Charlotte Street Foundation

Charlotte Street Foundation is pleased to announce the 2010 Charlotte Street Generative Performing Artist Awards Event on Monday, October 11, 8pm at Johnson County Community College’s Polksy Theatre, 12345 College Boulevard, Overland Park, KS.

Free and open to the public, the event will include live performances featuring  the work of actor/creator/writer/singer/songwriter/musician/teacher Stephanie Roberts and composer/musician Brad Cox, who received unrestricted cash awards of $6500 each from Charlotte Street Foundation earlier this year.

Stephanie Roberts’ presentation  will present a short segment of her one-woman film-noir mask play, The Mask of the Broken Heart,  as well as a new theatrical clown piece devised by herself, Matt Weiss and fellow Dell’Arte grad, Gulshirin Dubash.  Brad Cox’s presentation will feature new compositions, structured improvisations, and excerpts from a larger work, “I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for Ice Cream,” written originally for Owen/Cox Dance Group. Performing will be a nonet featuring Rich Wheeler (tenor saxophone), Matt Otto (tenor saxophone), Jeff Harshbarger (bass), Gerald Spaits (bass), Scotty McBee (drums), Kent Burnham (drums), Sam Wisman (percussion and samples), Patrick Alonzo Conway (percussion and baritone saxophone), and Brad Cox (rhodes).  The performance will conclude with a collaborative piece involving both artists and several of their colleagues.

Through its Awards to Generative Performing Artist and Visual Artist programs, CSF seeks to contribute to the vitality of Kansas City’s art community and to enhance Kansas City’s desirability as a place for artists to work and live. Since 1997, the Charlotte Street Foundation has now recognized 78 Kansas City based artists with unrestricted cash Charlotte Street Awards, with a total of $490,500 in unrestricted cash grants distributed directly to artists.

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Kansa Citta Pueblita,  an exhibition of new work by Kansas City-based artist Maria Calderon, presents the community of Kansas City as a pueblo or tight knit community, “where the people, the places, and the atmosphere exist in a unique balance,” writes Calderon. It opens at Urban Culture Project Space, 21 East 12th Street on Friday, September 17, 2010, 6-9pm, with artist remarks at 6pm and a performance of traditional Andean music by the Andean Express at 9pm. It runs through November 6.

Calderon presents the Kansas City community from her own singular perspective, and in relation to its seasons, permanent and temporal fixtures, nature, architecture, transport, and diverse population. Included are a fantastic array of Kansas City icons and local characters, including local artists, who many viewers will immediately recognize. Featuring vivid colors and patterns, works include a large-scale burlap painting installation composed of many parts, a series of paintings on paper, and a brand-new sculpture.

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You Complete Me, opening at Urban Culture Project’s Paragraph gallery, 23 East 12th Street, on Friday September 17, 6-9pm,  is an exhibition of interactive audio and video installations by HACK.ART.LAB, a Wichita-based disciplinary collective comprised of artists, programmers and engineers. Members are Ann Resnick, Kristin Beal-DeGrandmont, John Harrison, Ivy Lanning, Lauren Hirsh, and Tom McGuire.  The show runs through November 6.

You Complete Me explores relationships between viewers and technology, and the role that cooperation plays in creative endeavors. Viewers are invited to be active collaborators in the creation of several interactive audio and video installations, which present infinite possibilities and enable viewers to share authorship as they influence outcomes. From Ghost in the Machine, which plays with viewers’ temporal and spatial perceptions through a series of live, recorded and delayed playback using a webcam, Pd and a tv; to June, Kristin Beal-DeGrandmont’s self-lit, modular, kinetic, relief sculpture that references the cinematic experience of riding in the car along Kansas highways—the works by this multi-talented collective promise to create an immersive environment appealing to audiences of all ages and backgrounds, actively involving viewers in a process of learning and discovery.

Opening weekend also features Sneak Peak Under the Hood: An Open House Event, Saturday, September 18, 12-5pm, where Hack.Art.Lab and special guests, the Computer Cowtown Congress (CCCKC) hacker space, will teach visitors about the technical side of their projects through workshops and demos.

