Charlotte Street Foundation

The 2009 Charlotte Street Visual Artist Awards Exhibition opens November 13, 6-8pm at the H&R Block Artspace at Kansas City Art Institute, 16 E. 43rd Street. The exhibition features new work by Kansas City based artists Dylan Mortimer, Jaimie Warren, and Andrzej Zielinski, who were each awarded $10,000 each earlier this year. 

In addition, in celebration of the Artspace’s tenth anniversary, it has commissioned 2001 Charlotte Street Visual Artist Award Fellow David Ford to create relax, a new work for the Artspace Project Wall, a large-scale billboard that serves as a site for temporary public art projects commissioned by the Artspace featuring regional and national artists. 

Since 1997, the Charlotte Street Foundation has recognized and provided support for outstanding visual artists in Kansas City.  Charlotte Street Foundation has now recognized 68 Kansas City based visual artists with Charlotte Street Visual Artist Awards, with a total of $422,500 in unrestricted cash grants distributed directly to visual artists over twelve years.  Read full press release, which also includes information about public programs in conjunction with the exhibition.

Read Kansas City Star review of the exhibition by Alice Thorson.

The 2009 Charlotte Street Generative Performing Artist Awards will be celebrated with a free public event featuring live performances by 2009 Awards Fellows Glenn North and Tiffany Sisemore on Thursday, December 10, 8pm at the American Jazz Museum’s Gem Theater, 1615 East 18th Street.  This event is presented in collaboration with the American Jazz Museum.

The evening will feature a “poetic memoir” by spoken word poet Glenn North, reflecting upon how poetry has shaped his personal development.  This retrospective of sorts will incorporate many poems that North performs on a regular basis along with a selection of new pieces.  It will also weave in music, visual imagery, film, and dance, to demonstrate how spoken word intersects with other art forms.   

Tiffany Sisemore will present four short dance works, representational of her personal movement exploration and invention spanning eight years. These include “Time Dilation,” a work built for nine female dancers, loosely representing the growth, disintegration, and redevelopment of a collection of women;”Tumescence,” a quirky duet performed as a whimsical interpretation of seduction; “Our Story Has Always Been Told Through Beats,” a series of solos developed from conversations with Glenn North surrounding the theme “a percussive approach,” which will be performed in tandem with North’s poem “Our Story Has Always Been Told Through Beats,” as well as a fourth work in progress.    

North and Sisemore received unrestricted cash awards of $5000 each from Charlotte Street Foundation earlier this year. A color brochure is being produced in conjunction with the event, featuring images and essays about the fellows by Michael Humphrey, a New York-based writer/journalist, and Mary Pat Henry, Professor of Dance at the Conservatory of Music and Dance at UMKC and Artistic Director of Wylliams/Henry Contemporary Dance Company. 

Read full press release.

Frontier is a solo exhibition of recent work by Louisiana based artist Jeremiah Ariaz. It opens at UCP’s la Esquina, 1000 West 25th Street, with a reception on December 4, 2009, 6-9pm, and remains on view through January 7, 2010.

The exhibition features a new three projection video installation, Frontier, which was filmed in rural Kansas.  Shot by three cameras aligned side by side, the piece presents a panoramic view of open sky and prairie, amidst which the artist attempts to “run West” for a duration of 24 hours.  As one quickly realizes that the figure, dressed in blue jeans and cowboy hat, is making no progress but rather running in place, the work becomes both a quiet meditation on the land and a portrait of unfulfilled desire.  The adventure-seeking, possibility-laden American call of “go West young man” is here answered with futility and exhaustion, with the outcome of his action being a scar carved in the earth. The show also features Shadow Root, an installation of drawings, color photographs (presented as slide projections), and sculpture that  considers the Santa Fe trail, the people who travelled it, and the larger ideas that it represented.

Read full press release.

CSF’s Urban Culture Project  continues its collaboration with the Kansas City Electronic Arts and Music Alliance (KcEMA) by presenting KcEMA Newbie Commissions, a concert of new works on Saturday, December 5, 7:30pm at la Esquina, 1000 West 25th Street. Doors open at 7; admission is $5.

Inaugurating its electronic commissioning program, KcEMA commissioned three Kansas City area composers relatively new to the electronic medium - Zhou Juan, Caroline Miller, and Yaun Peiying -  for Kansas City based performers Jedd Schneider, tenor voice, and Brad Baumgardner, bass clarinet.  In addition to these new works, the concert includes pieces by Jorge Sosa, Scott Blasco, Tim Eshing, and international award-winning composer Jason Bolte.

The Newbie Commissions program features three World Premieres.  Jedd Schneider will perform Zhou Juan’s That night, 195 people were killed, a response to the violence that took place on July 5th in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China, where the composer was born, and Caroline Miller’s setting of John Donne’s sensual Elegy XX: To His Mistress Going to Bed.  Brad Baumgardner will perform Peiying Yuan’s Fractal Excursions, a piece structured around the inspiration of fractals.  Read full press release.