Art & Stage: Bravo! >>

• Best Humble Servant of the Arts (2 Comments)
  Mott-ly
  You've seen him rolling around town in his wheelchair, hanging out at the galleries or working his tail off at Grinders, a bandanna tied around his head. He's the man known only as Mott-ly, the guy who gives the young'uns a chance, either by showing their heretofore unseen work at MoMo or... More >>
• Best Emerging Artist
  Miles Neidinger
  Miles Neidinger impresses our socks off. The thing that sucks is how hard it is to describe what he does in a way that comes close to conveying the experience of seeing what he does. We can only do our best: Miles Neidinger changes reality. He doesn't heal the sick or allow the blind to see --... More >>
• Best Local Solo Show
  Wood Nymphs at Taxidermy Gallery
  Jane Almirall's first solo show was understated but powerful. What set Wood Nymphs apart from other local shows was its tight narrative strength. Almirall's simple watercolors of birds carrying, or sometimes tangled in, red string explored issues of migration, relocation and nesting with a hefty... More >>
• Best Imported Solo Show
  Diane Arbus' Family Album at the Spencer Museum
  It's easy to become preoccupied with art that has a clever premise or a flashy color scheme, but it's oh-so-refreshing to see an exhibit that makes you think about more than art. Diane Arbus' Family Album was one talented photographer's reflections on family in general and on a loose family of... More >>
• Best Artist
  Renee Laferriere
  Only one thing at the Green Door Gallery's Smut show surprised us more than discovering what other people find sexy, and that was Renee Laferriere's portrait series. The smudgy black formations against hot-pink backgrounds seemed abstract for a split second, like a Rorschach test. Labeled simply... More >>
• Best Collaboration
  Ghada Amer at H&R Block ArtSpace
  When Hadley Johnson got a temporary gig coordinating local embroiderers to do some stitching for renowned artist Ghada Amer in preparation for her Kansas City show, she quit her job at the Better Cheddar. Amer was one of her favorite artists, and she didn't want to botch the project. She figured... More >>
• Best Experimental Art
  Mash-Up!
  Taking inspiration from mash-ups (the DJ-inspired blending of songs -- say, New Order's "Blue Monday" with Kylie Minogue's "Can't Get You Out of My Head" -- to make a new dance track), Grand Arts hosted more than two dozen artists, architects, musicians and other arts-minded folks for a month... More >>
• Best Local Group Show
  Charlotte Street 2004
  The Charlotte Street awards are a pretty sweet deal -- unrestricted cash grants given to a handful of local artists, which they repay in new work for an annual show. Because the exhibits aren't curated around a single theme or medium, the displays can seem disjunctive, but somehow this year's... More >>
• Best Imported Group Show
  Past in Reverse at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art
  We have seen a lot of interesting Asian art shows over the past few years. It started with Tokyo Pop at the Gallery at Village Shalom in 2002, a show that brought Yoshitomo Nara, Aya Takano, Takashi Murikami and other major players in the sexy-yet-childish, sweet-but-still-dark Japanese pop-art... More >>
• Best New Media Show
  Time:Base:Behavior
  When Daven Gee, Rebecca Dolan and Barry Anderson launched a site-specific sequence of new media exhibitions in the renovated Boley Building last October, titled Time:Base:Inside, it fell flat right on its time:base:face. So we were leery of Round Two, which opened this past April, but we kept an... More >>
• Best Multimedia Piece
  Sean Ward's "Military Processional Relief or Maybe Perhaps the Celtic Pantheon for Christ's Sake!"
