KANSAS CITY, MO, SEPTEMBER 18, 2026: Charlotte Street and the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas are pleased to announce the recipients of the 2026 Rocket Grants, a re-granting program of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. This year, 10 awardees will receive project-based grants of $6,000 for a total of $60,000 in funding. The 2026 recipients include Grace Ambrose, Lourdes Kalusha-Aguirre, Melissa Ferrer-Civil and Calvin Arsenia, Kim Riley, Luke Harbur, Jared Horman, Bryan Stalder, Sean Kenealy, Marian McClellan, and The Waiting Room in collaboration with Harrison Street DIY.

The selected projects involve a variety of workshops aimed at accessibility, film screening events and initiatives, performance-based celebrations of queer resilience, outdoor exhibitions in unconventional spaces, and more. “Artists of our region continue to expand definitions for art, explore new places where it thrives, and invite many communities to participate. This year’s Rocket Grants recipients offer a broader view of our communities through surprising, somber, and sometimes zany projects of note,” said Saralyn Reece Hardy, Spencer Museum Director.

The awardees were selected from a highly competitive pool of 84 applications. The jury consisted of three jurors: Joshua Rios (artist and Associate Professor at School of the Art Institute, Chicago, IL); Meg Hahn (artist and Development & Special Projects Manager at SPACE, Portland, ME); Thomas Huang (artist and Associate Professor of Design at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS); and Camry Ivory (artist and recent Rocket Grant recipient, Kansas City, MO).

“This year, we received over 80 Rocket Grant applications. The jury was impressed by the talent on display from our region’s artists and were extremely conscientious in their deliberations at all points in the process. While only ten artists were ultimately selected to receive awards, each of the applicants represents a significant contribution to our region’s creative identity, “ said Elizabeth Spavento, Charlotte Street Co-Executive Director.

The public is invited to celebrate this year’s recipients at an awards ceremony from 6:30-8:00 PM on Thursday, September 24 at Charlotte Street in Kansas City, Missouri. This event is free and open to all and is an opportunity for audiences to learn more about each project and connect with the artists.

For more information about Rocket Grants and this year’s award recipients, visit the Rocket Grants website. 

Here is the complete list of the 2026 Rocket Grants recipients:

FROM LOG TO STOOL: GREEN WOODWORKING,
TRADITIONAL CRAFT, AND COMMUNITY BUILDING

Grace Ambrose, with her background in woodworking and teaching at craft schools and woodshops around the country, is organizing two free two-day workshops called: “From Log to Stool: Green Woodworking, Traditional Craft, and Community Building.” Participants can make their own stools through a practice called green woodworking, a traditional means of woodworking that aims at creating sustainable furniture. These workshops will take place at venues such as city parks or community gardens, where participants will each be given a small kit of hand tools to process the parts as opposed to using machines, offering both accessibility and intentionality.

FORWARD, TOGETHER 

Lourdes Kalusha-Aguirre presents Forward, Together, a film screening and discussion event at venues in the Lawrence and Kansas City areas. This is a story of the Lawrence-El Papaturro friendship committee, a group that is part of a “grassroots transnational peace and justice network known as U.S.-El Salvador Sister Cities.” Through an anthology narrative style, the film follows both Salvadoran and U.S. American born protagonists and illustrates not only the confrontations of their struggles across time and geography, but also their stories in finding solidarity in unlikely places. Proposing to offer ordinary citizens a model for being a part of international solidarity movements, Kalusha-Aguirre hopes to provide them with ways to make meaningful change in their communities.

MELANATED MEASURES : LAUNCH : GREENWOOD CENTENI

Melissa Ferrer-Civil, Kanas City’s first poet laureate, and Calvin Arsenia, internationally renowned harpist singer/songwriter, pair together to celebrate the centennial year of the Greenwood Social Hall, a historically Black religious institution and cultural pillar in the Black Community. Through their event series, A Nation In Exile (ANIE), they’ve partnered with Greenwood Social Halls’ Launch of events to resurrect with new programming in Black August 2027 called “Melanated Measures.” This will invite writers to Kansas City and pair them with local musicians to share their works, followed by sounds from Kadesh Flow and Calvin Arsenia. Other parts of the series include workshops, a dance clinic, and an exhibit featuring black artists from Kansas City and around the country.

THE RECKONING

Kim Riley combines theater, visual art, history, and civic dialogue, in the “The Reckoning,” an immersive play that follows William Adams, a successful Black corporate executive who discovers the stories of transcending the realities of racism in America he grew up with no longer explain the world around him. This play transforms the audience into participants, beginning with a gallery installation called “The Myth of Immunity,” exploring the promise and limits of respectability and achievement, and follows with a performance at the Buck O’Neil Education and Research Center.

