Charlotte Street Foundation

In collaboration with Grand Arts, CSF’s Urban Culture Project presents My Barbarian’s Broke People’s Baroque Peoples’ Theater at la Esquina, 1000 West 25 Street, on November 14, 8pm. My Barbarian is a collaborative of LA based performers who bring theater, art, music and video together to make site-responsive works that often include collaboration with local artists. Such projects have been presented in New York City, Trento, Italy, Cairo, Egypt and Vilnius, Lithuania, resulting in works that take a celebratory and critical look at cultural difference, identity and the fine art/entertainment divide.

For Broke People’s Baroque Peoples’ Theater at la Esquina, My Barbarian is collaborating with selected local performers, who will complete a Master Class during the week leading up to the performance. The subject of the project is survival through economic hardship. The free public performance on November 14 will take the form of a variety show and pageant, including original material by My Barbarian as well as songs, dances, sketches, speeches and scenes work-shopped over the course of the week.

This project is a component of “Ecstatic Resistance” a group show curated by Emily Roysdon (New York and Stockholm) on view at Grand Arts November 13-January 16, which includes works by  Sharon Hayes (New York), Jeanine Oleson (New York),  A.L. Steiner (New York), Matthew Lutz-Kinoy (Amsterdam), Dean Spade (Seattle), Craig Willse (New York), Ian White (London), Yael Bartana (Tel Aviv and Amsterdam), Ulrike Ottinger (Berlin) and Adrian Piper (Berlin). The exhibition at Grand Arts, 1819 Grand, opens Friday, November 13, 6-9pm, with additional events and symposium November 14, 1-4pm. Read full press release.

Installation Operettas: Moon Bears and Sister Wives is a series of two unique performances conceived and curated by composer, musician, performer, and sculptor Mark Southerland, a 2008 Charlotte Street Generative Performing Artist Award Fellow.  Performances take place October 23 (”Dream Arc”), 8pm and November 6 (”Banquet Boat”), 8pm & 10pm, at Urban Culture Project’s la Esquina, 1000 West 25th Street, KCMO. Admission is $10 at the door.

This experimental, narrative-driven, two-part multimedia extravaganza will blur the boundaries between genres and disciplines, showcase technical brilliance, challenge perceptions of jazz music, and create an immersive real-time experience. Involving an expansive and diverse group of highly accomplished musicians, visual artists, and other performers, the events will unfold in operatic fashion as stories told through a dramatic mix of instrumentals, voice, props, lighting, sculptural elements and artful backdrops.

Dream Arc, Oct. 23,  will feature special guests Helen Gillet, a highly accomplished cellist and vocalist from New Orleans, and Sait Arat, a master at the Darbuka and recent resident of Istanbul.  For Banquet Boat, Nov. 6, they will be joined by Brian Haas, a modern jazz giant on piano and founder of Tulsa’s Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey, and Annie Elicott a very talented jazz vocalist, also from Tulsa OK. Other performers and artists may include: Jeff Harshbarger, Shay Estes, Brad Cox, Arnie Young, Dave Ford, Ashley Miller, Emily Moore, Beniah Leusckie, Kent Burnham, Scott Johnson, Ruby Hanson, Jake Johannes, Matt Tady, Joy Stempleman, Shawn Hansen, Margaret Gordon, Ryan Gale, Jade, Laurel Birdsong, Jori Sackin, Laura Ellen Frank, Ari Fish, Peggy Noland, Stewart Losee, Peregrine Honig, Chris Bell, and many more. Read full press release.   Listen to Mark Southerland with Gina Kauffman on KCUR-FM.  See article and photos in Ink.  See feature on Southerland in KC Metropolis.

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.

Vacuum Paradoxicon, opening Friday October 16 at Urban Culture Project Space, 21 East 12th Street,  with artist remarks at 6:30pm, extends and distills an ongoing dialogue between Kansas City based artists Stewart Losee and Amanda Gehin. The two-and three-dimensional artworks featured may be described as fantasy architectures, reflecting the artists’ shared interests in exploring ideas of imaginative, internal/mental spaces.

