THE 93rd Annual Plaza Art Fair
The Plaza Art Fair encompasses nine city blocks and welcomes a crowd of over 250,000. Featuring 240 artists, the Plaza Art Fair is a top-ranked, national art event with three live music stages and over 20 featured restaurant booths. It continues to be a weekend of people simply celebrating art and each other, as well as Kansas City’s unofficial welcome to the fall season.
2024 Featured Artist
Lydia Randolph
Lydia Randolph is a full-time artist residing in north Alabama. Lydia draws inspiration from her life scenes, she paints details from her life, relics, and ruins. She chooses to focus on nature, Lydia explains, "Nature seemed to hold the biggest potential to expose the whole illusion...it's just shapes and repeating patterns."
By examining Lydia's work, one can surely see the repetition emerge. Lydia's simplification of these idyllic scenes exposes the triangles, squares, rectangles, and diamonds in the water of a creek bed. This beauty has certainly captured Lydia's eye, and, although these scenes seem extraordinarily peaceful, they are not without excitement. Armed with a miniature sketchbook and a small tin of watercolors, Lydia quickly captures a study of a scene before returning to her studio. Then, she will make a quick sketch when she gets home to capture "what's interesting" about the scene. If it's a large work, she will do a more detailed drawing to capture the movement and composition before moving to her canvas.
Although Lydia's work is extremely detailed, her goal is to simplify what she sees so that other people can see it. Lydia says, "I see both a tragic and stunning poetry in our mountains, creeks and canyons. It absorbs me to the exclusion of almost everything else. I paint what I see and when I can share that, when someone else can also see the beauty of a thing otherwise thought of as junk, or a cow, a dead tree, small creek — when I can communicate the magnificence of that, I feel like I've done my job as a poet and artist — a wandering fool left staring into the tide pools longer than is prudent or profitable."
Live Music
Live Music Schedule:
9/20/24
The Outtakes
5:00 PM – 6:00 PM
Main Stage
Jonathan Ramsey
5:00 PM – 6:30 PM
Acoustic Stage
Frankie Shorez & Mercy Fire
5:15 PM – 6:00 PM
Local Music Stage
Nathan Corsi & the Atomic Daydream
6:30 PM – 7:15 PM
Local Music Stage
Nick Nave Band
6:30 PM – 8:00 PM
Main Stage
David Luther
6:45 PM – 8:15 PM
Acoustic Stage
Jass
7:45 PM – 8:30 PM
Local Music Stage
Cory Jackson
8:30 PM – 10:00 PM
Acoustic Stage
The Suburbans
8:30 PM – 10:00 PM
Main Stage
The Phantastics
9:00 PM – 10:00 PM
Local Music Stage
Cost: Free.
Venues:
Country Club Plaza, 4706 Broadway Blvd, Kansas City, MO 64112
Stages:
Main Stage (on the Wornall Bridge)
Local Music Stage (Ward Parkway & Pennsylvania)
Acoustic Stage (Nichols & Central)
For more info plazaartfair@evenergy.com
