Wheelhouse Review

Peregrine Honig’s studio is a menagerie of intimate objects. Substituting for the sun—not in brightness, but in grandeur—a large antique chandelier hangs at the center. It’s fractured, uneven, and twinkling light serves as a tonal maypole for the individual objects and scenes it lights with its branches.

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It’s hard to know where David Ford’s studio truly begins and ends. After all, it’s only one part of a compound he owns on 18^th Street, a “for-profit arts center”, as he calls it. Within those walls, one will find YJ’s Snack Bar (which Ford also owns), Birdies (artist Peregrine Honig’s intimate apparel apothecary), a yoga studio, design studios, artist studios (including Honig’s), Peggy Noland’s storefront, a tattoo parlor, and Ford's Mardi Gras krewe’s shrine, which of course he established and maintains. He also lives there, somewhere.

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We visited Nicole Mauser’s studio in the late winter of 2011, when all of Kansas City seemed to be washed in brown snowmelt, dried by the mauve and wintry sunlight of March. When I walked inside Nicole’s studio—located on the second floor of her and her husband’s shirtwaist home—I was reminded for the first time in months that pigment, sunlight, and my own eyes are capable of cooperating to produce flashes of visual opulence.

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If it hasn’t already, Peggy Noland’s 18^th Street studio-storefront will soon change completely. Every so often it undergoes a complete transformation from its previous iteration; consistently discrete and singular from its surroundings. This summer, a giant green hand pointed visitors toward the door. The door was painted with four words (Peggy Noland, Call Me!) and a telephone number. That’s it.

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Located in the historic Hobbs Building in Kansas City’s West Bottoms district, Ricky Allman’s studio is a place where things happen fast. Alongside several large canvases stapled to the wall, a mobile cart sits ready with dozens of bits of blue tape, ready to mask and re-mask.

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When I first asked Jaimie Warren to tell me about the work she does at the Whoop Dee Doo space, she corrected my assumption that Whoop Dee Doo belonged to her. “Well it’s not at all just me, it’s Whoop Dee Doo, and all the people that make Whoop Dee Doo happen.” Each time Jaimie reiterates that answer, it is given with a smiling effervescence. 

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Ken Ferguson (1928–2004) was a world-renowned and locally loved ceramist. His studio, which Mike photographed shortly after his death, has served as a quiet inspiration for the Wheelhouse Review project. As the images clearly indicate, the space was a well-worn, discrete place with an aura that speaks of the time that was spent there by Ken. A written description is not necessary to communicate what is special about Ken’s studio—but the photographs are.

As Mike, John, and I discussed what this project could be, this collection of photographs served as an important and meaningful placeholder. “I said to Mike, someone’s gotta take pictures of that place,” John recounted to me, the first time we discussed the idea of documenting artist’s studios in Kansas City, “…or else it’ll just go away, and that’ll be it.”

For more about what Wheelhouse Review is, and how it came to be, see the About section.