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Charlotte Street Foundation is pleased to announce the selection of four Kansas City artists to receive unrestricted cash Awards of $10,000 each in 2008. Selected by a panel of local and national curators from a pool of 39 nominated artists, the recipients are Jorge Garcia Almodovar, Mike Hill, Beniah Leuschke, and Adolfo Martinez.
Charlotte Street Foundation has now recognized 65 Kansas City based visual artists with Charlotte Street Awards, with a total of $392,500 in unrestricted case grants distributed directly to the artists over eleven years. An exhibition of the work of the 2008 Charlotte Street Awards recipients will presented at the new Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in late fall, 2008.
Since its establishment in 1997, Charlotte Street Foundation has annually honored outstanding Kansas City-based visual artists with unrestricted cash awards. These Charlotte Street Awards recognize locally based artists who are creating outstanding artwork, and provide financial support, critical attention, and increased exposure for these artists with the aim of fostering their continued artistic and professional development. Through the Awards program, Charlotte Street Foundation 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.
A rotating panel of Awards Advisors is responsible for selecting Charlotte Street Foundation Award recipients each year. The 2008 committee included three local Advisors: Bruce Hartman, Director, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art; Stacy Switzer, Artistic Director, Grand Arts; and James Martin, Curator, Sprint-Nextel Art Collection. This year’s two Visiting Curators/National Advisors were Gregory Volk, independent critic and curator, frequent contributor to Art in America, and Associate Professor, School of the Arts, Virginia Commonwealth University, who served his second year of a two year term; and Lynne Cooke, Curator, Dia Art Foundation, New York, serving her first year of a two year term. Charlotte Street Foundation Founder/Director David Hughes, Jr. and Associate Director Kate Hackman oversee the selection process but are not voting members of the Committee.
Each of the Awards Advisors nominated a selection of Kansas City area artists for consideration. Nominations were also invited from a panel of Community Advisors, which this year included Heather Lustfeldt, Assistant Curator, H&R Block Artspace at Kansas City Art Institute; Kent Smith, Exhibition Coordinator, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art; Sean Ward, former Award recipient; Chris Cook, Curator, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art; Jennie Mendez, Director, Mattie Rhodes Art Center; Allan Gray, Truman Medical Center, Chairman Emeritus, Kansas City Friends of Alvin Ailey and Boardmember, Arts Council of Metropolitan Kansas City; Tonya Witmer and Ben Hansen, art collectors; and Janet Simpson, Director, Kansas City Artists Coalition. Community Advisors are selected annually by the Awards Advisors.
The inclusion since 2004 of Awards Advisors from outside of Kansas City is part of an effort to introduce new perspectives into the Charlotte Street Awards selection process. It also stems from recognition of the need to build stronger regional and national relationships with other arts professionals and institutions, in order to increase exposure and opportunities for Kansas City's artists and art community. These “Visiting Curators” serve two-year terms on the committee, with a new Visiting Curator added the committee each year. In addition to visiting Kansas City for several days to help select the Awards recipients, the curators return during the Awards exhibition to deliver public lectures and visit studios of past Awards recipients.
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Jorge Garcia Almodovar studied at the School of Visual Arts, NYC, and at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. Formerly employed at Dennis Oppenheim Studios in New York, Garcia relocated to Kansas City in 2002, where he has exhibited consistently. Garcia has completed temporary public art commissions for the Avenue of the Arts Foundation and the City of Lee’s Summit, and has completed studio residencies at Urban Culture Project and at Review Studios. His recent solo exhibition, Looped Symmetry at Review Exhibition Space January-February 2008, offered a 21st-century update on classic 1960s minimalism, as a material palette including reflective plastics, mirrored glass, and LED lights linked to sound-feed was applied to the expression of elegant, symmetrical forms and patterns.
Mike Hill earned his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1996 and his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 1999. Currently an Urban Culture Project Studio Resident, Hill has exhibited at venues including Urban Culture Project’s La Esquina gallery; Urban Culture Project Space, Kansas City (solo show); VertexList, Brooklyn; Raw Space, New York, NY; Wayne Art Center, Wayne, PA; Esther Klein Gallery, Philadelphia, PA; and West End Gallery, Houston, TX. For a number of years, Hill has been developing complex systems for tracking, organizing, and charting specific fields of information. From rigorously mapping baseball statistics from each and every game played by the Boston Red Sox over several seasons, to a new “History of Metal” project that engages extensive research directed toward comprehensively tracing the evolution of the Heavy Metal genre from the 1970s to the present, Hill creates large-scale drawings that simultaneously elevate these obsessions to a fine art, critique that very obsession, and exalt the process of gathering, organizing, and presenting highly specific information.
Beniah Leuschke received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1998 with a major in Photography and New Media. Currently a studio resident at Review Studios, Leuschke has presented solo exhibitions in Kansas City at Review Exhibition Space (Suburban Stunt Double, 2006), and at telephonebooth gallery (Nowhere now Here, 2005; dumb mobs bomb mud, 2004; and Dictator tot, 2002.) His work has also been featured at Bridge Art Fair, Miami (2007) and the Stray Show, Chicago (2004), as well as in group exhibitions at Fahrenheit gallery, Kansas City; The Bank, Kansas City; and Max Gatov Gallery, University of California at Long Beach. Leuschke, whose mixed media work spans sculpture, assemblage, painting and drawing, and is often interactive, completed a temporary public art commission for the Avenue of the Arts Foundation in 2005. Running throughout the artist’s work is an interest in language, including a frequent use of palindromes -- as titles, text that appears in the work itself, and as visual and conceptual inspiration. Regarding Leuschke’s selection for the Award this year, Awards Advisor Gregory Volk said: “He’s racheted up the visual power of his strange sculptures...Palindromes and wordplay are especially apt right now during wartime.” Lynne Cooke further noted, “It really speaks to the bombardment of spin we’re getting.”
Adolfo Martinez earned his BFA from Pan American University in Edinburg, Texas, and also studied at the Kansas City Art Institute. He has exhibited regularly in Kansas City at the Mattie Rhodes Art Center and the Late Show, as well as at the Writer’s Place, H&R Block Artspace at Kansas City Art Institute, Blue Gallery, and the Bohemian Gallery. Martinez is best known for his “sofa-size” paintings of living room sofas incorporating Mexican cultural motifs, two of which reside in the collection of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art. “I love them as a series,” said Awards Advisor and Nerman Museum Director Bruce Hartman. “He’s endowed each with a very distinctive personality. There’s great wit to them, and they’re beautifully realized.” As exemplified in the ongoing sofa series, as well as recent works such as Pancho Villa Tortilla Apparition and What Would Zapata Do?, Martinez habitually applies humor and an appreciation for pop culture to an investigation of personal and cultural identity.
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A non-profit organization, Charlotte Street Foundation (CSF) supports and recognizes outstanding artists in Kansas City; presents, promotes, enhances, and encourages the visual and performing arts; and fosters economic development in the urban core of Kansas City, Mo. On all levels, CSF places artists at the center of its mission and has built an infrastructure that depends on and reflects their involvement. As a result, we are an organization that continually evolves in response to their input and in relation to the city’s larger cultural ecosystem.
