. People and communities that are living creatively are in the process of becoming. In the twenty-first century, our growth – indeed our very survival as individuals, as a community, and as a species – depends on our exercising creativity for the benefit of all.

Michael Bauer is professor of organ and church music at the University of Kansas. His book is called Arts Ministry: Nurturing the Creative Life of God’s People.

by Mary Jo Draper