This week marks Global Entrepreneurship Week in Kansas City as designated by the Kauffman Foundation. While there are around 40 different events across the metro designed to appeal to future entrepreneurs, last Monday at the Kauffman Foundation, two dozen of the area’s top start up businesses pitched their ideas in front of an audience of potential financial partners, mentors, and just plain interested folks. KCPT had its cameras there along with videojournalist Justin Bond.
The name Ken Burns has become synonymous with some of public television’s biggest blockbuster documentaries.
The Civil War. Baseball. Jazz. The National Parks. This Sunday night on KCPT and PBS stations around the country, watch Ken Burn’s latest documentary epic, The Dust Bowl, a morality tale about our relationship to the land that sustains us–a lesson we ignore at our peril.
You can watch the first installment of Ken Burns’ The Dust Bowl this Sunday night at 7 p.m. here on KCPT. One of our metro’s most knowledgeable experts on that slice of our nation’s history, Professor Jay Antle, who is executive director of the sustainability center at Johnson County Community College, sat down with Randy Mason to give a local perspective on The Dust Bowl and to talk about what it means for us today.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Gordon Parks who is recognized as one of the most important photographers of the 20th century.
While the Fort Scott, Kansas native is best known for his iconic images in Life magazine, Parks, the youngest of 15 children was also a novelist, co-founder of Essence Magazine and a successful filmmaker.
When he passed away in 2006, he was eulogized as a true Renaissance man who constantly pushed boundaries and broke stereotypes.
Over the weekend here in Kansas City, Gordon Parks Elementary School threw a centennial celebration to honor the trailblazing artist at the historic Gem Theater. And Parks’ daughter, Toni Parks, flew in from London to join the musical salute to her late father.
At the Gem Theater, students from Gordon Parks Elementary performed the prologue of a new musical honoring the life of the school’s gifted namesake. The world premiere will be next June and the school hopes to perform it every year.
While we remember Parks’ photographs, he was an accomplished novelist and poet, and director of countless films, including the 1969 drama The Learning Tree which recounts his own experiences of racial discrimination growing up in rural Kansas.
This week, we feature extended local contributions to the national documentary Veterans Day 11.11.11 which will air at 5:30 p.m. on Sunday, November 11. We honor some of the local people who put service above self. Their stories are told in the new book Kansas City Spirit: Stories of Service Above Self. Contributing authors Bruce Mathews and Mamie Hughes sit down with Nick Haines to highlight what you can expect to discover in the book. We continue our series Women and Girls Lead with a profile of local artist Peregrine Honig.
