Charlotte Street Foundation

On Wednesday, September 29, 7:30pm at la Esquina, 1000 West 25th Street, CSF’s Urban Culture Project presents Network Topographies, a free lecture by Sara Schnadt, an internationally recognized, Chicago-based artist working in new media, installation and performance art.  Schnadt will focus on her current project, Network, which explores the profound impact of the internet on our sense of spatial relationships, as it collapses geography and provides unprecedented access to an expansive network of information and relationships in our daily lives.

Since November 2009, site-specific versions of Network have been created in Chicago for an unused store front downtown, a gallery space at Hyde Park Art Center, and a house in Oak Park (What It Is project space), where it inhabited the entire space and extended out into the garden, and where the home’s inhabitants lived with the work for a month, negotiating their routines around it. A version will also be presented this fall in a converted industrial space at MOCAD Detroit, and in the curated exhibition for Upgrade! Soft Borders, an international conference of new media artists in Sao Paolo in October.

Sara’s talk at la Esquina about her own artwork follows a talk on Tuesday, September 28, 5:30-7pm at the Arts Incubator, 115 West 18th Street, sponsored by the 2010 Artist Entrepreneur Speakers Program and during which she will speak about her experience as Co-founder and Technologist for the Chicago Artists Resource.

Read full press release.

Kansas City Electronic Music and Arts Alliance (KcEMA) opens its Fourth Season with electro<>acústico, a concert featuring clarinetist Mauricio Salguero. The concert is Saturday, October 2, 8pm at la Esquina, 1000 West 25th Street. Doors open at 7:30pm; admission is $10/$5 students. Salguero, an old friend of KcEMA, has interacted considerably with their members in the past years; Electro<>acústico is the result of that collaboration.

Salguero will present world premieres of pieces written specifically for him by composers Rodolfo Acosta, Andrew Cole, Jason Bolte and Eric Honour plus pieces by Jorge Sosa and Mark Snyder. The program combines a cutting edge mix of video, electronic sounds and high tech with the emotional intensity and technical dexterity of Mauricio’s playing. Guest artist Rebecca Ashe will join Mauricio on flute performing Asha Srinivasan´s Bapu; an exciting piece based on Indian traditional music.

Read full press release.

Live Streaming by Ustream.TV

In the four-day performance Kill to Hunt, Hunt to Kill, Kansas City-based artist and UCP Studio Resident Jason Dixon dares to call all artists liars and unveils the truth for the first time in art history through a monumental work entitled “The Truth.” A live performance and webcast from La Esquina / 1000 W 25th Street, Kansas City, MO 64108 at 8pm on Friday, August 20 (also live streaming at www.ustream.tv/channel/kill-to-hunt-hunt-to-kill)  begins this journey as “The Truth” is stretched in the gallery through absurd presentations and playful theatrics.

The event on August 20 will culminate in a tribal celebration and performance from musician/composer Hunter Long, following which the artist will take to the isolated woods of Missouri for three days with no food, shelter or basic amenities on an actual hunt using only tools formed from “The Truth” in an effort to salvage its namesake.  Photographer Josh Ferdinand will document this part of the performance only until his camera runs out of memory.

Finally, on August 24, 2010, 7pm, guests should bring their appetites as Dixon returns to La Esquina straight from the woods for a BBQ and potluck to share his kills, stories, and experiences from the hunt. Guests who don’t believe in the artist’s hunting prowess are welcome to bring their own food, and even feed the artist.

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Charlotte Street Foundation’s Urban Culture Project, in collaboration with City Center Square, seeks proposals from artists interested in being considered for a window installation commission. The commissioned work will occupy a large ground-floor window niche at City Center Square, located on the north side of the street just west of 12th and Main in downtown Kansas City.

In relation to the United States Post Office located within City Center Square, the installation should engage the theme of mail or the post office in some manner. Creative, innovative, artistic approaches to this subject are encouraged. The selected artist will be awarded a materials budget of $500 and an artist stipend of $500 to support the creation of the final project. The installation will remain on view for approximately one year.