Gehin’s work is specifically focused on articulating impossible, or paradoxical, shapes – those whose combination of properties are constructible only in a theoretical, mental landscape. Included are labyrinthine wall pieces, composed of many small paintings that relate to one another like pieces of a puzzle and are characterized by intensive patterning and rich colors, as well as a series of sculptures on pedestals that incorporate living plant life as well as constructed objects. Losee draws from forms of ancient art to explore the origins of images; the idea of image as a function of an evolved psychology rather than culture. Included will be a series of several large, baroque light boxes displaying digital renderings –“deep abstractions”- produced as polystyrene color prints, as well as a “wooden solar boombox temple.”  In addition will be various scale architectural maquettes, created collaboratively, which quietly consider new age metaphysics as applied to urban planning. Read the full press release.

“Post Office Sofa,” a window installation by Kansas City-based artist and 2008 Charlotte Street Foundation Visual Artist Award Fellow Adolfo Martinez, debuts October 16, 2009 in conjunction with UCP’s Third Friday Art Downtown event, with a ceremony at 4:30pm. To remain on view for approximately one year, the installation was commissioned by City Center Square for its north-facing window on 12th Street, just west of Main, through an open call to artists facilitated by Urban Culture Project. The installation relates to the United States Post Office located within City Center Square, specifically taking the idea of the postage stamp as inspiration.

Martinez’s installation will build on his “Sofa Sized Paintings” series, which takes inspiration from the “starving artist sales” promoted on television, which advertise bargain artworks priced according to size: “Sofa sized paintings for only $19.99,” for example. The installation will include a new 8-foot cutout painting, “Post Office Sofa,” incorporating USPS mailboxes as armrests, a stamp-patterned afghan draped over the back of the couch, throw pillows in the likeness of stuffed envelopes, and a framed picture behind it of the former post office across from Union Station, where Martinez’s father worked as a sorter in the 60s and 70s. The cutout painting will sit atop a fake green grass floor. Read full press release.

On Friday, October 16, 5pm at Paragraph gallery, 23 East 12th Street, CSF Visual Artist Award Fellow Anne Lindberg will speak about her experience as an artist in residence at Art Omi International Artists Residency program in Upstate New York this past summer.  Through a partnership launched in 2005, one Charlotte Street Visual Artist Award Fellow is annually awarded a three-week residency at Art Omi.

Lindberg is a nationally acclaimed Kansas City-based artist whose work has been featured in recent exhibitions at The Drawing Center, New York, NY, and The Mill, Newport, NH, and who will have a solo exhibition in 2010 at Cynthia Reeves Gallery, New York, NY. At Art Omi, she had the opportunity to work alongside other serious artists from around the world and to gain feedback from a renowned group of visiting artists, critics and curators who visit the program each year. She was among 30 visual artists from some 20 different countries who participated in the program this summer, along with critic-in-residence Frances Richard. Read full press release.

CALL and RESPONSE is a series of two multidisciplinary performative events organized collaboratively by Charlotte Street Foundation’s Urban Culture Project and the American Jazz Museum, generating from the desire to bring artists from different media, genres, communities and backgrounds together to share, inspire one another, and build new audiences. This two-part, two-location series spotlights a mix of writers, spoken word poets, jazz musicians, electronic musicians, and composers.  CALL and RESPONSE participants are writers/poets Robert Baumann, Glenn North, Shavonne “Queen” Standifer, Kynan Ramsey, Faith Scott, and Jordan Stempleman; the Kansas City Electronic Music and Arts Alliance; and the contemporary jazz ensemble Synergy.

