MEET OUR MASTERMINDS
For the sixth time, we're singling out four of Kc's cultural leaders. we think they look like classics.
Since the first MasterMinds, in 2006, The Pitch has given $20,000 to local artists. On April 2, four new MasterMind Award winners join a roll that includes some of Kansas City's most fascinating and dedicated cultural forces. Each new recipient picks up a check for $1,000 — no strings attached. If past winners are any indication, the talented people we've chosen this year will only get more interesting.
Each year, we ask our readers to nominate artists, innovators and entrepreneurs who are shaping the community through fashion and design, literature, visual art and performance. This isn't a popularity contest or a lifetime-achievement award; in fact, several of our MasterMind grants have gone to people who know what it's like to work with little recognition and less financial reward. With the MasterMinds, we set out to recognize deserving individuals or groups whose contributions have influenced the metro's cultural and creative landscape. It's our way of saying thanks — and encouraging the winners to keep surprising us.
We'll hand out the checks at our annual Artopia party — a night of fashion, music, performance and food — on Saturday, April 2, at the Screenland (1656 Washington). The party that night starts at 7:30. Tickets cost $30 at the door; call 816-561-6061 for details.
Until then, you can get to know the 2011 MasterMinds below.
WINNER: VISUAL ART
David Gant
As though it weren't obvious from the giant paintings of Crossroads figures, which covered every inch of wall in the giant gallery at the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center last summer, David Gant, their maker, declares: "I really like painting portraits."
He's only 24 years old, but Gant has been painting portraits for more than half his life. He started out as a doodle-crazy fourth-grader, sketching the seashell whorls of classmates' ears instead of paying attention in class. And he copied images from Spawn and Ninja Turtle comic books. But he traces what he calls his "fascination with portraiture" to volumes of Civil War photographs he found in the school library. He spent hundreds of hours drawing the features of soldiers and generals. Something about the Victorian look and the somber, still expressions required by the lengthy photographic process appealed to him then and influences him now.
In sixth grade, Gant found a teacher who taught him to see the blue and green under skin tones. But for most of his school career, he got in trouble for drawing instead of doing whatever else he was supposed to be doing. So he rushed through high school in three years and entered the Kansas City Art Institute. He loved it there but didn't stay long — tuition problems and dorm disputes, he says. Only a semester after he first enrolled, the 17-year-old was living on the floor of a friend's studio in midtown.
From there he returned to what he'd always done: rendering faces. He got supplies by Dumpster-diving, making canvas stretchers out of old window frames, sometimes painting on drop cloths. "I wasn't going to let not having money stop me from making work," he says.
Gant lives and works in his Charlotte Street studio, where he moved about three years ago, and he has gotten to know people in the Crossroads. He started talking about a massive portrait project, and in January 2010, he began. His friend Todd Weiner found him more stretchers, and friends and neighbors dropped in to sit. Word spread, and people jumped onboard. Friends recruited friends to pose. A big box of art supplies, containing thousands of dollars' worth of oil paints, came his way from someone's aborted hobby. More than a dozen times, Gant arrived home to find supplies dropped at his doorstep by anonymous donors — half-finished or thrift-store paintings he could paint over. "It's kind of what the whole thing was about," Gant says, still amazed at the generosity, "the larger artist community here."
Comments (0)