Charlotte Street Foundation

It’s All Yours is a collaborative, event-based exhibition that explores the Westside community around la Esquina (1000 West 25th Street KCMO), celebrating a spectrum of creative interests among neighbors and businesses. The exhibition includes artists and neighbors in the programming of the event series, andwill take participants to new places in the area, introduce them to local residents, and highlight a number of interesting things that are happening in the neighborhood. Regular gallery hours are Fridays + Saturdays, 12-5pm, plus the following special events, all free and open to all.

Celebrate Mom! Saturday, May 14, 2-5pm – hosted by Mattie Rhodes Art Center. If Mother’s Day flew by, take the afternoon to spend time with your mom enjoying free snacks and refreshments, making fun take-home crafts for the whole family, and other pampering surprises for mom.

Game & Workshop Night Led by Alta Vista Charter Middle School Students, Friday, May 20, 6-9pm - with students teaching a variety of activities from nail art to video games and soccer moves, plus free snacks and refreshments and maybe a movie. 

Gardening Day at Switzer Neighborhood Farm and Westside Community Garden, Saturday May 28, 12-4pm - Learn the basics of growing edible gardens, raising chickens, and collecting rainwater to use for the garden. Meet at la Esquina at noon; garden is at the corner of 20th and West Pennway, just across from the Public Library. Dress to be outside in the dirt!  

Westside Boulevard Brew Night! Friday, June 3, 5-8pm - Boulevard Brewing has created a beer that is based off one of the brewer’s experience of the Westside neighborhood. Pancho Luna, a homebrewer and volunteer at Boulevard, has created two ‘beer portraits’ of people… (Felix Pacheco and Pat Zamora) who are a part of the Westside neighborhood community. These beers will be unveiled and served for free to gallery visitors for one night only.

Generation Ginger launch, Friday, June 10, 8pm-midnight - Generation Ginger’s launch celebrates the integration of Indian heritage into todays world. Ritu Nanos, a cultural education consultant, explores a question that gets to the root of cultural identity: “Where are you from?” The evening’s journey begins with a brief lecture introducing the topic and further illustrates the beauty of cultural integration by using music, dance and visual imagery in a collaborative story-telling of the Indian mythological story, Prahalad, while also inviting guests to participate in hands-on activities related to Indian culture.

Read more.

All free and open to the public, Charlotte Street’s Third Friday Art Downtown April 15, 6-9pm is a walkable, edible, performance-full evening of art, with open studios at three locations plus special one-night-only dining-related activities in conjunction with exhibitions at UCP’s Paragraph and Project Space. Highlights include:

At CITY CENTER SQUARE, 1100 Main, 5th floor: LIVE MUSIC PERFORMANCES by BLACK HOUSE IMPROVISORS’ COLLECTIVE from 7-8:15pm, including Improv Sliced Four Ways, a new collaborative work with 940 DANCE COMPANY, plus LIVE MUSIC BY HOMINID featuring Hunter Long, 8:30-9pm.  In addition, Open Studios by 25+ visual artists at City Center Square, TOWN PAVILION (1100 Walnut, 6th floor) and PARTNERSHIP PLACE, 906 Grand, 13th floor.

The evening also includes a Third Friday Smorgasbord at Paragraph, 23 East 12th Street, 6-9pm, in conjunction with The Dining Room Project exhibition on view, including:
Andrew William Erdrich: Red Food, Yellow Food, Blue Food – an artistic, edible serving of organic mystery mash exploring the essential, aesthetic, and manufactured facets of contemporary food;
Aaron Storck: The Wizard’s Salad – in the persona of his alter ego, the Wizard, artist Aaron Storck presents a new centerpiece, delivers a poem (7pm), and serves a salad;
Alberto Aguilar: Mole (sauce) – All Ingredients at Hand – Visiting Chicago-based artist Alberto Aguilar discusses the history of Mexican Mole and presents 50 of the possible Mole ingredients as he prepares the sauce in the gallery. In addition he will be creating a sound work that will incorporate visitors to his station in the space.

Plus Over Again: Alison Brady & Sarah Knobel on view at Project Space.

Read press release with full details!

Watch interview with studio resident Paul Smith

Charlotte Street Foundation’s Urban Culture Project is pleased to partner with the Kansas City Jewish Museum of Contemporary Art (KCJMCA) to present The DIning Room Project, a multifaceted project serving as a platform for the exploration of issues of hunger, sustenance, consumption, public health, sustainability, cultural symbolism within various traditions, and food and the meal’s usefulness as vehicle for communication and creative expression.