THIS IS US: LGBTQ+

Luke Harbur presents “This Is Us: LGBTQ+,” an annual 4-hour daytime celebration that showcases multigenerational queer voices through workshops and a cabaret. The event will focus on anecdotes and artistic expressions that surround queer resilience, offering a “Pay What You Can” entry to each part of the experience, ensuring accessibility to interested patrons. Workshops will offer attendees the chance to design both a pride flag, which will be led by visual artist Triangle Head Universe (Evan Maddox), as well as a drag look to represent what pride looks like to them, led by Burly Esque (Spencer Ruwe). In addition to these workshops, the cabaret will feature cast members who will perform one number representing their own expression of queer resilience.

IF LIFE’S A DRAG, KANSAS CITY’S BEEN LIVING

Jared Horman painted the mural at Passions KC in Westport featuring 18 local drag artists earlier this year, and to celebrate their stories, he’s created his next project: “If Life’s a Drag, Kansas City’s Been Living.” To share each of the artists’ stories and other local artists, this project builds a public website and launches it with a live storytelling event, alongside a call to action to preserve KC’s rich LGBTQ+ history. The website would preserve written histories, share archival photographs, and include an ephemera to tell each story. 

THE FRONT PAGE PROJECT

Bryan Stalder transforms the cover of Northeast News with “The Front Page Project,” an accessible public gallery aimed at turning print media into a platform for community storytelling, portfolio development, and local artistic expression. As a widely distributed newspaper in one of Kansas City’s most culturally diverse, working-class neighborhoods, Northeast News issues will be able to highlight featured artists through this initiative, removing financial barriers, providing mentorship and exposure for local artists, and prompting for an end-of-the-year public exhibition to bring each artist’s works together in a physical gallery space.

POCKET CINEMA PROJECT

Sean Kenealy presents “Pocket Cinema Project,” a micro-budget filmmaking initiative that offers an accessible filmmaking experience. This project starts with a series of free workshops led by Kansas City filmmakers, writers, and artists, and culminates in a free public film festival featuring a selection of the participant films, along with artist talks and community events. Kenealy hopes to create space for new voices, unconventional approaches, and stories that can be made when barriers to filmmaking are intentionally lowered.

REFLECTED

Marian McClellan introduces “Reflected,” a Playback Theater training program offered inside women’s shelters in Kansas City. “Playback Theater” is an interactive approach to improvisational theater, where audience members share a story and a trained ensemble enacts it. Through this approach, residents of the shelters can build community by choosing to tell their stories, see it reflected with care, and hold others’ stories in return. These workshops will culminate in a closing mini-showcase, where the participating residents, along with Improv Springboard players, will perform for an audience of their choosing. 

SITE FOUR

The Waiting Room and Harrison Street DIY collaborate in “Site Four,” an event to reignite Site Projects. This is a one-day outdoor exhibition and collaboration between artist-run galleries and alternative art spaces in Kansas City that will take place at the Harrison Street DIY Skate Park in October 2026. Artists are invited to activate public spaces in the city’s urban core while also creating a network of independent, artist-run spaces. As an important community-building initiative and creative achievement, this project also aims to celebrate the park and serve as a fundraiser for the park to be built again in a new location.

ABOUT CHARLOTTE STREET

Charlotte Street centers Kansas City’s most forward-thinking visual artists, writers, and performers—acting as the primary incubator, provocateur, and connector for the region’s contemporary arts community, and its leading advocate on the national stage. Since 1997, Charlotte Street has distributed over $2.5 million in awards and grants to artists and their innovative projects, and connected individual artists to each other and to the greater Kansas City community. For more information about Charlotte Street, its awards, programs, and initiatives, visit www.charlottestreet.org.

ABOUT THE SPENCER MUSEUM OF ART

The Spencer Museum of Art, located on the University of Kansas Lawrence campus, explores the intersection of art, ideas, and experiences. With a diverse collection of more than 48,000 works, the Spencer is the only museum in Kansas with contemporary and historic artwork in all mediums from cultures across six continents. The Spencer Museum facilitates arts engagement and research through exhibitions, artist commissions and residencies, conferences, performances, lectures, children’s art activities, and arts and culture festivals. Admission to the Spencer Museum of Art is free. Learn more at spencerart.ku.edu.

ABOUT THE ANDY WARHOL FOUNDATION FOR VISUAL ARTS

In accordance with Andy Warhol’s will, the mission of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts is the advancement of the visual arts. The Foundation manages an innovative and flexible grants program while also preserving Warhol’s legacy through creative and responsible licensing policies and extensive scholarly research for ongoing catalogue raisonné projects. To date, the Foundation has given over $260 million in cash grants to more than 1,000 arts organizations in 49 states and abroad and has donated 52,786 works of art to 322 institutions worldwide.

