Attendees at the Prairie Village Arts Fair this weekend will have the chance to inspire and take home a poem written on the spot by a former Poet Laureate of Kansas, Huascar Medina. Huascar Medina served as the Poet Laureate of Kansas from 2019 to 2022 and became an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, in 2022. Huascar Medina has authored three books of poetry: Protest As Love Poem (Meadowlark Press, 2026) Un Mango Grows in Kansas (Spartan Press, 2020) and How to Hang the Moon (Spartan...

DJ Matheny in her studio Some things endure. In the long tradition of painting, portraits of people have been one through-line in art history, as proven by the Fayum portraits, spectacularly alive-looking, done in encaustic, and executed as far back as 100 BCE. Those portraits were centered on the identity of the subject. Less so for the contemporary portraits by Kansas City artist DJ Matheny, who paints "narrative portraits," suggesting a more universal exploration of the human experience....

Some artist studios are pristine and well-appointed. Some verge on total chaos. Some feel like a Bohemian crash pad; others have a strong utilitarian vibe. Some convert a garage into a studio, others paint in a bathroom or kitchen. Plein air painters paint outdoors. Lisa Ervin paints in the middle of her family. Ervin shares her creative space with her two young sons. Ervin, who works as a clothes designer during the day, paints whenever she can in her home's "maker space." There's a small...