As a partner and collaborator on this project, Charlotte Street’s Paragraph gallery (an Urban Culture Project venue) will be transformed into a site for research, installations, conversations, and a diverse range of activities, events, performances, presentations, and meals.  This Dining Room Project: Potluck Smorgasbord begins with an opening reception on March 18, 6-9pm, featuring several one-time only offerings. In addition, it will serve as a colleciton site for Harvesters. Click here for a press release specifically related to the exhibition at Paragraph.

New programming will be featured every week, including off-site tours, dinners and excursions. Click here for a full schedule (in progress), and watch for updates as well as new documentation of activities each week.

The KCJMCA Espten Gallery at Village Shalom’s exhibition,The Dining Room Project: Art, Food, and the Ritual of Eating opens Sunday, March 20, 2-4pm. A catalog/cookbook  produced by KCJMCA, will document the whole project and feature recipes and texts by artists, curators, and food writers.

Read this press release for more about the whole project.

View archives of past Dining Room Project events and gallery wall texts

Paragraph Gallery hours are Wednesdays, Fridays & Saturdays 12-5pm and Thursdays 11am-6pm.

Charlotte Street Foundation’s Urban Culture Project is pleased to present Humanature, an art exhibition that calls into question the boundaries between what is “human” and what is “natural.”  Opening Friday, March 4, 6-9pm at la Esquina, this ambitious show features installations, sculptures, photographs, prints, and mixed media works by artists Cameron Fuller (St. Louis), David Johnson (St. Louis), Jamie Kreher (St. Louis), Karen McCoy (Kansas City), Carin Mincemoyer (Pittsburgh, PA), Eric Troffkin (Detroit, MI), and B.j. Vogt (St. Louis), who is also the exhibition curator.  In addition, the artists and curator will participate in Correlations, a panel discussion about the concepts introduced in Humanature on Saturday, March 5, 1pm, also at la Esquina. All free and open to all.

Raising questions about the definitions of “natural” and “man made,” the boundaries implied therein, and the manners in which humans are disposed to representing “nature” as “other,” this exhibition argues for a more expansive consideration. “Our influence over the natural world, and the impact this influence in turn exerts upon human civilization, make readily apparent the fact that we are, in fact, part of an ongoing natural process in which both choice and chance determine the outcome,” writes curator B.j. Vogt. “It is relevant therefore to propose that humans exist as a natural event unfolding within the evolutionary timeline of the Earth.”

Humanature runs March 4 through April 16, 2011 at La Esquina, 1000 West 25th Street,  KCMO 64108.

La Esquina hours are Wednesdays, Fridays & Saturdays 12-5pm and Thursdays 11am-6pm.

Read more. See photos of the Humanature opening.

Read the Kansas City Star review

Read the article in Review

 Charlotte Street’s Urban Culture Project hosts an art-packed Third Friday Art Downtown event the evening of Friday, February 18, 6-9pm. All free and open to the public, the evening features open studios at three locations plus two exhibitions on view at UCP’s Paragraph and Project Space. Open Studios offers the chance to meet our Urban Culture Project Studio Resident artists, view recent work and work in progress, and get a behind the scenes perspective on these artists’ working processes. GUIDED WALKING TOURS to the STUDIOS will leave from Paragraph gallery, 23 East 12th Street, at 6:30 and 8pm. Maps of the studios will be available at Paragraph, sign boards will be placed at each studio building, and hosts at each location will guide visitors up to the studios.

Read more.

The stability of the modernist era has disintegrated into a multiplicity of art making approaches.  Artists, historians, critics, and theorists have systematically dismantled barriers and effectively opened the floodgates.  Art, it seems, can be anything.  We are free, but this freedom does not come without a price.  The current pluralistic art milieu is unpredictable and chaotic, a tangled mess of methodologies.

So write artists Lee Piechocki and Aaron Storck, whose new exhibition, Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire–opening at Paragraph gallery, 23 East 12th Street on Friday, January 21, 6-9pm–explores, with fascination and skepticism,  the boundary-blurring trends in contemporary art.  Drawing subject matter from the immediate environments of their studios, and the piles, stacks, and accumulations therein; and taking inspiration from far-ranging aspects of contemporary culture, art, and theory, Piechocki and Storck confront this mess, its potential and its problematics.  The exhibition will include new still-life paintings and a sculptural objects/arrangements by Piechocki, and a new large-scale multi-media diptych painting, installation, videos, and studies by Storck.

The exhibition runs January 21-March 5, with open hours Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays 12-5pm and Thursdays 11-6pm. And join the artists for a discussion of their work on Saturday, February 26 at 2pm. Read full press release.

Read the Kansas City Star Review

Watch the artists’ talk from the opening.

See exhibition photos.