View press release as PDF HERE.

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Kansas City MO, September 1, 2026:  Charlotte Street is pleased to present Strength in Softness, an exhibition curated by Charlotte Street staff member Cherline Philogene and featuring current and past artists from Charlotte Street’s Studio Residency Program. The exhibition will open September 16 with an opening reception from 11 AM–1 PM at The Box Gallery (1000 Walnut Street, Suite 211, KCMO, 64106) and will remain on view through January 29, 2027.

Strength in Softness brings together past Charlotte Street Studio Residents Erin Dodson and Caroline Honas with current residents Ellie Naeger and Yulie Urano. Through sculpture, installation, and mixed-media practices, these artists create a visual conversation exploring the relationship between softness and strength, fragility and endurance. Together, their works invite viewers to consider how materials, like living things, hold memory, transformation, and resilience.

For nearly three decades, Charlotte Street has supported Kansas City’s artists through exhibitions, grants and awards, residencies, public programs, and performances. Since its founding in 1997, the organization has served as the primary incubator, connector, and advocate for the region’s contemporary arts community. Strength in Softness continues Charlotte Street’s longstanding commitment to creating opportunities for local artists to share their work with new audiences expanding access to contemporary art throughout Kansas City.

Located on the first floor of the Commerce Bank Building, The Box Gallery is an 830-square-foot exhibition space dedicated to showcasing Kansas City’s arts and cultural history through partnerships with artists, collectors, arts organizations, businesses, and universities. The gallery provides an accessible downtown setting for engaging with Kansas City’s arts and cultural history.

Commerce Bank and the Richard J. Stern Foundation for the Arts-Commerce Bank Trustee have been longstanding partners of Charlotte Street. Together, the organizations cultivate collaboration, ambitious creation, and whole-person support for hundreds of local artists each year by providing resources, spaces, and community that enable artists to take creative risks and build sustainable careers and lives in Kansas City.

ABOUT THE BOX GALLERY

The Box Gallery is an 830-square-foot exhibition space located on the first floor of the Commerce Bank Building at 1000 Walnut Street, Kansas City, Missouri. Dedicated to presenting exhibitions that reveal Kansas City’s arts and cultural history, the gallery partners with local artists, collectors, arts organizations, businesses, and universities to present a year-round exhibition program. Admission is free and open to the public Monday through Friday from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Complimentary parking is available in the Commerce Bank Building Garage with gallery validation.

ABOUT CHARLOTTE STREET’S STUDIO RESIDENCY PROGRAM

Charlotte Street’s Studio Residency program supports visual artists, writers, and performing artists by providing free studio space, rehearsal space, professional development, and opportunities for exhibition, performance, mentorship and cross-disciplinary collaboration. The residency cultivates an environment of experimentation, dialogue, and community-building for approximately 30 artists each year. Charlotte Street’s annual Open Studios event makes Resident art more accessible to a broad public audience and encourages exchange and collaboration among the Studio Residents. Artists receive Residency for two-year terms, on a rotating basis, with a new cohort of approximately 15 joining each June.

ABOUT CHARLOTTE STREET
Charlotte Street centers Kansas City’s most forward-thinking visual artists, writers, and performers—acting as the primary incubator, provocateur, and connector for the region’s contemporary arts community, and its leading advocate on the national stage. Since 1997, Charlotte Street has distributed over $3 million in awards and grants to artists and their innovative projects and has hosted countless exhibitions, performances, convenings, and conversations connecting and challenging Kansas City’s contemporary art ecosystem. For more information about Charlotte Street, its awards, programs, and initiatives, visit www.charlottestreet.org.

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View the press release as a PDF here.

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Kansas City, MO, August 14, 2025:  Kansas City, MO, August 14, 2026: ArtsKC, Charlotte Street, and the Hall Family Foundation are transforming arts investment to honor and amplify the creative power alive in Kansas City, announcing the launch of the Creative Confluence Fund, a two-year, $1.4 million pilot grant program supporting artists and arts-engaged organizations in three key geographic areas.

Creative Confluence Fund features two streams of support and prioritizes the historically divested neighborhoods of Northeast Kansas City, East Side Kansas City, and Northeastern Wyandotte County, Kansas.

Ten individual artists living and working in these neighborhoods will receive $50,000 over two years to lead community-informed projects. The second stream of support will provide grant services and funds equal to $50,000 to 15 small arts organizations over two years for capacity-building, bolstering their programming accessibility and impact in the priority neighborhoods. These funding opportunities are open to all artistic disciplines.

