Charlotte Street Foundation

Presented within the context of the exhibition Humanature, now showing at La Esquina, Ballads is a Kansas City Electronic Music & Arts Alliance recital of music for voice and digital audio that features colortura soprano Bonnie Lander. The concert is Monday, March 14, 8pm (doors at 7:30) at Esquina (An Urban Culture Project Venue),  1000 W 25th Street. $10 ($5 Students) at the door.

Based out of Philadelphia, PA and classically trained, Lander performs a wide range of contemporary music in a wide variety of spaces. Most recently, she performed with the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society under the baton of Leon Fleisher and as a participant in the Yellow Barn Kurtág Residency studying with soprano Susan Narucki. She recently completed an Artist In Residence at the <fidget> space and is a founding member of the chamber opera company “Rhymes With Opera.” In 2010 Bonnie co-created the experimental quintet Q-1 which is featured regularly throughout the Philadelphia area in various formations. Lander is the only person to have twice received the Phyllis Bryn-Julson Award for the Commitment to and Performance of 20th/21st Century Music. Visit bonnielander.com or www.kcema.net for more.

Read full press release.

Charlotte Street Foundation is currently seeking applications from artists interested in being considered for its Urban Culture Project Studio Residency Program for Visual and Performing Artists, which provides free studio spaces in downtown Kansas City to talented and dedicated area artists in need of space in which to work among a community of peers.

The Studio Residency Program currently includes studios at: Center City Square, 1100 Main, 5th floor (providing large, shared studio/rehearsal space for several performing artists/groups and private studios for 12 visual artists); pARTnership Place, 906 Grand, 13th floor (providing space for 7 visual artists in a large, open space); and Town Pavilion, 1100 Walnut, 6th floor (providing private studios for 8 visual artists.)

Studios are granted to selected artists for one year terms. No full time students will be considered. Studios are work spaces only; the program does not provide residential accommodations. The studios do not include access to specialized equipment, tools, materials, etc. A dance stage with Marley floor is provided for dancers/choreographers.

Deadline is Monday, February 28, 2011, for a limited number of studio spaces becoming available this spring.  Applications are being administered through http://www.callforentry.org. Read full details here.

 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.

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Back to the Source Code, a Kansas City Music and Arts Alliance concert on Saturday, February 19, 8pm, at la Esquina, 1000 West 25th, features Bassist Jeremy Baguyos, who grew up in Overland Park and now lives in Omaha. Baguyos returns to the Kansas City area to perform works for Bass and Digital Audio, including pieces by McGregor Boyle, Andrew May, and Kirsten Volness, alongside works by Kansas City‐based composers Jason Bolte and Andrew Seager Cole. 

“Back to the Source Code is an acknowledgement that my creative output includes the sum total of all experiences stretching back to my earliest memories, musical and non-musical,” says Baguyos. “My interest in music technology can be traced to the early Apple computers, recording weird noises on a Fostex X-15 multitrack tape recorder, and playing Rush and Devo tunes on consumer-level Yamaha and Casio synths at a local Service Merchandise.”

Doors open at 7:30pm, Concert begins at 8:00 pm. Tickets $10; Students $5

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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.

Charlotte Street hosts an art-packed Art Downtown event the evening of Friday, December 10, 6-9pm (on Second, rather than UCP’s typical Third Friday, with respect to the holidays). All free and open to the public, the evening features open studios at three locations , including 30+ artists and a series of artist talks, live performances and one-night activities; plus exhibitions on view at Paragraph and Project Space.  Highlights include a performance of new music compositions by Black House Improvisors’ Collective at City Center Square studios, 7:30pm, and holiday card printing with Nicholas Naughton at pARTnership Place, supplies provided, all evening.

GUIDED 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.  Paragraph will also feature Wonder Fair of Lawrence, KS presenting‘zines made to order – taking orders and cranking out handmade, one-of-a-kind ‘zines assembly line style in an interactive art event and performance, from 6-9pm. And at 9pm, Paragraph presents a poetry and prose reading by Kansas City Art Institute Creative Writing faculty Robert J. Baumann, Cyrus Console, Chloé Cooper Jones, and Jordan Stempleman.

Click here for much more information, including a list of residents, locations, and full schedule of events.

Read The Pitch’s preview of visual artist Sean Starowitz’s Yard Sale

For three seasons, the Kansas City Electronic Music and Arts Alliance (KcEMA) has been introducing audiences to the cutting edge of electronic music and video being created in the Kansas City area.  For Current Trends, KcEMA is looking further, bringing examples of the most innovative work composed across the U.S. and internationally to Urban Culture Project’s La Esquina, 1000 West 25th Street, KCMO, for an exciting evening of sound and image on December’s First Friday, December 3, 8pm. Doors open at 7:30. Admission is free; donations suggested.

The concert features works by Mike McFerron, Bret Battey, Matthew Burtner, Jeffrey Hass, Christopher Burns, Robert Ratcliffe, Elainie Lillios, and Bonnie Mitchell.

Read more.