Deadline for proposals is Monday, August 9, 2010. Click here for full details.

Viva la Vida – A Celebration of Life & Community is a large group exhibition curated by Jenny Mendez, Director of Mattie Rhodes Art Gallery and Chairperson of the Guild of Latino Fine Arts (Azteca de Grater Kansas City). The show opens with a celebration on Friday June 4, 6-10pm at la Esquina, 1000 West 25th Street, featuring music, performance, food, and drink. It features many dozens of artworks of far-ranging media, including paintings, drawings, sculptures, ceramics, photographs, textile-based and mixed media pieces, all of which represent responses to and interpretations of the exhibition’s title. Many works reflect participating artists’ connections to the Latino community in Kansas City and elsewhere.

Featured artists include Rodolfo Marron, Juan Moya, Jessica Manco, John Hernandez, Miriam Feingold, Israel Garcia, Adolfo Martinez, Alisha Gambino, Arzie Umali, Jason Sierra, Thomas Woodward, Dominic Murillo, Robert Tapley Bustamante, Sammy Persons, Darwin Arevalo, Luke Rocha, Susan Moveno, Elaina Wendt Michalski, Anthony Oropeza, Monique Salazar and many others.

The exhibition runs through July 10, with hours Thursdays & Saturdays, 12-5pm.

Additional events: June 18, 7pm:  Chicano Film Night, with feature film La Vida Loca. Evening includes “Best Dressed Chola Contest.” $5 donation covers one drink and all you can eat popcorn.  Other snacks and drinks will also be available.

June 30, 5:30: Viva la Vida Artist/Curator Talk.

Read full press release. 

Read front page June 27 Kansas City Star Sunday Arts feature by Alice Thorson, “Latino Artists Celebrate Culture and Community at la Esquina and All Around Town.” 

Read front page June 27 Kansas City Star Sunday Arts feature by Alice Thorson, “Recognition Flows in for Adolfo Martinez.”

As part of Third Friday Art Downtown June 18, UCP presents Event Horizons, a touring program of new work by film, video, and new media artists Thomas Comerford (Chicago), and Sabine Gruffat & Bill Brown (Madison, Wisconsin), at Project Space, 21 East 12th Street, 8pm (suggested donation, $5). The event will run approximately 2 hours.

This program includes a screening of Comerford’s The Indian Boundary Line, which follows a road in Chicago, Rogers Avenue, that traces the 1816 Treaty of St. Louis boundary between the United States and “Indian Territory.” In doing so, it examines the collision between the vernacular landscape and the symbolic one, and suggests how this land and its history are an index for the shifting inhabitants, relationships, boundaries and ideas of landscape — as well as the consequences — which have accompanied the transformation of the “New World.”

Also featured is Gruffat & Brown’s Time Machine, a multimedia live performance in which the artists explore new way of telling stories with technologies that are both cutting edge and obsolete, including slide projector, analog video switcher, record player, digital video projector, and computer.  During the performance, the stage becomes the control panel for an immense ship and the projection screen a window through which different spaces and times are visualized, as Gruffat and Brown assume the role of space-time tourists driven by an exploratory urge.

Read full press release.

Community + Loneliness, opening at Paragraph, 23 East 12th Street on May 21, 6-9pm (with curator remarks at 6:30pm), examines the conflict between desire for community and lifestyle and personal choices that undermine the fulfillment of this desire.  “In American culture, there is a desire for community, but also a lifestyle that does not support building communities,” writes curator Angela Lopez.  “This culture in many ways supports forgetting individual roots…. The first solution to ‘Starting over’ is to move. Further, the marketing of convenience seems to pull people apart in more ways than it brings them together… it promises more time to spend with family, friends, etc.,  however in many ways, it takes away the possibility of neighborhood communities.  In a transient culture, it is difficult to maintain stable reliable relationships.”

Community + Loneliness features artists whose work expresses a sense of loneliness stemming from isolation from or within a community, as well as works that speak to community identification and attempts toward community building.  Artists are Miki Baird, Amy Casey, AJ Halbrook, Peregrine Honig, Amy Kligman, Michael Lopez, Hugh Merrill, Charlie Mylie, Jason Needham, Anne Pearce, Sean Semones, Drew Roth,  Rachel Wetchensky, and Whoop Dee Doo.