“Artists are community leaders,” said Charlotte Street Co-Executive Directors Amanda Middaugh and Elizabeth Spavento. “They serve as culture bearers and create a sense of wonder in our daily lives, but they also function as agents of change: embedded in social initiatives, giving voice to diverse groups, and organizing community action. We’re eager to see how this funding initiative propels positive change in Kansas City.”

Just as the confluence of the Missouri and Kansas Rivers have shaped the geography of Kansas City, the arts have shaped Kansas City as a place of cultural distinction. Kansas City’s unique cultural history has been largely influenced by communities in the Northeast and East Side, MO neighborhoods, and Northeastern Wyandotte County in KS. However, Kansas City’s history is also one of division, from redlining to border wars to many other divisive policies and practices.

As communities in Kansas City continue to wrestle with dividing lines both literal and figurative, art and artists are a uniting force, bringing people and innovative ideas together to manifest change, preserve cultural traditions, and enrich the lives of families throughout the region. By channeling its support to specific geographic focus areas, the Creative Confluence Fund recognizes the creative power that exists in these neighborhoods and seeks to amplify community-driven art and artists in Kansas City’s cultural landscape.

The president of the Hall Family Foundation, Mayra Aguirre, is excited for the opportunity this provides Kansas City. “Creativity exists in every neighborhood across Kansas City. Artists, cultural organizations, and community members help shape how people experience belonging, tell stories, and connect to place. This opportunity builds on those strengths by expanding participation in the arts and supporting and amplifying the cultural life that already exists within communities.”

GEOGRAPHIC AREAS

Northeast Wyandotte, Kansas includes the area defined by the Missouri River to the north, 69

Highway to the east, I-70 to the south, and College Parkway/North 67th to the west.

Northeast Kansas City, Missouri includes the area defined by the Missouri River to the north, I-

435 to the east, I-70/Truman Road to the south, and East 5th Street to the west.

East Side Kansas City, Missouri includes the area defined by I-70/Truman Road to the north, I-

435 to the east, East 63rd Street to the south, and Troost Avenue to the west.

“Community-focused, arts-engaged organizations are pivotal to ensuring the vibrancy and

humanity of our neighborhoods,” said Dana Knapp, ArtsKC President & CEO. “We look forward

to learning from and engaging with the organizations and artists participating in this initiative as

they continue to inspire the growth and change occurring across our region,” said Rashida

Phillips, ArtsKC VP of Community Impact.

ARTIST GRANTS

This grant supports the development of public art projects by individual artists that strengthen the cultural fabric of one of the three focus neighborhoods, both during the project time period and long-term. Projects must be relevant to the given community, ambitiously creative, facilitate collaboration with residents, and foster social dialogue around local issues. Applicants must be located or working within one of the geographic focus areas and must develop outreach strategies for the project in collaboration with Charlotte Street and ArtsKC staff members.

ARTS-ENGAGED ORGANIZATION GRANTS

This funding supports not-for-profit arts organizations with an annual budget under $500,000. Organizations must be principally located in or predominantly serving one of the three focus neighborhoods and have at least one year of financial records and an established history of programming. Grant support seeks to build organizations’ long-term viability, including growing accessible community engagement, stabilizing finances and personnel, identifying and resolving organizational needs, strategic planning, and developing evaluation metrics and competencies.

The collective grantees will participate in a cohort model that prioritizes peer-to-peer learning, access to specialized resources, and camaraderie.

Applications for both competitive funding opportunities open on August 14. Artists are asked to submit a short Letter of Interest by September 30. Select artists will receive an invitation to submit a full application. Both artist and small arts organization grants have a full application deadline of November 24, 2026. Submissions will be reviewed by a jury panel of independent artists and arts professionals – including residents of the three geographic focus areas. Grant announcements will be made in late January 2027.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

ArtsKC and Charlotte Street will host multiple in-person and virtual information sessions for both grant opportunities in the coming weeks. Dates and neighborhood locations will be announced soon.

Additional details and links to the applications can be found at www.creativeconfluencefund.org.

For interview requests, contact Karla Deel, Sr. Marketing & Communications Manager, ArtsKC at kdeel@artskc.org or 816-994-9231 or Amanda Middaugh, Co-Executive Director, Charlotte Street at amanda@charlottestreet.org or 816-994-7734.

ABOUT ArtsKC

ArtsKC envisions a vibrant and just world where everyone participates in and benefits from the transformative power of the arts. As the Metropolitan Arts Council of Greater Kansas City, we are singularly focused on the advancement and engagement of the region’s arts and culture ecosystem. We ensure access, build capacity, activate advocacy, and drive investment —connecting 500,000 individuals to the arts annually through promotion and access programs, investing $8.5 million since 2007 in artists and arts organizations through grants and stipends, and building strong public and private partnerships to secure policy and funding that advance the arts as integral to the quality of life for all. Please connect with arts and culture in our region at artskcgo.com and reach out to our team at ArtsKC.org to learn more.