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Charlotte Street Foundation’s Urban Culture Project is pleased to present Things to be Next To, an exhibition collaboration with threewalls, Chicago.  Featuring recent and new work by Alberto Aguilar (Chicago), Peter Fagundo (Chicago), James Woodfill (Kansas City), and Warren Rosser (Kansas City), the exhibition will open Saturday, September 4, 6-9pm at CSF’s la Esquina (an Urban Culture Project venue), 1000 West 25th Street in Kansas City, running through October 15, and will then travel to threewalls in Chicago, November 5-December 11, 2010. Also on Saturday, September 4, la Esquina will host a roundtable discussion with the artists and curators at 3:30pm.

Co-curated by Kate Hackman (CSF) and Shannon Stratton (threewalls), this exhibition developed through extensive artist reviews and studio visits by each curator in the partner city.  One interest that emerged was in the nature of the cities themselves, and how the conditions of each place, including the characteristics and contexts of the artists’ studios, inform their practices.

Alberto Aguilar and Peter Fagundo both work in their own homes, creating artworks that are intimate in scale and substance. Their work derives from, responds to, comments upon, and participates in the domestic realm, often involving collaborations with family members and knitted into a spectrum of daily life activities. In contrast, James Woodfill and Warren Rosser work in expansive, high-ceilinged studios in the kind of industrial building characteristic of downtown Kansas City. A sense of freedom—to make things, step back and sit with them awhile, make other things, then circle back around again—is  palpable in their works, which convey a sense of flux and sustained potential. Both artists’ works for this exhibition reference the domestic as well, with Rosser employing fabrics and rugs in cut shapes that recall dressmaking patterns, and Woodfill creating structures that suggest—and can readily function as—benches, desks, and screens.

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On Wednesday, September 29, 7:30pm at la Esquina, 1000 West 25th Street, CSF’s Urban Culture Project presents Network Topographies, a free lecture by Sara Schnadt, an internationally recognized, Chicago-based artist working in new media, installation and performance art.  Schnadt will focus on her current project, Network, which explores the profound impact of the internet on our sense of spatial relationships, as it collapses geography and provides unprecedented access to an expansive network of information and relationships in our daily lives.

Since November 2009, site-specific versions of Network have been created in Chicago for an unused store front downtown, a gallery space at Hyde Park Art Center, and a house in Oak Park (What It Is project space), where it inhabited the entire space and extended out into the garden, and where the home’s inhabitants lived with the work for a month, negotiating their routines around it. A version will also be presented this fall in a converted industrial space at MOCAD Detroit, and in the curated exhibition for Upgrade! Soft Borders, an international conference of new media artists in Sao Paolo in October.

Sara’s talk at la Esquina about her own artwork follows a talk on Tuesday, September 28, 5:30-7pm at the Arts Incubator, 115 West 18th Street, sponsored by the 2010 Artist Entrepreneur Speakers Program and during which she will speak about her experience as Co-founder and Technologist for the Chicago Artists Resource.

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Kansas City Electronic Music and Arts Alliance (KcEMA) opens its Fourth Season with electro<>acústico, a concert featuring clarinetist Mauricio Salguero. The concert is Saturday, October 2, 8pm at la Esquina, 1000 West 25th Street. Doors open at 7:30pm; admission is $10/$5 students. Salguero, an old friend of KcEMA, has interacted considerably with their members in the past years; Electro<>acústico is the result of that collaboration.

Salguero will present world premieres of pieces written specifically for him by composers Rodolfo Acosta, Andrew Cole, Jason Bolte and Eric Honour plus pieces by Jorge Sosa and Mark Snyder. The program combines a cutting edge mix of video, electronic sounds and high tech with the emotional intensity and technical dexterity of Mauricio’s playing. Guest artist Rebecca Ashe will join Mauricio on flute performing Asha Srinivasan´s Bapu; an exciting piece based on Indian traditional music.

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