Present Tense: Randy Bacon freeze-frames our city’s diversity as museum modernity
Courtesy David Remley
When you visit the Kansas City Museum, housed in a beautiful, recently-renovated former beaux-arts mansion on Gladstone Boulevard that once belonged to a lumber baron, you might expect to see a lot of history. You’re probably thinking of stories featuring well-known Kansas City characters like Tom Pendergast, neighborhoods like 18th and Vine, or businesses like J. Rieger & Co., the modern iteration of which sits right across the train tracks from the museum itself.
All that to say, when you visit a museum, you’re probably thinking about the past. But the present is what you’ll find if you visit the third floor. That’s the location for an exhibit called “Our City, Our Stories,” which has occupied the space since 2021. This January, the exhibit, made up of photographs and story cards depicting the lives of everyday Kansas Citians from diverse walks of life, got an upgrade, part of a plan to make the exhibit more interactive and invite more people from the community to share their stories.
In addition to still portraits from photographer Randy Bacon, the exhibit now includes nine “motion portraits,” short videos by Bacon profiling KC activists, artists, athletes, politicians, and more. Subjects sit in front of Bacon’s camera and tell their stories or follow prompts to help them share their perspectives. The current set of motion portraits (more are planned for the future) make up a section of the exhibit called KC Together. They include KC Current midfielder Desi Scott, Making Movies frontman Enrique Chi, and Jackson County representative Emily Weber.
Chiluba Musonda, the museum’s deputy director, says KC Together is a reminder of Kansas City’s diverse appeal: “We have people from all different walks of life and backgrounds who decided to settle here, whether it’s someone on the soccer team who came here from Canada (Scott), or someone who was born in South Korea and became an elected official here (Weber). These profiles remind us why Kansas City is such a unique city.”
For Musonda, who came to Kansas City 20 years ago from Zambia, this is a topic with personal resonance.
“We don’t market ourselves as a global town, and some of our city leaders don’t see us as that, but as someone who decided to come here, there is a global pull,” Musonda says. “We have great businesses and museums and cultural richness. In a small way, these stories expose that beauty.”
Anna Marie Tutera, executive director at the Kansas City Museum, says the exhibit is also an important illustration of the museum’s mission to keep the city’s past and present in conversation with each other.
“We’re not just focused on the past,” Tutera says. “You’re going to come to the Kansas City Museum and have a rich experience in history and the humanities, but you’re also going to hear about issues that are currently impacting our city, people’s hopes and dreams for the future, organizations they’re involved in, new resources that you might not have known of before or ways you can become more involved in your city, your neighborhood, your community. These stories are important to tell because they can serve as a catalyst for personal, individual action.”
Pursuing profound connections
To that end, it’s worth noting that some of the stories on display in KC Together explore beauty and perseverance through experiences of profound injustice. One of the exhibit’s featured subjects is Kevin Strickland, who was exonerated in 2021 after 43 years of wrongful incarceration for a murder he didn’t commit. He’s now working to change Missouri legislation that denies compensation for people like him who have been wrongly convicted and released.
Bacon said his experience meeting and speaking with Strickland is representative of everyone he spoke with for this project—an instant connection between himself and his portrait subject.
“Obviously, I’ve read so much in the news about him, and I was a little nervous about speaking with him,” Bacon says. “He walks in, and I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh.’ I can just feel his presence and know that he is a good soul. Instantaneously, it’s like, ‘There we go, there’s a bond.’ By the end of it, it was saying, ‘Kevin, my new friend, thank you.’ Moments like that keep me going.”
Seeking and depicting profound connections with strangers is essentially Bacon’s stock in trade. The Springfield-based photographer is the founder of 8 Billion Ones, a project with the stated mission of “Using the art of photography, motion films, and written word to present people’s unique stories in an artful, impacting form so that human transformation occurs exponentially.” His work includes exhibitions on literacy, mental health, homelessness, living with physical disabilities, and more.
“When I do this work, I don’t know how it’s going to go. I come in with a clean slate and let the natural flow of that process come forward with the motion work, still work, and the words associated with it,” Bacon says of his projects through 8 Billion Ones. “There’s an organic nature to it. An honest, raw nature to it. It’s hard to walk away without being touched by that.”
That process naturally leads to some vulnerable conversations, and Bacon says he hopes that intimacy with his KC Together subjects comes through in the finished product.
“I want people to experience that as if ‘Well, gosh, I don’t know this person,’ but they walk away, and in some strange aspect, it’s like they’re connected to them now,” Bacon says. “So many people are going to walk in and know some of the names, like Kevin Strickland or Desi from KC Current. They only know that person through what they’ve seen or read, but they’ll walk away with that conversation knowing things they wouldn’t have learned anywhere else. They can say, ‘I know Desi Scott now.’”
Musonda says he’s seen that sense of connection reflected through the ways museum visitors have reacted to the “Our City, Our Stories” exhibit over the course of its evolution.
“It’s been amazing to see people’s reactions, particularly to see young people see representations of themselves on display,” he says. “It’s a celebration of all of us in a subtle way, where we get to see ourselves through these selected individuals.”
Reflecting KC’s past, present, and future
In the future, Tutera says the museum plans to continue working with Bacon on motion portraits for KC Together that will rotate to comment on current exhibits in other parts of the building, portraits that can only be viewed on-site at the museum. Eventually, there will also be an audio component to the exhibit incorporating both contemporary oral histories and interviews from the museum’s archive. The goal is to foster a sense of connection with other Kansas Citians that reaches across divides, be they political, cultural, or historical.
“People come to the museum, and while each of our stories is unique, you have a shared, lived experience with someone else,” Tutera says. “That’s really critical, especially now, over the past several years. I think that’s what a city museum can do best.”
Bacon says he got to share that connection firsthand, and it’s helped him feel more optimistic about the future.
“There’s a universal quality to what we talk about (in the motion portraits) and the issues we face as humanity,” Bacon says. “Humanity, a lot of times, gets a bad rap. What I see from the people I spoke with for this project is that they bring a lot of wisdom and hope not only to Kansas City but in general.”
Musonda says he agrees and appreciates the way the portraits break down stereotypes in ways that connect to his own experience and ways that present him with new perspectives.
“You might think about what’s going on in the media and the negative perception of immigrants, then you come to our museum and hear stories that have an immigrant piece embedded in their story,” he says. “You encounter an individual who was incarcerated for so many years accused of having committed a crime he was innocent of, and you hear his hope and dreams for the future. You hear from members of the Native American community who have these shared hopes and dreams that bring us all closer. You see these people as people.”
Bacon says all of it is a credit to a museum that has a special approach to the way it views the community it serves.
“I’ve been so fortunate in my long career to work with a lot of organizations and other museums, and Kansas City, which I consider my second home, has a museum that I can purely say is so uniquely incredible and community-focused,” he says. “We’re doing something as a museum that’s there to connect our community, to show that we’re more alike than different. Through that, we grow a stronger community.”
