Art Baby

Little miss E has gotten a taste of what the city has to offer her and is now painfully bored at home. So papa and I decided to take her out for a little night on the town and went to First Fridays in the Crossroads. For those of you non-Kansas Citiers (City-ites? not sure), First Fridays is pretty amazing. It began several years back when some of the artists of the city bought some worse- for -wear property in the downtown and started making art and creating their own little pocket galleries in live/work spaces. The word got out that property was cheap down there, and some wealthy artists bought up big buildings and rented out studio space or lofts to the starving artists. This trend grew and grew until more and more galleries (including some super high-end ones) started opening all in this one little part of the city.

My husband and I actually rented and renovated our own little slice of the Crossroads pie several years back when the scene was just taking shape. In exchange for our promise to leave the space better than how we found it, we got cheap rent on a killer space which we used as a live/work/ gallery space for almost a year. It was a strange time and we made lots of art and music, saw a gang of free concerts at Grinders, ate way too many slices of pizza (we had no kitchen for awhile), and made friends with a whole bizarre subset of people. Our old space is still a gallery to this day. But that's a story for another time.

Now on the First Friday of every month, the Crossroads Art District comes alive as the galleries all do their big openings and the people come out to see what's up. There are street performers, live painting demonstrations, mimes, bands and musicians everywhere, and it generally rocks. If you're from New york or somewhere cool, I'm sure you see this kind of awesomeness daily. But it's pretty great for the Midwest.

This is now Everleigh's favorite thing to do :) This First Friday I wore a vintage dress that I LOVE (yay for normal clothes again!), and headed out into the night with my two little loves. Ev rode in the carrier and soaked in all the art action she could take before passing out. We saw incredible paintings by Hung Liu, caught the tail end of a "peace parade", watched a drum circle do their thang, and caught some really cool art and sculpture pieces by locals. Later, Everleigh woke up to see some street performers dancing with fire, which was pretty awesome. From her facial expression, I think it's safe to say her mind was completely blown. Then we took our little baby bird home and she slept like a mil. Win-win.

**Photo by KCPhotoBlog http://kcphotoblog.com