With Dual Singularity – opening at Urban Culture Project Space January 21, 6-9pm (with a helium baloon release and artist remarks at 6:30pm), and running through March 6 – emerging artists Justin Rulo-Sabe and Brandon Barr seek to interpret patterns of information embedded in natural phenomena, and to use digital media to translate that information into new languages and ways of seeing. Through video installations, photographic prints, writings, drawings, and “algorithmic walks,” their exhibition posits a way of looking at information as values to be transformed and recombined, until the ways of seeing that information become variable and multifarious enough to suggest near-infinite possibility.

Read full press release.

See exhibition photos.

THE DINING ROOM PROJECT: Intersections of Food, Art, and the Rituals of Eating is a collaborative project initiated by the Kansas City Jewish Museum of Contemporary Art (KCJMCA), which will include exhibitions at Urban Culture Project’s Paragraph Gallery (A Potluck Smorgasbord; March 18-May 7, 2011) and KCJMCA’s Epsten Gallery at Village Shalom (March 20-May 15, 2011).  With this project, the traditions, rituals, structures, and conviviality of the dining room become a platform for the exploration of issues such as hunger, sustainability, public health, consumption, the origins of food, its history of cultural symbolism, and its ever-evolving role as a vehicle for communication, community-building, and creative expression.

The participation of artists, designers, historians, scholars, educators, planners, farmers, gardeners, activists, chefs, caterers, foodies, foragers, and other creative people of all kinds is invited. Each exhibition will center around a 16-foot dining room table, created by artist Peter Warren.  At and around these tables a series of participant-driven activities, events, and meals will unfold. Proposals are invited for multiple aspects of these exhibitions, including: THE HARVEST (at Paragraph): soliciting, collecting, organizing, displaying and/or otherwise considering the canned goods and other non-perishables to be gathered on behalf of Harvesters food bank; THE TABLE (at Paragraph): the creation of individual place settings, to displayed on the dinner table and appropriate for use;  THE SMORGASBORD (at Paragraph + Epsten Gallery): activities of all kinds to take place during the course of the exhibitions that relate to, are inspired by, and/or will center around the dining room table, including lectures, discussions, presentations, demonstrations, workshops, temporary installations, live performances, readings, potluck dinners, off-site excursions, etc. Submissions of personally, culturally, or creatively significant recipes and/or personal photographs or videos of memorable dinners and dining-related activities and experiences for public display in THE KITCHEN (at Paragraph) are also invited.

Click here to download the complete call for proposals and participation, including much more information about The Dining Room Project. Proposals are due Tuesday, January 25, 2011.

Curated by artist Caleb Taylor, A Glimpse Inward presents a group of artists whose works offer commanding views into explorations of the body, science, media, and psychology.  Featured artists are Rollin Beamish (Bozeman, MT), Lori Hiris (New York, NY), John Douglas Powers (Birmingham, AL), Caleb Taylor (Kansas City, MO), and Chris Turbuck (Bozeman, MT). The show opens Friday, January 7, 6-9pm, at la Esquina, 1000 West 25th Street, a Charlotte Street Urban Culture Project venue. An Artists Talk follows on Saturday, January 8 at 2pm, featuring special presentations by Rollin Beamish and John Douglas Powers.

Through autobiographical comic books, kinetic sculptures, videos, and paintings, these artists investigate the use of “inner” structures as both literal and metaphorical platforms to generate meaning. The exhibition establishes the act of looking as a conceptual focus, with voyeurism, or the “pleasure of looking,” as a key component to how these artists gather material and create an aesthetic.

Read full press release.

See video of A Glimpse Inward.

The Missouri Bank Crossroads Branch, 125 Southwest Boulevard, will debut four new large-scale commissioned images, by Lawrence, Kansas-based artist Jerry Kunkel and Kansas City-based artist Adolfo Martinez on its Art through Architecture “Artboards” in time for First Friday December, 2010.

Jerry Kunkel‘s two west-facing images, titled Memories Are…, play with ideas of fact and fiction, past and present, the nature of memory, and the veracity of photographic representation.  Juxtaposing the front and back of a postcard against two views of the specific location it apparently depicts, Kunkel invites the viewer “to fill in the blanks, conjure a short response, and consider what may have transpired.”

Adolfo Martinez’s east-facing Artboards, titled We’re Not in Kansas Anymore, feature robots pulled from pop culture set amidst the Kansas City skyline: Robby the Robot, from the movie “Forbidden Planet,” Gort from “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” and robots from “Lost in Space,” “March of the Robots,” Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis, ” and a B movie called “Robot Monster.” While injecting a sense of humor and fantasy into the downtown landscape, this line-up of visitors from different eras and planets also offers a poignant portrait of changing cultural portrayals of the futuristic “other.”

Read more.

Read the article in The Kansas City Star

Read the article in The Vignette