Contemporary Art in Kansas

 Overland Park, KS

Donna looking at Tim Rollins' Adventures of Huckleberry Finn which is painted on pages from the book

The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art

Today we went to The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art.  It's a contemporary art museum located on the Johnson County Community College campus.  It's on the smaller end for museums and one of the wings was closed for an installation so it was even smaller but it had a great collection of emerging and established contemporary artists and it was free with free parking too.  It was the right amount of art and commitment for the day and we had a great time exploring.

A low rider style bike by Carlos Rolón/Dzine.  There will be a whole Latino Arts Festival in September that we will miss.

Zigmunds Priede's Kansas

Zigmunds Priede's Magical City #4

Proof that everyone has a Dale Chihuly Piece

As with many museums, the building is very cool

They had a lot of art by Native American artists.  This painting, Norman Akers' Dripping World, says that Norman is American Indian, Osage

Keltie Ferris' Man Eaters

KAWS' UPS AND DOWNS  

Iona Rozeal Brown's POD 444, Lynxes and Dropses

Douglas Miles' Apachelpse Now!, Have Gas Will Travel, Let's Blow This Joint 

Nick Cave's Soundsuit

Detail of Allison Schulnik's Ariel #2

Linda Besemer's Fold #84.  
I loved this paint on canvas draped over a "towel rack" piece.  It reminded me of Fruit Stripe Gum.

Karin Davie's Lover

Christopher Brown's The Bystander

Kehinde Wiley's Alexander The Great
We saw his work at The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

Elizabeth Murray's Landing

A great view from the museum looking out on Kansas.  

Another in my series of Donna in front of Art

After our museum visit we headed over to the local grocery store to pick up a few things for our dinner.  I noticed that I am in "Little Debbie" country.  I know I have seen "Little Debbie" around but not this prominent.

Little Debbie wants you to know that Fall is Coming!

This is a Kansas Liquor Law.  I should do 2 posts for Liquor Laws in Kansas and Missouri

We also got to drive a bit of the "Ring Road", I-435 around KCMO and KCK.  

I learned a new skill today too!  I am sure there is a better way to do this but this is the ring road on Google Maps.  We have done very little of it.

That's it for today.  If you missed yesterday's post you can see it here.  

106 Degree $6 Movie

 McKinney, TX

The Gray Man

Air Conditioning and a Movie

Today we decided to go see another $6 movie at Moviehouse & Eatery by Cinépolis.  We saw The Gray Man and it was good.  2 hours of action packed chase scenes, fights, and explosions featuring Ryan Gosling,  Billy Bob Thornton, Ana de Armas, and Chris Evans in a greasy mustache playing a villain. It reminded me of a mix of Bourn Identity and John Wick.  It was also nice that there was only 1 other person in the theater with us.  

Texas Frontage Roads

On the way there I asked Google Maps to avoid toll roads. Some of the highways here in Texas are very different from what I am used to in CA and WA.  It's not just the Texas U-Turns I talk about here.  The Texas U-Turns are actually a result of highways being flanked by 2nd highways called frontage roads and this isn't the 2 lane frontage road you see along highways in CA, these are 2-3 lanes on each side of the highway going 45-60 MPH "frontage roads". When you combine the frontage roads with the actual 6 lane highway you get up to 12 lanes across and then when you add intersecting highways with flyovers you get what Donna calls, "a spaghetti of lanes".  So the point of this story is that you can avoid tolls by just driving on the 45-60 MPH frontage roads which is weird to me but I will take it.

Spaghetti

The actual highway near the movie theater.  You can see the Texas U-Turn lanes as well as all of the other lanes.  This is how you make highways when you don't care how much land you use to make them.

If this highway madness is as interesting to you as it is to me you might like some of these YouTube videos I have put in a playlist here.  

If you didn't read about our Texas BBQ experience yesterday you can check it out here.