  Pantyhose frighten us even in their original form. But when Sean Ward assembled them into a vertical army of diseased monsters, then provided the entire wall with weapons, it was so disturbing and hysterical that we couldn't take our eyes off it. "Military Processional Relief or Maybe Perhaps... More >>
• Best Curator
  Hesse McGraw
  There are tons of fabulous artists in this town -- more, in fact, than a city this size deserves. There are fewer fabulous curators. The city puts on a handful of good art shows every month, but not all of them reflect the extent of local talent, and even when they do, the curatorial approach is... More >>
• Best Display of Self-Indulgence
  Tom Deatherage's Portrait Show
  There might not be any other curator in town who could get away with an entire exhibit devoted to himself. But Tom Deatherage -- with his "Art Pimp" T-shirt, often unintelligible rants and lovable cackle -- has served the KC arts community long enough to score a free pass for such a decadent... More >>
• Best Fashion Designer
  Sophie and Gwendolyn
  When Amy Schlabach and Wendy Gillman tentatively stepped onto the stage at the 18th Street Fashion Show in June, following in the pretty footsteps of their willowy models, we thought, There's no one else we'd rather buy lingerie from. The women, who design the Sophie and Gwendolyn line, looked... More >>
• Best Dancer
  Deanna Heitt
  Subjectivity has its place, especially when it comes to dance, an art form often pigeonholed. How can one dancer be the best when you're comparing ballet dancers with flamenco dancers? Impossible! What about the tango dancers, the country dancers, the square dancers, the two-steppers? Deanna... More >>
• Best Dance Experience
  Quixotic Performance Fusion
  For those who love dance but do not love silent venues with confining seats, the opportunity to see a dance performance in a laid-back atmosphere -- one that offered free beer -- was a rare treat. Keelan Whitmore, artistic director of the new grassroots collective Quixotic, clearly finds... More >>
• Best Burlesque Show
  Sugar Puppy and the Lovely Dumplings
  Today's stripping has as much to do with its parent art of burlesque as the Republican Party of Bush has with that of Lincoln. The current model is a thoughtless debasement unfit to windmill its progenitor's tassles. So even though her act doesn't shy from the doffing of clothes in close... More >>
• Best Comedy Troupe
  Monkeys With Hand Grenades
  Yeah, the name's entry-level funny, the kind of thing junior high kids might name a band, and the 30-plays-in-60-minutes bit whiffs of gimmickry. What's key is that the Monkeys are disciplined but daring writers and performers crafting sharp, staccato bits that, at their best, will have you... More >>
• Best Actor/Actress
  Jan Rogge
  Like most of the characters in Tracy Letts' plays, Bug's Agnes floats around her life like cigarette ash in a beer can. She's where she is, and she isn't going anyplace soon. Lonely, coked-up, menaced by a violent ex, Agnes is a disaster, the kind of person you might be cousins with but hope you... More >>
• Best One-Two Punch
  Cedric Hayman
  Here's to rage and range. Out of nowhere, it seemed, just two years out of college, Cedric Hayman headlined twin Unicorn shows and found visceral life in characters who, on the page, verge upon abstractions. In Topdog/Underdog, his Booth was a con man of ferocious charisma, an angry but boyish... More >>
• Best Performance in a Bad Play
  Corrie Van Ausdal
  Even our culture's most gifted founts of outrageous pop fun sometimes flag. It happened to His Royal Badness, whose shows veer these days between greatest-hits coasting and smooth-jazz nightmares. The humdrum even hit Late Night Theatre back in the spring, when its parody of Prince's lone... More >>
• Best Play
  The Cripple of Inishmaan
  The American Heartland Theatre twice knocked us out over the past year, first with the dark Affluenza! and then with the surprisingly not-godawful Tuesdays With Morrie. The Unicorn dazzled consistently, and the remarkable Voysey Inheritance at the Kansas City Repertory Theatre seemed a lock for... More >>
• Best Theater Company
  Unicorn Theatre
  Here's a dissertation topic: What is the relationship between a mendacious presidential administration and the flowering across this beleaguered country of rich, nourishing art? Unicorn Theatre Producing Artistic Director (and gifted play director herself) Cynthia Levin dubbed the theater's 30th... More >>
• Best Ballsy Theater Company, Nonprofessional
  Minds Eye Theatre
  The Minds Eye folks will probably never live down the Caligula they brought us a few years back, but even though that existential nudie show might have shocked our parents, it's nothing compared with the school-shooting comedy from late this summer, a show not unsympathetic to the shooter and... More >>
• Best Young Impresario
  Steven Eubank
  Singing theme-park nerd by day, director of drag-and-underpants-themed musicals by night, Steven Eubank (whose responsibilities in Worlds of Fun's Stax of Wax show have him performing five shows a day) is just 21, but he estimates that he's directed more than a dozen plays and musicals. (His... More >>