The exhibition runs May 21-June 26, with gallery hours Thursdays & Saturdays, 12-5pm. Read full press release.

See KC Free Press coverage.

See article in Review.

Troost Troost Troost is a collaborative project of University of Kansas School of Architecture, Design and Planning, the Kansas City Art Institute Graphic Design Department, and el dorado inc, which explores the present and future of Troost Avenue.  It opens at Project Space, 21 East 12th Street, on Friday May 21, 6-9pm, and runs through June 12.

What is Troost Avenue in 2010?  And what role might architecture play in shaping its future?  Which pieces of its history, physical and cultural fabric are important to carry forward? Troost, Troost, Troost encompasses a series of iterative architectural proposals exploring the potential of an incremental infill approach to revitalizing Troost Avenue, with a program including a public radio station, a branch library, a community bank, an urban Habitat ReStore, and mixed-use commercial and residential development  on the section of Troost Avenue from 39th Street to Emanuel Cleaver II Boulevard.  Also included are video essays and graphic design work that explore the critical issue of understanding Troost for what it is today. 

Exhibition hours at Thursdays + Saturdays, 12-5pm. Read full press release. 

Voices of Community + Loneliness, on Saturday, May 22, 1pm at Paragraph, 23 East 12th Street, features writers and performers responding to Paragraph exhibition’s themes. The program, free and open to the public, features Gina Kaufmann’s “Status Report,” for which Ron Megee, Rita Brinkerhoff and Kaufmann will stand on soap boxes, shouting real Facebook status updates onto the street to greet visitors. By adapting online behavior to a physical space, visitors will get to see the humor, loneliness and occasional beauty of broadcasting unrelated sentiments into a shared void. Concluding “Status Report,” Pitch Managing Editor Scott Wilson will speak about how people behave differently in the dark. The program also features a presentation of poetry inspired by the exhibition theme and organized by Glenn North, Poet-in-Residence at the American Jazz Museum. Featured poets are North, Robert Brown, Taylor Brown, and Camiel J. Irving.

The evening of May 22, at 8pm at The Brick, 1727 Megee, Gina Kaufmann hosts Storytelling: Community + Loneliness, a night of stories about the unexpected ways in which feelings of loneliness and feelings of belonging can intersect.  Storytellers featured include Rolf Potts, Kaite Mediatore Stover, Beth Byrd-Lonski,  Frankie Krainz, Meshel Cook, Hadley Johnson, and Brian Busby.

On Saturday, May 8, 7:30 pm at la Esquina, 1000 West 25th Street, BD Collier, Founder and President of The Society for a Re-Natural Environment, will give a multi-media presentation titled, “On the Impact of Flying Carp.” The presentation, free and open to the public, will address the natural history of invasive Asian carp, their impact on North American waterways, and possible solutions to the problem. The presentation will focus primarily on the silver or flying carp whose population has been rapidly expanding in mid-western waterways since the 1980′s and the threat they pose to the Great Lakes ecosystem.

BD Collier is a re-naturalist, educator and artist. As Founder and President of the Society for a Re-Natural Environment he gives presentations, creates exhibitions, and engages in sanctioned and unsanctioned public works to increase understanding of and connection to the non-human natural world. He also works to educate people about how humans have shaped the ecosystems they live in. Collier  has exhibited widely in the U.S. and abroad including: Neues Museum Weserberg Bremen, in Germany; Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art; Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales, Havana, Cuba; University of Houston; 60 Wall Gallery, Deutsche Bank NYC; University of Kansas Natural History Museum and Paragraph Gallery in Kansas City, MO. Collier’s work has been written about in numerous publications including: Art in America, The New York Times, Afterimage, Orion: Nature, Culture, Place, Domus, and Art Papers Magazine. He earned his MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He currently lives and works in Bloomington, IL.

For more about Collier and the The Society for a Re-Natural Environment, visit http://societyrne.net/