By Nicole Mitchell
“The next time someone asks you why LGBT Pride marches exist or why Gay Pride Month is June tell them, ‘A bisexual woman named Brenda Howard thought it should be.’” — Brenda Howard
While it’s true that the first pride was a riot, many credit bisexual and LGBTQIA+ Activist Brenda Howard for continuing the fight and making June officially known as Pride Month—therefore awarding her the name of “Mother of Pride.”
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By Nicole Mitchell
Kansas City’s Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art is opening its newest art exhibit this month: the Women to Watch exhibition (Women to Watch—A New World: 2024). The series has been held every few years and invites women artists from across the country to respond to a theme picked by Washington, D.C.-based organization National Museum of Women Artists (NMWA) curators. Kemper participated most recently in the series in 2019 with Paper Routes—Women to Watch 2020. This exhibition will be the seventh total installment of the Women to Watch series.
The theme for this year’s exhibition was inspired by the events of 2020, including a global health pandemic, intense calls for social reform, and political division. Artists across the U.S. used this as inspiration to express visions of a new world.
This year, Kemper’s presentation of Women to Watch—A New World: 2024 features five local artists Mona Cliff/HanukGahNé (Spotted Cloud) (Aaniiih, born 1977), Bianca Fields (American, born 1995), Bev Gegen (American, born 1937), Melanie Johnson (American, born 1978), and Sun Young Park (South Korean, born 1990). The presentation was juried by Kemper Museum Director of Curatorial Affairs Erin Dziedzic and presented in cooperation with the Greater Kansas City Area Committee of the NMWA.
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By Nicole Mitchell
Caley Rose is a female empowerment pop singer of four years—and she’s just getting started. So far, her music has been in commercials, she’s been streaming her music creation, her single “GAME OVER” is on the Billboard charts, and, coming up soon, Rose will be performing at an event this Saturday in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
While Rose has been booked and busy regarding her music career recently, it wasn’t always that way. “I was always a singer,” she said. “But I got lost along the way and took some detours.” Her original end goal was to join Broadway as a performer. “However, if I was honest with myself, I really just wanted to do pop music.”
It took Rose a while into her music career to make the switch to pop. “I was working with different producers, and I wasn’t a songwriter,” she said. At the time, Rose followed the lead of what her songwriters wanted her music to sound like. “It wasn’t until four years ago that I started songwriting,” she explained. “Once I realized myself as a writer, I saw myself as a singer.”
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By Kelcie McKenney
Photos by Travis Young
I reached a creative roadblock in the midst of the 2020 pandemic. I wasn’t making things for myself, and my mental health was suffering because of it. So I challenged myself to make. And this book was created.
Over the fall of 2020, I pieced together poetry and film photography to create Tessellation, a zine about falling apart and putting yourself back together again.
Over a year and a half later, Tessellation is ready for the world. And because this zine helped me through a dark time, I want it to help others. So I’ve partnered with Barrier Babes—a Kansas City nonprofit that strives to promote inclusive and unapologetic sexual health education. Barrier Babes distributes condoms as a way to help lower rising STI rates in Kansas City.
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By Sophie Oswald
Illustrations by Matthew Vargas
“Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don’t,” Rebecca Solnit remarked in her essay Men Explain Things to Me. While Solnit didn’t specifically use the word “mansplain” in her popular essay, she was one of the first to discuss this phenomenon. Conversations surrounding her essay shortly resulted in the term appearing in a comment section online.
Most women, maybe even all women, have been there. Men have been explaining things in patronizing ways for centuries.
Generally, mansplaining involves a conversation between a man and a woman, but sometimes it can happen between two men or with a man and a non-binary person.
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Catcall 