Charlotte Street Foundation

You’re Such a Good Sport, March 19-May 6 at Paragraph & Project Space, 21-23 East 12th Street, focuses on artists’ work relating to sports and sports culture. Curated by artist/arts professional Michael Schonhoff, the exhibition represents both sport and art as deeply rooted into our definitions of ourselves, individually and culturally. Through visual artworks, performances, participatory activities, special events and public programs, You’re Such a Good Sport invites viewers and participants to discover commonalities within the meanings of gamesmanship and art-making.

The exhibition is divided into two parts: a group exhibition at Paragraph gallery and “The Training Room,” hosting a series of short-term projects in the adjacent Project Space. In addition to works by visual artists, You’re Such a Good Sport incorporates regional sports objects as well as specific sports-inspired exhibition furniture to create a lively, multi-faceted context and experience.  Areas of investigation include spectacle and audience roles, fanaticism and obsessivism, archetypes and gender roles, and the local historical and cultural contexts of arts and sports.

Artists featured at Paragraph include Matt Dehaemers, Robert Heishman, Megan Mantia, Mike Hill, Miki Baird, Pellom McDaniels, Brett Reif, Pablo Helguera, Chris Doyle, Phil Peterson, Ray Noland, Adriane Herman, Brian Reeves, Shelley Buffalo, Linda Trunzo, and Megan Gallant. Also featured are images and video borrowed from the Kansas City Museum, and reference materials from the Negro League Baseball Museum. In addition, Kansas City artist Alexander Austin will be creating a mural painting on gallery windows featuring local and national sports figures. A performance by Rah! Booty will be featured on opening night, March 19, at 7pm.

Artists undertaking projects in “The Training Room” include Andy Anima, Sean Starowitz, Jeff Harshbarger, Johnny Naugahyde, Json Myers, Jaclyn Senne & Stephen C. Proski, Mike Hill, Maria Calderon, Lori Waxman, Jenna Stanton, Lori Bury, Margaret Shelby, and Paul Shortt. Read full press release, which includes info about public programs and schedule for The Training Room.

Cumulus, a multi-media, multi-disciplinary exhibition featuring select projects developed by current UCP Studio Residents, continues with the addition of new artworks and projects. New features debuting at the Third Friday opening on February 19, 6-9 pm at Paragraph, 23 E. 12th. include The Wizard Ningxt, an eccentric character embodied by Aaron Storck, who will offer stir-fry, drinks, and poetry to gallery visitors from temporary housing structure at the gallery’s entrance, and a rotating exhibition curated by Erica Mahinay within Paragraph featuring works by Storck, Caleb Taylor, Samantha Persons, Lori Yonley, Kat Dison, Luke Rocha, Darwin Arevalo, Erica Mahinay, Charlie Mylie and Timothy Amundson.

In nearby Oppenstein Park, 12th and Walnut, Elaina Wendt Michalski will debut Exit, composed of two life-size figure sculptures, based on homeless youth. Made of unfired clay, these figures, left vulnerable to the elements, are inspired and informed by Michalski’s interaction with members of Synergy Services, a youth homeless shelter in the Kansas City area.  In additionm Lori Yonley will welcome visitors once again to Give and Take, an ever-revolving collection of 5×5 collaborative drawings, and on the street Kurt Flecksing and Sean M. Starowitz will again fire up the S’mores Vending Cart, supplying a taste of campfire nostalgia and accumulating funds to award to future artists’ projects.

Additional Cumulus Events:
Saturday, February 20th, 1-2:30pm: Critique dialogue led by Barbara O’Brien, Curator, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and Julie Farstad, Painting Professor, Kansas City Art Institute.
Wednesday, February 24, starts at 6pm: Potluck Drawing session, Reperformance organized by Charlie Mylie (7pm), & The Four Seasons, a performance collabioration by Jane Gotch, Tim Amundson, Erica Mahinay.

Read full press release. Read Kansas City Star review. Read KC Free Press article.

