Panty Raider

It's Valentine's Day, and Peregrine Honig is spreading the love. In a picture window at her Fahrenheit Gallery in the West Bottoms, white lights and soot-stained aluminum letters spell out MOTEL against a red-velvet backdrop.

Earlier tonight, men cruising the deserted streets for prostitutes stopped and pressed the buzzer. Honig sent them away. She isn't running a no-tell motel. She's hosting her seventh annual Valentine's Day art installation in a two-story brick building that, since the 1860s, has been a saloon, a juke joint and a country-western bar.

Artists Chris Devlin and Heather Scorcha Minga have transformed it into the Stagger Inn Motel, where "deals are made and graves are laid."

In the softly lit dance hall, real bamboo trees, transplanted from someone's backyard, sprout from the tile floor. On a stage up front, Greg Meise, a tuxedoed lounge singer in black sunglasses, plays a piano and serenades the crowd. A white-haired couple moves slowly on the empty dance floor.

Boxes of Boulevard beer line the bar. A hundred or so people stroll about, perusing the evening's art -- five eerie motel rooms tucked into corners. In one, a bedspread with a Haitian voodoo symbol drapes the bed. Above that, a painting depicts a ghostly, winged woman with an O-shaped mouth hovering above a praying man.

In another room hang two paintings of the "Jimmy Brothers." In one, a menacing teen-age Jimmy, his arm in a sling, holds a rock in his free hand. In the other, a different Jimmy scowls and thrusts his crotch forward in a macho stance.

People wearing headphones stand respectfully before each piece, listening to an audiotape prepared by the artists.

"I'm Jimmy," snarls a voice on the tape, "and I'm every fucking bad motherfucker you've ever met. I'll throw this rock at you. I'll set your shit on fire. I'll steal your car. I'll fucking eat your food while you're at work. I'll fuck you up.

"Please move to the next room."

The guests, all of them there by special invitation of the artists, step carefully from artwork to artwork, careful not to track mud on the rugs or muss the pillows. Honig, who has been flitting about with a wineglass in her hand, plops down on a bed to rest.

Honig is a petite woman with short, curly brown hair and blue eyes. She's wearing a cream-colored Mexican dress with big, orange flowers on it. Buckled around her waist is a wide pink garter belt from the 1950s, which looks more like a champion wrestling belt than an item of dainty lingerie.

Honig can't go longer than a minute without someone rushing up to hug her. Nearly everyone here knows who she is. Honig's controversial drawings and paintings of young girls and women have been exhibited all over town. She's had art shows in major galleries around the world.

When Honig was 23, New York's famed Whitney Museum bought her Ovubet (26 Girls with Sweet Centers)-- a suite of drawings on vintage paper doilies depicting prepubescent girls and their sexual awakening. Ovubet is part of the Whitney's permanent collection, along with the work of such renowned artists as Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keeffe and Andy Warhol.

Right now, however, Honig isn't concerned with fame. "We're in the most industrial section of the city, and it's Valentine's Day, and look at all the people," she says. Art students, bohemians and business executives fill the space. Rain is pouring down, and the old building's restrooms have flooded; still, Honig's mood is anything but dampened. By evening's end, 200 people will have come to her annual soiree. "This is like the prom everybody wishes they'd had."

At 26, Honig is widely perceived to be one of the city's most talented artists. Now she's in a position to help her colleagues. Being in her good graces could lead an artist to exhibitions at the Fahrenheit as well as major gallery contacts and invitations to national shows.

These days, Honig doesn't have much trouble making friends.

Honig has been in Kansas City for nine years, and for much of that time, being the young darling of Kansas City's art community came at a cost.

People who don't know Honig have gossiped about her to her face. She's been interrogated by people demanding to know whether her art springs from an abusive childhood. At the very least, she's been called a relentless self-promoter -- an insult in overly polite Kansas City.

Nonetheless, her work ultimately ended up in the Whitney because Melissa Rountree, curator for Hallmark Cards' fine-art collection, was a fan. In 1998 Rountree introduced Honig to Jack Lemon, the founder of Landfall Press, a publisher of contemporary fine art in Chicago, who later began representing Honig. At the Navy Pier art show in Chicago in 1999, Lemon tells the Pitch, he sought out David Kiehl, a curator for the Whitney.

"I dragged David Kiehl over there and showed him Peregrine's work," Lemon says. "I told him it should be part of his collection. That's my job." Lemon's marketing efforts paid off. The Whitney bought a print of Ovubet, one of 25 sets of hand-painted prints that Landfall Press had published from Honig's original etchings on copper plates.