ABOUT CHARLOTTE STREET
Charlotte Street centers Kansas City’s most forward-thinking visual artists, writers, and performers—acting as the primary incubator, provocateur, and connector for the region’s contemporary arts community, and its leading advocate on the national stage. Since 1997, Charlotte Street has distributed over $3 million in awards and grants to artists and their innovative projects, and connected individual artists to each other and to the greater Kansas City community. For more information about Charlotte Street, its awards, programs, and initiatives, visit www.charlottestreet.org

ABOUT THE HALL FAMILY FOUNDATION
The Hall Family Foundation is a private philanthropic organization dedicated to enhancing the quality of human life in the Greater Kansas City area. The Foundation supports initiatives that enrich the entire community, expand opportunity for all, and promote excellence. As a catalyst and collaborative partner, the Foundation invests in programs that help ensure all families in Kansas City thrive. To learn more about our work, visit www.hallfamilyfoundation.org.

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Kansas City, MO, August 5, 2026:  Charlotte Street is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2026 Cultural Producer Grants. This year, Charlotte Street has awarded 5 grassroots arts organizations and artist-run projects in Kansas City with general operating grants of $5,000. The 2026 recipients include Flew The Coop Sessions, Greenwood Social Hall, Jardín, Kansas City Public Theatre, and Kostas Contemporary.

Kansas City has long enjoyed a thriving and diverse ecology of low-budget artist-run spaces, collectives, groups and organizations. The collective impact of these grassroots operations to both our arts community and to the cultural landscape of Kansas City is enormous. Whether permanent or temporary, these groups nurture and grow artists creatively and become powerful engines of community. Through the Cultural Producer Grant program, Charlotte Street seeks to help build capacity, sustainability, visibility, and further funding viability for art operations with budgets under $50,000.

Through Charlotte Street’s juried selection process, 100% of funds for Cultural Producers is awarded in support of organizations whose mission and leadership will positively impact the advancement of BIPOC, LGBTQIA, or Disabled communities, in recognition of the oppression of those communities in the art sector and the gap that has created particularly in the Kansas City art scene.

ABOUT THE 2026 CULTURAL PRODUCER GRANT RECIPIENTS

FLEW THE COOP SESSIONS

Flew The Coop Sessions is a non-profit live music video series that provides local artists with high-quality video and audio recordings of their live performances free of charge with the mission of documenting, celebrating and growing the thriving and diverse local music scene in the Kansas City region. Flew the Coop Sessions features a wide variety of musicians and bands from different genres, such as jazz, blues, hip-hop, rock, folk, punk, country, hardcore, electronic and more. Each episode showcases a different artist or group performing in unconventional and visually compelling spaces throughout Kansas City. By showcasing musicians from diverse backgrounds and genres, we aim to celebrate the multicultural tapestry of our city while promoting inclusivity and fostering a sense of unity through the universal language of music. We contribute to the growth of artists’ music careers as well as show the broader music industry that Kansas City is a destination for progressive new music of all genres, not simply “flyover country”. The content produced by Flew the Coop Sessions serves as a vital resource for local artists interested in growing their platforms and effectively booking live shows.

GREENWOOD SOCIAL HALL

Greenwood Social Hall is an artist-centered performance space producing intimate, high-caliber multidisciplinary work centered on queer, Black, and underrepresented artists. Programming emphasizes artists whose work pushes formal boundaries while remaining rooted in cultural specificity and lived experience. Excellence at Greenwood is defined not by scale, but intention: carefully curated artists, meaningful audience engagement, and consistent strong artistic output. This space is different than any other venue in the world. Greenwood notably flaunts its care of the audience with varied seating options, the crystal glassware, the individual hand towels in the bathroom, the lightly scented curtains that meet you upon entry, and the smile that greets familiar faces by name with feather pen in hand. Artists feel comfortable hanging out with audiences in the maximalist sanctuary Greenwood fills a critical gap in Kansas City’s arts ecosystem—supporting artists who are often overlooked by larger institutions while maintaining a level of artistic quality and care that rivals them.

