Charlotte Street Foundation

CSF’s Urban Culture Project is thrilled to be hosting Let’s Paint TV, a live internet television show starring Los Angeles-based artist and cult phenomenon John Kilduff.  Begun as a public access television show in Los Angeles and now a YouTube sensation, Let’s Paint TV stars Kilduff, who paints, blends drinks, answers phone calls, and completes a variety of other tasks — all while wearing a suit and running on a treadmill.

Let’s Paint TV will be taped and streamed live (at www.letspainttv.com) from Urban Culture Project Space, 21 East 12th Street. Open to the public, live shows are Tuesday November 17 through November 24, from 6-7pm each day. Each show will feature an array of local talents as guest stars. Third Friday, November 20 features a reception from 6-9pm, with a special live show at 9pm.  Read full press release. See the schedule of daily guest stars!

Mythmakers, opening Friday, November 20, 6-9pm at Paragraph, 23 East 12th, embodies the youthful, make-your-own-fun, do-it-yourself-and-together spirit of the Kansas City art scene. Organized by artist/curator Megan Mantia, the densely packed exhibition will showcase a cross-section of emerging artists who place themselves at the center of their work, constructing mythic personas and fantasy narratives that fuse autobiographical aspects with illusions of grandeur, typically with a sizeable dose of humor thrown in as well. Featured artists are Drew Bolton, Spencer Brown, Cody Critcheloe, Kyle Devine, Ariel Hart, Hooliganship, Lamano, Dustin Maberry, Rah! Booty, Leone Anne Reeves, Elisha Stetson, Ryan Tacata, Jaimie Warren, and Ariel Williams.

While expressed through diverse media and formats, this personal mythmaking frequently involves performative elements, which this exhibition will emphasize. Opening night will feature “scheduled activations of personalities and installations,” says Mantia, who also notes that the collaborative nature of many of these artists’ work will encourage audience participation. Read full press release.

An exhibition-related website has been created at www.myth-makers.org

In collaboration with Grand Arts, CSF’s Urban Culture Project presents My Barbarian’s Broke People’s Baroque Peoples’ Theater at la Esquina, 1000 West 25 Street, on November 14, 8pm. My Barbarian is a collaborative of LA based performers who bring theater, art, music and video together to make site-responsive works that often include collaboration with local artists. Such projects have been presented in New York City, Trento, Italy, Cairo, Egypt and Vilnius, Lithuania, resulting in works that take a celebratory and critical look at cultural difference, identity and the fine art/entertainment divide.

For Broke People’s Baroque Peoples’ Theater at la Esquina, My Barbarian is collaborating with selected local performers, who will complete a Master Class during the week leading up to the performance. The subject of the project is survival through economic hardship. The free public performance on November 14 will take the form of a variety show and pageant, including original material by My Barbarian as well as songs, dances, sketches, speeches and scenes work-shopped over the course of the week.

This project is a component of “Ecstatic Resistance” a group show curated by Emily Roysdon (New York and Stockholm) on view at Grand Arts November 13-January 16, which includes works by  Sharon Hayes (New York), Jeanine Oleson (New York),  A.L. Steiner (New York), Matthew Lutz-Kinoy (Amsterdam), Dean Spade (Seattle), Craig Willse (New York), Ian White (London), Yael Bartana (Tel Aviv and Amsterdam), Ulrike Ottinger (Berlin) and Adrian Piper (Berlin). The exhibition at Grand Arts, 1819 Grand, opens Friday, November 13, 6-9pm, with additional events and symposium November 14, 1-4pm. Read full press release.

Installation Operettas: Moon Bears and Sister Wives is a series of two unique performances conceived and curated by composer, musician, performer, and sculptor Mark Southerland, a 2008 Charlotte Street Generative Performing Artist Award Fellow.  Performances take place October 23 (”Dream Arc”), 8pm and November 6 (”Banquet Boat”), 8pm & 10pm, at Urban Culture Project’s la Esquina, 1000 West 25th Street, KCMO. Admission is $10 at the door.

This experimental, narrative-driven, two-part multimedia extravaganza will blur the boundaries between genres and disciplines, showcase technical brilliance, challenge perceptions of jazz music, and create an immersive real-time experience. Involving an expansive and diverse group of highly accomplished musicians, visual artists, and other performers, the events will unfold in operatic fashion as stories told through a dramatic mix of instrumentals, voice, props, lighting, sculptural elements and artful backdrops.

Dream Arc, Oct. 23,  will feature special guests Helen Gillet, a highly accomplished cellist and vocalist from New Orleans, and Sait Arat, a master at the Darbuka and recent resident of Istanbul.  For Banquet Boat, Nov. 6, they will be joined by Brian Haas, a modern jazz giant on piano and founder of Tulsa’s Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey, and Annie Elicott a very talented jazz vocalist, also from Tulsa OK. Other performers and artists may include: Jeff Harshbarger, Shay Estes, Brad Cox, Arnie Young, Dave Ford, Ashley Miller, Emily Moore, Beniah Leusckie, Kent Burnham, Scott Johnson, Ruby Hanson, Jake Johannes, Matt Tady, Joy Stempleman, Shawn Hansen, Margaret Gordon, Ryan Gale, Jade, Laurel Birdsong, Jori Sackin, Laura Ellen Frank, Ari Fish, Peggy Noland, Stewart Losee, Peregrine Honig, Chris Bell, and many more. Read full press release.   Listen to Mark Southerland with Gina Kauffman on KCUR-FM.  See article and photos in Ink.  See feature on Southerland in KC Metropolis.

