New Venues Jazz Up Miami, Kansas City Art Scenes

South Miami-Dade Cultural Center

We live in the New York metro area and, for better or worse, within the orbit of its powerful art movements and institutions. Sometimes, "New York" gets it all wrong: witness the Museum of Modern Art's chutzpah in raising its basic admission fee 25% (to twenty-five dollars per person) to cover "operations". Fortunately, there are American cities that have a much better idea about how to bring the arts to the community.

Miami is a case in point. There's much more to South Florida's art world than the world-famous Art Basel. I wrote earlier this summer about "Sketchy Miami," a "bottom-up" approach, in which emerging local artists posted profile sketches online. Meanwhile, an interesting, collective push in the region to attract more "top-down" art venues appears to bearing fruit. According to the Miami Herald, two new sites are opening this month. One of them, The Light Box at Goldman Warehouse, will house a number of arts organizations, including those on the experimental edge. (The warehouse's "grand opening" declaration is something of a misnomer, as events have been held at the site for some time. However, the Miami Light Project and other arts groups are moving into the site, thus the "grand opening" justification.) The other is the South Miami-Dade Cultural Center, a nice, new, shiny building in what has been characterized as an artistically "underserved" district. In other words, it was an artistic Siberia -- until now.

Meanwhile, Kansas City has proudly opened what looks like a beautiful performing arts center. Named after the locally prominent Kauffman family, which owned KC's Major League Baseball team in its glory years, the venue features a slick Moshe Safdie architectural design that, in and of itself, will be a draw. The venue's opening is all to the good, and can only encourage local arts. While not well known, Kansas City has a surprisingly vibrant artistic community and is home to the excellent Nelson-Atkins Museum,  which features some of the finest classical Chinese art outside of Asia.

The Miami and Kansas City openings are refreshing reminders of how living, breathing art contributes vitality to a community and region. The concern is that significant funding is going into glitzy structures rather than to artists and their work. (MOMA's multi-million dollar artists are another story.)