By The Shout

Welcome back to the Weekly SHOUT. Our managing editor starts us off by musing on the value of arts criticism using Kendrick Lamar's halftime show as a springboard — an exercise that sets the tone for this rather cosmopolitan installment. The jet-setting quality of the newsletter was not intentional, but it shows the impact our region's artists and institutions have on the broader cultural landscape.

Case in point: two household names — Jeremy Scott and Katherine Bernhardt — who also happen to be native Missourians, are being fêted at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park in a grand homecoming that merited a shout-out in Vogue. In another instance of inter-regional excellence, a dance company based simultaneously in Los Angeles and Wichita just released a special love-themed folio of dance films for your favorite decapitated saint's day. 

Please read on for more fascinating snippets, and, as usual, our latest stories and can't-miss events roundup (plus a BUNCH of art-job openings — scroll down if you're looking for work in the creative economy).

With all our very best, 

Your friends at the SHOUT

A story about the value of critical writing

Like (almost) everyone else, I watched Kendrick Lamar strut around the Super Bowl halftime stage in a pair of boot-cut jeans last Sunday. To this Chiefs fan, it was certainly the highlight of the night. Yet culture critic Soraya Nadia McDonald enhanced my appreciation of Lamar's performance when she eloquently argued that it "was about far more than just a rap beef." The rapper's megahit "Not Like Us" is also a statement that neglectful, abusive men are “not like us.”

And that reminded me of the artist Robert Peterson, whose first major museum exhibition closed at the Wichita Art Museum in January. At a WAM event, Peterson said that “In the movies, you see a lot of absent fathers in Black families. That just wasn't my truth, and it wasn't something that I accept or something I want to be responsible for not speaking against."

In another interview, Peterson offered an iteration of "Not Like Us," stating that he doesn't work with "dudes that are deadbeats … I want to paint the picture of men that I see, men that I'm surrounded by, who I am as a man.” 

I'm not writing to convince you of these artists' merit, but to demonstrate how something beautiful can happen when you read criticism. As I told Soraya in an exchange on Bluesky, what I love about great criticism is that it expands the reader’s awareness. I spent hours last fall analyzing Peterson’s show, and I’ve heard "Not like Us" countless times. But I needed another perspective to fully grasp their unified view of Black masculinity. —Emily Christensen

P.S. If you missed "Robert Peterson: Somewhere in America" at WAM, you can experience it through Jeromiah Taylor's review for the SHOUT or by picking up the catalog in the museum store. And if you feel like a road trip, the exhibition will make its next stop in Dallas at the Green Family Art Foundation later this year.

News that caught our eye

Wichita playwright produced by national radio theater
Shoestring Radio Theater produced a short play written by Anne Welsbacher, who's also the SHOUT's new performing arts editor. In the two-hander "Terminal," a daughter and her father hash things out on a train ride. The elder character is loosely inspired by Anne's own father, the late Dick Welsbacher, who was the longtime head of the theater program at Wichita State.

RKDC releases Valentine's dance film series
The Wichita and California-based dance company led by choreographer Regina Klenjoski introduces "Love Letters," a new five-part dance film series "created to celebrate love, connection, and movement" and choreographed different RKDC company artists.

National and state arts policy developments 

• A bill in the Kansas legislature would make Kansas the 41st state to offer film production tax incentives (Anna Kaminski for the Kansas Reflector)
• Ron Estes partners with California Democrat to sponsor federal tax incentives for independent music producers (Anna Kaminski for the Kansas Reflector)

What we're reading 

Kansas is…en Vogue?

Unbeknownst to this newsletter editor, fashion designer Jeremy Scott — acclaimed reviver of Moschino and founder of an eponymous brand — is a KCMO native. And now, 28 years after his Paris debut, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, Kansas, has launched an exhibition dedicated to Scott and the artist Katherine Bernhardt, Vogue's Nicole Phelps reports. Bernhardt, herself a Missouri native now based in St. Louis, is a renowned visual artist with an international presence. She and Scott also share a fascination with the symbols of consumer culture — hence the exhibition's name, "A Match Made in Heaven: Jeremy Scott x Katherine Bernhardt." 

Read Vogue's coverage of the exhibition, on view in Overland Park through Aug. 3. 

Jeremy Scott Meets His Match in Katherine Bernhardt—Go Inside Their Joint Exhibition in Kansas City

The Jeremy Scott and Katherine Bernhardt exhibition, “A Match Made in Heaven,” runs through August 3, 2025 at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art.

VogueNicole Phelps

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