Human's Animal

Here I am at the Apple store adding RAM to my parents' computer. I feel like a real computer nerd. Or just a teenager. This shopping district of Kansas City, The Country Club Plaza, is ridiculously full of touristy types from surrounding states...families oohing and aahing and shopping for back to school clothes. It used to be a more practical neighborhood with grocery stores and dry cleaners and the like. I grew up near here and my parents were always upset as more and more chain stores moved in. I think this was the first shopping mall, where one person/company owned the space and leased it to merchants. We used to come here for Thanksgiving to see the window displays with moving things and lights in the department store windows. There are some neat old Kansas City department stores still in existence, or maybe it's just Halls, but Halls is neat.

I'm now encouraging anyone in surrounding states (that includes Minnesota) to make the trip to Kansas City to see the renovation on the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. It's a really great new building, which I discussed in an earlier post. It's been written up pretty much everywhere. The photo above is from a Kiki Smith installation there, Constellation, on display through October 28th. Although I grew up blocks from the museum and took art classes there and ate lunch there and went there all the time, I had never before seen much of the museum's collection, which had been in storage due to lack of space. Now I get to see some really great abstract expressionist stuff, contemporary stuff, realism. There's an amazing American ceramics collection. There's also a super cool research library, the Spencer Art Reference library with 147,000 volumes open to the public. In the new coffee shop, all disposable containers are made of corn.