Masterminds 2009

Four years in a row, four Masterminds. Once again, we’re presenting four of the city’s aesthetic adventurers with $1,000 each — no strings attached — just for doing what they do. Each year, we’ve asked our readers to nominate artists, innovators and entrepreneurs who are changing the city’s cultural landscape. This isn’t a popularity contest or a lifetime achievement award; instead, we want to recognize individuals or groups whose contributions are influencing the city’s cultural and creative landscape. We back up our appreciation with cash because we know that these people often do their work with little recognition — and less financial reward. A thousand bucks, we figure, is a small investment in keeping the city interesting. We’ll hand out the checks at our fourth-annual Artopia party — a night of fashion, music, food and all-around creative energy — on Saturday, April 4, at the Screenland (1656 Washington). Until then, you can read about this year’s Masterminds in this Artopia pullout section. The party that night starts at 7; tickets cost $25 at the door, $20 if you get them sooner by calling us at 816-561-6061.

ANNE AUSTIN PEARCE

Anne Austin Pearce is quietly industrious. But unlike many people who have more than one job and multiple passions, she doesn’t talk about how busy she is. Pearce just prefers to do the work. And what good work it is. Pearce is a working artist, an art professor, a mentor to more than a dozen independent-studies pupils and, since 2004, director of the Greenlease Gallery at Rockhurst University. She’s also on the board of Review magazine. But she would be embarrassed to read here how much time she spends on these things and how much work she gets done. She would just as soon mention all the folks at Rockhurst with whom she works — people, she says, who make her job easier. That’s the way she is. She would rather deflect attention from herself and onto the artists she works with in the gallery (where she organizes five exhibitions each academic year), her students and her fellow artists in the Kansas City community. For her pithy exhibitions, which have made Rockhurst’s gallery interesting and have drawn attention to the university, Pearce has curated works by local as well as national artists, often at the same time, to spark discussion. Her own works have appeared in exhibitions around the country and abroad.A Lawrence native, Pearce has been in Kansas City for more than 12 years. She spent a couple of years in Texas after school, but Texas is another story and too many years ago. Pearce is focused on the present and the future and how she can collaborate with other exceptional artists, serve her students and grow in her own work. And she has plans for her art. Her next project is a series of double portraits. She would like to pick about 40 people — some she knows, some strangers — and make portraits of what she calls “interior and exterior selves.” This kind of project, which she expects will take her two to three years, feeds into one of Pearce’s primary interests. “I love people and asking them questions, and then seeing how that translates into a portrait,” she says. Her work now suggests the intuitive essence of people and places. In these new portraits, she says, “I’d be more specific, photograph objects people like, or I’d use someone’s shadow as a starting point and go from there.” Pearce is a prodigious mapper of her interactions. For instance, in her work she has charted the dynamics of a conversation between herself and another person, suggesting the topography of a relationship and how it rises and falls. Her hybrid works combine multiple abstract ideas about her subjects and her relationships with them. For Pearce, the new project is an experiment, a riskier way of working. And yet it will allow her to engage emotionally and intellectually with her subjects. That collaborative part of working, whether in the gallery with the exhibited artists or as part of her teaching projects, is what she thrives on and what makes all of her work essential to Kansas City’s visual and intellectual landscape.

RON MEGEE

Pick any year from the previous dozen, and Ron Megee could have been that year’s Mastermind. From his days as a gifted improv comic through the long-lived fantasy that was his Late Night Theatre to his current career directing for the Coterie At Night series, Megee has always managed to create extravagant theater from limited means. Just as impressive, in 2009 — the year the performer-director-writer-designer officially takes the Mastermind honor — we’ve been treated to his starring turns in La Cage Aux Folles and Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You, two shows that demonstrate how even an actor with a résumé as thick as Megee’s still has a lot he can discover. “Sister Mary stretched me pretty far,” Megee says. “Dressed as a nun, all I had was my face! I had to learn to be reserved, how to rely on an eye gesture instead of kicking my legs apart and doing a pratfall.” Learning reserve is the gift of Jeff Church, the Coterie Theatre’s artistic director and Megee’s frequent collaborator. “He’s one of my best friends,” Megee says, “and he inspires me and pushes me forward. He put me in The Laramie Project” — the decidedly uncomic story of Matthew Shepard — “and then La Cage and Sister Mary.” Besides these extraordinary performances, the Megee-Church partnership has also yielded Coterie At Night, which features plays that are aimed at teenage audiences. “That crowd is there, and nobody’s giving credit to them,” Megee says. “We try to reach them, and we pick stories that don’t dumb down to the audience. Jeff and the Coterie do that, too — they talk up to their audience.” So far, Coterie At Night has been a success. Night of the Living Dead has done well two Halloweens in a row, and The Breakfast Club — currently running Monday nights at the Westport Coffee House — is enjoying frequent sellouts. Crafting creative, exciting, honest shows for teenagers? Giving them a place that’s theirs after dark? Maybe even inspiring in these young audiences the same love of the arts that stirs in him? This is what makes a Mastermind: Some day, some of those kids whom Megee reaches will be staging shows of their own. Megee being Megee, he’ll keep us busy with shows until then. A taste of his upcoming projects: Mall of the Dead, a Megee-penned sequel to the Coterie At Night hit Night of the Living Dead, which he promises will involve zombies actually taking over Crown Center; an adaptation of The Rose at La Esquina, featuring Cody Wyoming’s live band and starring Spencer Brown in the Bette Midler role; and a wacky-neighbor role in the New Theatre farce Run for Your Wife. Perhaps best of all, now that the debt on Late Night Theatre has almost been paid off, Megee admits to the possibility of a Late Night reunion. If it happens, that motley crew will sally forth under a new name: Royal Crown Theatre Troupe, which is tres KC. With luck, they might even take on a couple of Megee’s own scripts in progress, including the promising Helen of Troy, Pennsylvania. But whether that comes to pass, there’s one certainty: Megee will always be creating shows, just as he’ll always be making others’ shows better.