The first event takes place on First Friday, October 2 (reception at 7pm, performance at 8pm, free) at UCP’s la Esquina, 1000 West 25th. It will specifically take the idea of “Call” as inspiration, while the second event, on Third Tuesday, October 20 at the Jazz Museum’s Blue Room, 1616 East 18th (doors open at 7pm, performance at 8pm, free) will relate directly to the notion of “Reponse.” Both evenings will include solo pieces by each of the performers as well as collaborative efforts.  Read full press release.

Renowned experimental filmmaker Roger Beebe takes to the Heartland this fall to present a program of his recent multi-projector films as part of a 6-week US tour.  CSF’s Urban Culture Project is pleased to host Beebe’s Films for One to Eight Projectors program at la Esquina, 1000 West 25th, Thursday September 24 at 8pm in partnership with Film and Media Arts, University of Missouri Kansas City.

In his recent films, Beebe explores the possibilities of using multiple projectors—running as many as 8 projectors simultaneously—not for a free-form VJ-type experience, but for the creation of discrete works of “expanded cinema.” These films are simultaneously performance films (as they can only be screened with Beebe actually running the projectors—and running from projector to projector), technological demonstrations (with a parade of different modes of image making and presentation—16mm and super 8mm film alongside video and digital formats), and significant aesthetic works in their own right. Read full press release.

Great Accommodations is a participatory exhibition project spearheaded by Kansas City based artist Jamie Burkart that highlights the Missouri River within Kansas City, utilizes the central rivers as a social network, and imagines lifestyles for cities on the water.  The exhibition runs September 1-October 3 at Paragraph + Project Space, 21-23 East 12th Street,  with special extended hours: Tuesday-Sunday, 9am-6pm. Third Friday reception is September 18, 6-9pm, with artist remarks at 6pm.

Burkart’s multi-component, rhizomatic, immersive installation will assume the form of a kind of living museum, housed within a massive inflatable environment filling Paragraph and Project Space. It will include interactive video installations, participatory sculptural experiences, computer programs, community projects, and “working” documentation.  Much of the show is made from recycled materials collected by businesses and individuals around the Kansas City area.

Together with collaborator Suzanne Hogan, Burkart has mailed hundreds of letters and placed targeted Facebook advertisements to reach people and places located along the Missouri, Mississippi, Arkansas and Ohio rivers, inviting individuals to contribute their stories and perspectives of life on the river as part of the project. “I want this exhibition to become a space where people from every city up and downstream from Kansas City can come and write their own histories together,” says Burkart. Read complete press release.

Check out Jamie’s Photostream here!

More about Burkart’s river projects:

“In the name of art, go with the flow” in KC Star; “When Artists Turn Huck Finn”  in The Pitch. Read review in Review.

First Friday at la Esquina, 1000 West 25th,  is all about mediating virtual information. The free evening kicks off at 7:30 with While We Were Working, a one-hour program of YouTube selections curated by artists Eric Fleischauer (Chicago) and Robert Snowden (New York). “Digging in deep, past the recognizable, recommended, and promoted selections, we have compiled a range of videos that provoke and articulate YouTube’s role as an artist resource, venue, and medium,” they write. Their program folds together video featuring such cultural icons as Barack Obama, David Lee Roth, John Cage, Charlie Rose, Nicholas Cage, A-ha, and Picasso’s Guernica; cultural phenomenon such as Japanese train loading, wave pools, and QVC television; and a range of highly idiosyncratic performances, experiments and activities that emblematize the wildly eclectic, populist nature of YouTube.

At 8:30 is the launch of INFOBAHN, a new event series where invited presenters will each share approximately 15-minutes worth of selections culled from the vast field of web-based information in response to a given theme. INFOBAHN is about information, inspiration, and personal interest; the process of searching, navigating, discovering, making choices; and the unique structure and ever expanding virtual terrain that is the internet. The theme for INFOBAHN Episode I is “Secret.” Presenters include Ari Fish, Miguel Rivera, Lisa Marie Evans, Dirk Cowan, Paul Shortt, and Deanna Skedel.

Read complete press release.  POST EVENT UPDATE!: INFOBAHN Episode I links.