Best Wall Art

Give H&R Block Artspace Director Raechell Smith 200 inches and she'll take it a mile on the Artspace's west-facing Public Wall, a billboard-size tabula rasa at 43rd Street and Main. Around last Halloween, Missouri photographer Deanna Dikeman's Diane Arbus-like snapshot of an elderly couple on a suburban lawn (like "American Gothic," only set in Olathe, circa 1979) was replaced with Alexis Rockman's thoughtful and eye-catching "Pet Store." The politically savvy Rockman imagined a pet shop window of the future, featuring such details as a bioengineered white tiger with red racing stripes (a little NASCAR-cum-Siegfried and Roy, a reference he acknowledged) and a robotic dog displayed on a shelf that was coiled, not coincidentally, like a strand of DNA.