The Heaviest Flower, a two-person exhibition of recent photographic work by longtime friends and peers Elijah Gowin (Kansas City) and Colby Caldwell (Southern Maryland), opens at UCP’s Paragraph gallery, 23 East 12th Street, Friday, October 16, 6-9pm, and runs through November 12, 2009.  The artists will speak about their work at 6pm the evening of the opening. An 80-page, full-color catalogue is being published by Tin Roof Press in conjunction with the exhibition.

Tied together through their innovative inquiry of the materiality of photography—both artists use painstaking and elaborate processes for reaching their final images – the exhibition circles around themes of anxiety, loss, and the tenuous beauty of living.  Both artists have rich histories shooting film and making prints, and possess a love and certain reverence for “the machinations or the materiality of photography itself,” as Caldwell describes it. But these two artists live equally in the digital age, applying its tools—digital cameras, Photoshop, scanners—toward a merger, or accumulation, of the analog and the digital that mines the potential and properties of both. On one level, it is this investigation into the nature of photography and the photograph that is the subject of their work, but it is in the delicacy and subtlety of manner with which this course of investigation is pursued that the poetry and potency of the work of these two artists emerges. Read full press release.

Vacuum Paradoxicon, opening Friday October 16 at Urban Culture Project Space, 21 East 12th Street,  with artist remarks at 6:30pm, extends and distills an ongoing dialogue between Kansas City based artists Stewart Losee and Amanda Gehin. The two-and three-dimensional artworks featured may be described as fantasy architectures, reflecting the artists’ shared interests in exploring ideas of imaginative, internal/mental spaces.

Gehin’s work is specifically focused on articulating impossible, or paradoxical, shapes – those whose combination of properties are constructible only in a theoretical, mental landscape. Included are labyrinthine wall pieces, composed of many small paintings that relate to one another like pieces of a puzzle and are characterized by intensive patterning and rich colors, as well as a series of sculptures on pedestals that incorporate living plant life as well as constructed objects. Losee draws from forms of ancient art to explore the origins of images; the idea of image as a function of an evolved psychology rather than culture. Included will be a series of several large, baroque light boxes displaying digital renderings –“deep abstractions”- produced as polystyrene color prints, as well as a “wooden solar boombox temple.”  In addition will be various scale architectural maquettes, created collaboratively, which quietly consider new age metaphysics as applied to urban planning. Read the full press release.

 R O C K E T  G   R   A   N   T   S  

With support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Charlotte Street Foundation and the Spencer Museum of Art are partnering to fuel the dynamism of our region’s art ecology by providing direct support for innovative, experimental, artist-driven, and artist-centered projects through new Rocket Grants.  These Rocket Grants will will provide cash awards of up to $4,000 each to individuals or groups of area artists, curators, and writers, to support the creation and presentation of new work/projects.  

Rocket Grants will enable individuals and groups of artists to take new risks with their work, push the scope and scale of their activities, develop and pursue collaborative projects, and engage with the public and public realm in inventive and meaningful ways. In doing so, these Rocket Grants seek to create ripple effects that will engage, inspire, and propel other artists; spark new ideas and ways of working; and contribute to a regional culture characterized by unconventional and expansive forms of interaction, exchange, provocation, and surprise. 

Applications will be posted by January, 2010, and a series of outreach/information sessions planned. Applications for the first year of grants will be due in Spring 2010.  Read more about the program here.  No phone calls please.

“Post Office Sofa,” a window installation by Kansas City-based artist and 2008 Charlotte Street Foundation Visual Artist Award Fellow Adolfo Martinez, debuts October 16, 2009 in conjunction with UCP’s Third Friday Art Downtown event, with a ceremony at 4:30pm. To remain on view for approximately one year, the installation was commissioned by City Center Square for its north-facing window on 12th Street, just west of Main, through an open call to artists facilitated by Urban Culture Project. The installation relates to the United States Post Office located within City Center Square, specifically taking the idea of the postage stamp as inspiration.

Martinez’s installation will build on his “Sofa Sized Paintings” series, which takes inspiration from the “starving artist sales” promoted on television, which advertise bargain artworks priced according to size: “Sofa sized paintings for only $19.99,” for example. The installation will include a new 8-foot cutout painting, “Post Office Sofa,” incorporating USPS mailboxes as armrests, a stamp-patterned afghan draped over the back of the couch, throw pillows in the likeness of stuffed envelopes, and a framed picture behind it of the former post office across from Union Station, where Martinez’s father worked as a sorter in the 60s and 70s. The cutout painting will sit atop a fake green grass floor. Read full press release.

“Money, shows and space. For artists, these are the essentials, and the Charlotte Street Foundation is helping Kansas City’s artists get all three,” writes Alice Thorson in a feature article in the Kansas City Star Sunday Arts, October 4, 2009. “In the last 11 years, the local nonprofit has put $447,500 in artists’ pockets and provided more than 24,000 square feet of studio and exhibition space. This fall, both those figures are going up…” Read the full article.

On Friday, October 16, 5pm at Paragraph gallery, 23 East 12th Street, CSF Visual Artist Award Fellow Anne Lindberg will speak about her experience as an artist in residence at Art Omi International Artists Residency program in Upstate New York this past summer.  Through a partnership launched in 2005, one Charlotte Street Visual Artist Award Fellow is annually awarded a three-week residency at Art Omi.

Lindberg is a nationally acclaimed Kansas City-based artist whose work has been featured in recent exhibitions at The Drawing Center, New York, NY, and The Mill, Newport, NH, and who will have a solo exhibition in 2010 at Cynthia Reeves Gallery, New York, NY. At Art Omi, she had the opportunity to work alongside other serious artists from around the world and to gain feedback from a renowned group of visiting artists, critics and curators who visit the program each year. She was among 30 visual artists from some 20 different countries who participated in the program this summer, along with critic-in-residence Frances Richard. Read full press release.