JARDÍN

Jardín (“garden” in Spanish) is the world’s first “soft-skills first” DJ lifestyle, education, and technology organization dedicated to dismantling gatekeeping within the global music industry. Operating under the foundational tenet that emotional intelligence is the single most vital DJ skill, Jardín seamlessly integrates insight meditation, theory of art, and personal wisdom into proven DJ pedagogy. The initiative builds welcoming physical and digital sanctuaries specifically designed to invite historically underrepresented creatives into the DJ booth without the barrier of prohibitively expensive hardware. Jardín’s DJs don’t just play songs, they blossom into artists. Beyond community workshops and seasonal showcases, Jardín’s integrated ecosystem pioneers innovative DJ software logic and proprietary hardware controllers engineered for intuitive musical discovery.

KANSAS CITY PUBLIC THEATRE

Kansas City Public Theatre is an eight-year-old professional theater company that has made its mark through its mission of deploying Radical Hospitality to provide theater to every person: presenting all shows free of charge in a variety of accessible locations, performing new works and adaptations by area playwrights that are topical and full of diverse actors and stories, and further building community through audience conversations and local partnerships. KCPublic also continues to expand our community outreach efforts through our “Soapbox,” a program that allows people to give voice to their experiences through public performance. Founders, Elizabeth and Nathan Bowman lead the organization artistically and administratively. They hire approximately 60 artists each season for programming that serves over 1,000 community members annually. KCPublic has a hands-on board of directors that volunteers at least 30 hours a year to the organization. In 2022, Kansas City Public Theatre was named “Arts Organization of the Year” by the Missouri Arts Council and was formally recognized through legislation passed in the Missouri House of Representatives.

KOSTAS CONTEMPORARY

Kostas Contemporary creates open, accessible spaces for movement that bring professional dancers and community movers together to train, create, and connect. Kostas Contemporary is committed to expanding access to contemporary dance in Kansas City while supporting collaboration, artistic growth, and the healing potential of movement. Kostas Contemporary has hosted open movement classes since 2022 in spaces throughout Kansas City, including the 21c Museum Hotel Kansas City, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and Charlotte Street. In 2024, we formally renamed the series Open Class and partnered with Hotel Kansas City to host monthly free classes designed for both professional dancers and community movers. Kostas Contemporary has also developed a collaborative artist exchange model pairing professional dance artists to share and merge creative processes in real time. The program has helped fill a gap in Kansas City’s dance ecosystem by creating consistent space for artists and community members to gather, train, collaborate, and build opportunities together. Programming is coordinated through volunteer efforts led by the organization’s founder alongside collaborating teaching artists, volunteer coordinators, and interns who are emerging artists gaining experience in community-based arts programming.

Grant applications were submitted and scored through an online submission platform. The jury reviewed and rated applications individually and then conducted in-person interviews of the top scoring applicants. Charlotte Street administers the selection process, but staff are not voting panelists.

The 2026 jury panel included:

Jimmy Beason II, a citizen of the Osage Nation and professor in the Indigenous and American Indian Studies department at Haskell Indian Nations University

Angelica Sandoval, metal artist and sculptor, Adjunct Professor of Fine Arts at Johnson County Community College

Carmaletta Williams, Ph.D., Executive Director, The Black Archives of Mid-America

ABOUT CHARLOTTE STREET
Charlotte Street centers Kansas City’s most forward-thinking visual artists, writers, and performers—acting as the primary incubator, provocateur, and connector for the region’s contemporary arts community, and its leading advocate on the national stage. Since 1997, Charlotte Street has distributed over $3 million in awards and grants to artists and their innovative projects, and connected individual artists to each other and to the greater Kansas City community. For more information about Charlotte Street, its awards, programs, and initiatives, visit www.charlottestreet.org.

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Kansas City MO, July 22, 2026:  Charlotte Street is pleased to present Digital Prairie, a group exhibition curated by Steve Gurysh and Poppy DeltaDawn that brings together artists working across craft, computation, music, and ecological practice to examine the intertwined relationships between technology, landscape, and human intervention. Featuring work by Colette + Jeff Bangert, Raven Chacon, Poppy DeltaDawn, Steve Gurysh, Michael Jones McKean, and Jeanine Oleson, the exhibition will be on view in the Charlotte Street Gallery (3333 Wyoming St., Kansas City, MO 64111) from August 15 through September 26, 2026. An opening reception will take place on Saturday, August 15, from 3:00–5:00 PM.

“The subject of all my work has been landscape. The elements of the computer work and my hand work are often repetitive, like leaves, trees, grass and other natural landscape elements are… The form of grass as grass, leaves as leaves, is what I’m exploring… Grass as form. Grass is also random and random is a natural computer facility. Computer grass is natural grass.” — Colette Bangert (In: Leavitt, R, ed. Artist and computer, 1976).

