The United States is filled with iconic landscapes and memorable landmarks, and many of them were depicted in the stylized prints by WPA artists in the late 1930s. The colors and forms of those destinations were firmly imprinted in the minds and memories of our culture, in no small part because of these striking posters. Mary R. Gage recognized that Kansas has iconic views, too, and hatched a plan to honor them.

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....