Jon Rubin is an interdisciplinary artist who creates interventions into public life that re-imagine individual, group, and institutional behavior. Rubin is an associate professor in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University and Chair of the Contextual Practice area. Projects include Conflict Kitchen, The Last Billboard The Royal Danish Protesters, and The Independent School of Art. He has exhibited at The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Guggenheim Museum; The Mercosul Biennial, Brazil; The Shanghai Biennial; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; The Carnegie International; as well as in backyards, living rooms and street corners.

What kind of art can you create with a Road Roller? Find out on Friday, April 5 at the Kansas City Art Institute’s 12th Annual Road Roller Day at Lead Bank. The process requires lots of hands-on work drawing, carving, and inking the plates, setting up the prints, and working with the road roller to eventually “roll over” all of the art. The public is encouraged to stop by between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. in the Lead Bank parking lot located at 1801 Main Street. You can view a video from a previous year here. “Lead Bank is proud to be involved in such a cool and creative event,” said Josh Rowland," CEO of Lead Bank. “We’re excited to host this event again and to be a part of the process as we share this art with our community neighbors, providing them a cultural piece for reflection and enjoyment,” Josh added. Steamroller engraving is an experience that is not often available for public viewing. The process requires a steamroller, a heavy construction vehicle normally used for leveling surfaces, to be used as the pressure point to transfer the ink from a matrix onto a fabric or paper, creating a…

Mel Ziegler began his undergraduate studies at the Rhode Island School of Design, later transferring to the Kansas City Art Institute to complete his BFA in 1978. He earned an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1982. It was in Kansas City that he met Kate Ericson, his future artistic collaborator of 18 years. Together, Ericson and Ziegler made influential site-specific installations and objects concerned with mapping trajectories, questioning history, and highlighting the specificity of places and communities. After the tragic and premature death of his partner Kate Ericson in 1995, Mel Ziegler has continued to show works nationally and internationally. Ziegler earned a Loeb Fellowship for study at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University in 1996-97. He continues to lecture and exhibit throughout the United States, Europe and South America. He is currently a Professor of Art and Chair of the Department of Art at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN.

Christi Hodgen is the author of books of fiction. Her most recent novel, Elegies for the Brokenhearted, was hailed by The New York Times Book Review as “the literary equivalent of a hand grenade.” Elegies was an Editors’ Choice selection in both The New York Times Book Review and Booklist and was released in 2014 its German translation. Her second book, Hello, I Must Be Going, was featured by Barnes & Noble in their “Discover Great New Writers” series. A Jeweler’s Eye for Flaw, Hodgen’s collection of short stories, won the 2001 AWP Award for Short Fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award. Hodgen has also published short works of fiction and nonfiction in over a dozen literary journals and anthologies, including Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, Conjunctions, New Stories from the South, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology. Two novellas, Special Problems and The History of Baseball, have been published as Kindle Singles. Her work has received several national awards, including two Pushcart Prizes, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship.

See, photograph and experience an artistic adventure as illustration students ride wacky vehicles made only from cardboard and glue. Can a Kansas City Art Institute illustration student build a vehicle out of cardboard and glue, climb on and drive it down an 80-foot long wooden rail? Find out Wednesday, April 24 at the KCAI’s annual Rail Day. Students from Professor Steve Mayse’s Image and Form Exploration class create the cars out of cardboard and glue then they attempt to ride them down the 80-foot long,18-inches high rail. The vehicles must withstand the student’s weight and move forward with the help of a team of two or more students for balance. Past examples of these unique vehicles include a lit cigarette, a red dragon and a Pac Man.