Digital Prairie is a technological choir reverberating the landscape. Through the vocabularies, gestures, and geometries of machine language, musical composition, basketry, weaving and threadwork, tree harvesting, mystic architecture, computer-aided imaging and expression; together, these artists present craft, technology, and environment as a holistic and monstrous hybrid, an intergenerational, cross-cultural survey of human-computer-prairie interaction.

The prairie itself serves as subject and cautionary tale, as an ecosystem broken by innovation. John Deere’s steel prairie-breaking plow of 1837 could finally slice through millennia-old root systems that wooden plows could not penetrate. By 1874, Joseph F. Glidden’s patented machine was mass-producing barbed wire, a low-cost means of enclosing agricultural land across the largely treeless plains. Over four decades, these technologies accelerated Western expansion and enabled the systematic displacement of Native peoples from ancestral lands.

The artists in Digital Prairie reconfigure traditional and speculative knowledge through the lens of computer-aided craft, material culture and practices in land stewardship and connection. Their works converge on a critical insight that computational abstraction leaves concrete ecological footprints—marks of human activity in the geological record through an irreversible meshing of environment and infrastructure. This exhibition asks whether technology might be reoriented from an extractive force toward a regenerative one. Can our digital tools learn to grow like grass—randomly, recursively?

CURATED AND ORGANIZED BY

Steve Gurysh + Poppy DeltaDawn

CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS

Colette + Jeff Bangert, Raven Chacon, Poppy DeltaDawn, Steve Gurysh, Michael Jones McKean, Jeanine Oleson

PERFORMANCE PROGRAM

Marshall Trammell

ADDITIONAL PROGRAMS SUPPORTED BY

The University of Kansas

For interview requests contact Amanda Middaugh at amanda@charlottestreet.org or 816-994-7734.

ARTIST BIOS

Colette Stuebe Bangert and Charles Jeffries Bangert (Lawrence, KS) were a collaboration. CSB + CJB = CB; as they signed their computer-ink-plotter drawings on paper beginning in the mid 1960’s in eastern Kansas. The algorithmic ink drawings on paper reflected their lives living in the landscape of the midwestern Grasslands. Simple lines of many colors, vertical, horizontal, curved and circling or crossing, open or dense as are natural landscape elements. According to Colette “The programs were written by Jeff who was a mathematician and programmer. As a life long visual artist, the program’s visual contents were influenced and developed using my hand work on paper and canvas. The algorithmic work in turn influenced my own hand work on paper, canvas and later thread on cloth.” Their work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NYC; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, Kansas.

Raven Chacon is a composer, performer and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, Chacon has exhibited, performed, or had works performed at LACMA, The Renaissance Society, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Borealis Festival, SITE Santa Fe, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival, and Swiss Institute Contemporary Art New York. As a member of Postcommodity from 2009-2018, he co-created artworks presented at the Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, Carnegie International 57, as well as the 2-mile long land art installation Repellent Fence. His solo artworks are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum and National Museum of the American Indian, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Getty Research Institute, the University of New Mexico Art Museum, and various private collections.

Poppy DeltaDawn (Lawrence, KS) is an artist, writer, and teacher exploring the dialogue between contemporary life and traditional making practices through textiles and sculpture. Her location-specific practice is currently informed by the material culture of the Kansas prairieland, where she challenges the relationship between inherited craft knowledge, technology, and contemporary making. Recent residencies include Fire Island Artist Residency (FIAR), Berea College, Unstable Design Lab (CU Boulder), and Tallgrass Artist Residency. DeltaDawn is an Assistant Professor of Art in Textiles + Fiber at the University of Kansas, where she is restoring a 3 Acre Hay Meadow.

Steve Gurysh (Lawrence, KS) is an artist working in sculpture, computational craft, and art in the public realm, responding to collective and beyond-human ways of understanding place, ecology, and the scale of planetary phenomena. Receiving residencies at the Volland Foundation, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, the WATERSHED+ Dynamic Environment Lab, he has exhibited at W139, Amsterdam; El Museo de la Ciudad, Quer‌‌étaro, Mexico; The Engine Room, Wellington, New Zealand; and in the center of the Allegheny River. Gurysh is an Associate Professor of Sculpture in the Department of Visual Art at the University of Kansas.

Michael Jones McKean (b. Federated States of Micronesia, lives/works in the US and France) is a sculptor whose work explores the nature of objects in relation to folklore, technology, anthropology, and geography. McKean has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Nancy Graves Foundation Award, and has lectured and shown his work extensively around the world. He is currently an Associate Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in the Sculpture + Extended Media Department where he has taught since 2006. McKean is also the inaugural Artist-in-Residence of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, and the Centro de Interpretação do Abrigo do Lagar Velho in Portugal.

