This is an article I wrote for The Pitch, Kansas City’s renowned alternative publication. You can read the full article here.
Local artists banding together to continue the legacy of a beloved art gallery? It sounds like a subplot in a YA novel, but after Beco Gallery was forced to close the doors to its gallery in 2022, members of the local art community worked together to evolve Beco Gallery into its new identity and continue its legacy.
On Feb. 21, The Waiting Room, located in the West Bottoms’s Holsum Warehouse building, opened its doors to the public with a small gallery and work-in-progress studio space.
The space is the continuation of Beco Gallery, founded in 1999 by Rebecca Ederer and Collette Keenan as part of their business Beco Flowers. However, when Beco Flowers lost its location in the Crossroads Arts District in Kansas City due to doubling rent prices, the flower shop relocated and parted with its gallery.
SK Reed, The Waiting Room co-founder, decided to continue Beco Gallery’s work by curating 10 off-site exhibitions, before partnering with co-founder David Lieffring and co-curator Lily Erb to work to curate a new, permanent gallery and art space.
After climbing down the stairs to the basement of the industrial era building, you enter the seemingly haunted basement turned collective. Lieffring and Reed have spent the past couple of months transforming the space into Kansas City’s newest artist-run gallery.
“Beco had this amazing legacy of supporting local, emerging and underrepresented artists, and it felt like a real staple in the community,” Reed says. “I feel like in Kansas City there’s this big kind of DIY energy, because we don’t have as many resources as larger cities. So a lot of artists are kind of like chipping in to try and give each other opportunities, especially for those that don’t have that career set up yet.”
When Beco closed its doors, it still had a year of exhibitions planned with a multitude of artists, and Reed was determined to make sure these artists still had the opportunity for their art to be shown. “It’s really important when you get a show. So it was pretty cool that all these other spaces across the Kansas City Art scene chipped in and hosted our shows,” Reed says.
As you traverse the space, you’re met with doors leading into work-in-progress studios to house artists, alongside the gallery space that hosts the current exhibition. Titled “Beco-se Of You,” it is a selected 25 works of art from 25 artists who have engaged with Beco Gallery in the past as exhibiting artists, former curators, or community members.
“i captured you in a bottle and forgot to let you out (the rose of memphis)” by Jackob Graves was on display at The Waiting Rooms first exhibition titled “Beco-se of You.”
As somebody who minored in visual arts in college, I take a gallery very seriously. This exhibition definitely earned its place in being one of my recent favorites. My favorite piece, by Jackob Graves, was a heart sculpture made of a concoction of lace, wire, newspaper, a broken brooch, rhinestones, false eyelashes, confetti, wax, paraffin, and… a vanity mirror stand?
Despite being made of things I could find in my bathroom trash can, I contemplated taking this $670 sculpture home with me. This was a theme in the gallery, as every piece was so captivating that I could feel my wallet start to shiver in fear. Metaphorically, of course.
The space felt representative of the best of what the Kansas City art scene has to offer. Alongside being offered drinks and snacks in the most ‘midwestern niceness’ fashion ever, the gallery was bustling with midwestern artists bleeding with pride of the work being showcased.
“We’re still trying to hold on and extend the history of Beco Gallery. We’re just trying to change the name so it still feels like the extension of this larger project,” Reed says. “The Waiting Room just feels like an important change.”
The Waiting Room is located in the basement of the old Holsum Warehouse building located at 1106 Santa Fe St. in the West Bottoms district of Kansas City, MO. To learn more about The Waiting Room, future exhibitions, and exhibition dates, you can follow them on Instagram.