Sofa Kingdom in the Valley of Comic Sans, a new, site-specific installation by Kansas City based artists Timothy Amundson and Charlie Mylie, opens at Urban Culture Project Space, 21 East 12th Street, Friday February 19, 6-9pm. It runs through March 6, 2010.

Amundson and Mylie, both artists in UCP’s Studio Residency Program, are generating “an interactive, performative space of play.” This multi-media environment is envisioned as a platform for “improvisations, cooperations, and transformations,” whereby “actors become sculptures, performative games become improvisational dance, paintings become platforms, drawings become instructions, objects become tasks, formal sculptures become architectural interventions, and viewing becomes experience.”  Over the course of the evening, such array of transformations will unfold, with such materials as wood, fabric, guitars, electric fans, fermenting wine, pedestals, lights, plants, paint, play-dough, diverse found objects, and human beings as cast as active players in a real-time theatrical event. Read full press release.

Commodity, Commotion, Communication, an installation of new work by Kansas City based artist and Urban Culture Project Studio Resident Samantha “Sammy” Persons, opens at Urban Culture Project Space, 21 East 12th Street, with a Third Friday reception on January 15, 6-9pm; artist remarks at 6pm.

A manipulator of signs more than a producer of art objects, Persons constructs “paintings” and interactive sculptural environments  from materials drawn from her own lifetime and which signal the difference between Art and non- art identified objects—her materials palette includes house paint, vinyl letters, art books and catalogs, bendy straws, , air fresheners, life-sized Hanna Montana Stickers, highlighters, and glitter, among much else.  In part, Persons’ calculated barrage of fragments and collaged images signifies the saturation of text/media in contemporary culture. At the same time, this field of partial and re-contextualized information is meant to position the viewer as an active reader of messages rather than passive contemplator of the aesthetic or consumer of the spectacular.  Further, by appropriating traditionally gendered materials, such as 2 by 4’s, which she paints bright pink, as well as by building up the surfaces of painting with stickers, which have a long historical correlation to femininity and decoration, the artist seeks to heighten tension between masculine  support and feminine façade, destabilizing our standard readings of familiar products and materials.

Also upcoming:  Tea Party – Conversation, an open dialogue with Sammy Persons, Kurt Flecksing, Lynley Farris, and Robert Heishman at Project Space on Wednesday, January 27, 7pm. Free & open to the public. Read full press release. Read review in The Pitch.

Cumulus,  opening at Paragraph, 23 East 12th, on January 15, 6-10pm, is a multi-media, multi-disciplinary exhibition featuring select projects developed by current Urban Culture Project Studio Residents. UCP’s Studio Residency Program for Visual and Performing Artists currently provides free studios for more than 30 artists and groups, who occupy studios in three facilities: Bonfils (125 East 12th Street), pARTnership Place (906 Grand, 13th floor) and City Center Square (1100 Main Street, 5th floor).

The exhibition’s call for proposals encouraged studio residents to “consider collaboration or interactivity in the making and /or presentation of the work,”  resulting in a dynamic group of proposals whose structures are inherently generous – offering room for audience participation, inviting the response of peers, and directly giving “gifts” to visitors of the exhibition. Sepecial vents on January 15 include: The Four Seasons, an interactive performance piece, 7:30-8pm, by Timothy Amundson, Jane Gotch, and Erica Mahinay that will engage and react to the gallery space; Luke Rocha’s Project Porta-Sound, which will employ analog audio/visual formats of the past to create a multi-media experience; the debut of Maura Michelle Garcia’s and Lisa Marie Evans’ video of a multi-media dance performance entitled The Little People, which addresses the reclaiming of a conscious Native identity through exploring the character and personality of the ancient Cherokee fairies; the debut of Kurt Flecksing’s Smores Vending Cart on the sidewalk outside the gallery, and a performance of new compositions by the Black House Improvisors’ Collective at 9pm. Read full press release.

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.

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 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

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.