Northeast News

October 12, 2016

KANSAS CITY, Missouri – What do you want out of your community? How about your police department?

A temporary, interactive art project set up this week at the Kansas City, Missouri East Patrol Division (2640 Prospect Ave.) is attempting to answer just those questions. Kansas City artists Charlie Mylie and Jori Sackin have partnered with KCPD on the temporary exhibit, which asks officers and members of the community to fill in the blank on the following statement: “All I want is _____.”

In concert with East Patrol, the artists set up their art project, entitled “The Big Board at East Patrol,” on Wednesday, October 12. The big board is a giant, magnetized graph board situated in East Patrol’s lobby. After residents finish the statement, “All I want is ____.”, Mylie and Sackin will illustrate the responses onto magnetic strips, before allowing those who provided the response to place the strip on an axis determining where the statement falls: from ambiguous to specific; and unachievable to achievable. While the original statement author initially places the strip, other members of the community are invited to move the statements around the board based on their own perceptions.

“Then anyone who comes by can argue the placement of anyone else’s answer,” Sackin said. “That’s why they’re on magnets, so they can move. It’s a socially negotiated thing – we kind of decide what our words mean, but other people do, too.”

For Sackin and Mylie, this is the second incarnation of their “Giant Board” project. The artists had initially conceived the project for an area bank earlier this year, drawing the attention of KCPD officers. Sackin added that the project is intended to help the community navigate some of the most divisive issues facing our city in a thought-provoking way.

“One of the really good qualities of this project is it can take really contentious, hard-to-deal with issues and frame them in kind of a game,” he said. “It seems to diffuse some of the social anxiety about tense topics and makes a way to have a deeper conversation about them.”

The community is invited to East Patrol to check out the interactive art project from 3:00 p.m. until 6:00 p.m. on both Wednesday, October 12 and Thursday, October 13. For those who can’t make it to East Patrol in person, the department is also soliciting responses through the KCPD’s Facebook page. Responses can also be submitted through the artists’ event page. Mylie and Sackin will be monitoring the page and adding statements to the big board throughout the two-day event.