Jeanine Oleson (New York, NY) is an interdisciplinary artist working with images, materiality and language, which she forms into complex and humorous objects, instruments, images, videos and performances through a queer and feminist lens. Oleson has exhibited and performed at venues including: The Kitchen, NY; Cubitt Gallery, London; Commonwealth & Council, LA; Grand Arts, Kansas City, MO; MoMA P.S.1, NY; Coreana Museum, Seoul; SculptureCenter, NY; Beta-Local, San Juan, PR; Socrates Sculpture Park, NY. Oleson was a 2024 Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome and has been in residence at Macdowell Colony, Hammer Museum, New Museum, Smack Mellon Studio Program and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Oleson teaches at Rutgers University and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

ABOUT CHARLOTTE STREET
Charlotte Street centers Kansas City’s most forward-thinking visual artists, writers, and performers—acting as the primary incubator, provocateur, and connector for the region’s contemporary arts community, and its leading advocate on the national stage. Since 1997, Charlotte Street has distributed over $3 million in awards and grants to artists and their innovative projects and has hosted countless exhibitions, performances, convenings, and conversations connecting and challenging Kansas City’s contemporary art ecosystem. For more information about Charlotte Street, its awards, programs, and initiatives, visit www.charlottestreet.org.

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KANSAS CITY, MO, JUNE 12, 2026: Eight artists have been selected to participate in Charlotte Street’s 2026-2027 Crossroads Artboards program. Located in the heart of Kansas City’s Crossroads Arts District at 125 Southwest Blvd, the Artboards will feature eight commissioned works every three months on the exterior, double-sided billboards. The artists selected for the 2026-2027 cycle are Simon Angel, Summer Brooks, Aimee Fresia, Caroline Honas, Laura Kozak, Jay Malik, Jean McGuire, andArin Yoon.

The works features traverse intersections of identity, environment, and collective memory, from Simon Angel’s stark self-portraiture, where the transgender body is set against Kansas City’s industrial desolation, to Summer Brooks and Jay Malik’s luminous celebrations of Black femininity, reframing narratives of beauty, strength, and self-definition. Aimee Fresia captures the tension between permanence and transience through layered landscapes in motion, while Caroline Honas reflects on the fragile ecology of the tallgrass prairie, where cycles of growth and burn reveal both threat and renewal. Laura Kozak confronts the ubiquity of waste, juxtaposing intimate refuse with expansive post-landfill landscapes, as Jean McGuire channels the enduring joy of Kansas City’s jazz and dance heritage. Arin Yoon’s deeply personal images trace the lingering impacts of war across family and generations, illuminating how trauma is carried and inherited.

The 2026-2027 Crossroads Artboards schedule is as follows:

April–June 2026: Jean McGuire (West), Summer Brooks (East)

July–September 2026: Aimee Fresia (West), Jay Malik (East)

October–December 2026: Caroline Honas (West), Arin Yoon (East)

January–March 2027: Simon Angel (West), Laura Kozak (East)

For interview requests or to inquire about sponsoring the Artboards program contact Amanda Middaugh at amanda@charlottestreet.org or 816-994-7734.

CROSSROADS ARTBOARDS SELECTION PROCESS

Applications were submitted and scored through the online submission platform, Submittable. This year’s jury reviewed and rated 76 proposals for the 2026-2027 Crossroads Artboards program.

Charlotte Street administers the selection process, but staff are not voting panelists.

The jury for the Artboards consists of four artists and arts advocates–all from the Kansas City region with at least one juror who lives or works in the Crossroads Arts District. The jurors for the 2026-2027 cycle were Lorece Chanelle, Bernadette Negrete, Garry Noland, and Chico Sierra.

ABOUT CROSSROADS ARTBOARDS
Since 2008, the Crossroads Artboards has featured over 100 commissioned works by Kansas City-area artists. The Artboards capture the creative spirit of the Crossroads neighborhood while serving as an alternative platform for contemporary art. For a complete listing of artists and more information, visit charlottestreet.org/crossroads-artboards.

ABOUT CHARLOTTE STREET
Charlotte Street centers Kansas City’s most forward-thinking visual artists, writers, and performers—acting as the primary incubator, provocateur, and connector for the region’s contemporary arts community, and its leading advocate on the national stage. Since 1997, Charlotte Street has distributed over $3 million in awards and grants to artists and their innovative projects and has hosted countless exhibitions, performances, convenings, and conversations connecting and challenging Kansas City’s contemporary art ecosystem. For more information about Charlotte Street, its awards, programs, and initiatives, visit www.charlottestreet.org.

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KANSAS CITY, MO, JUNE 5, 2026: Charlotte Street is excited to announce the selection of 17 artists for the two-year Studio Residency Program. The group of 9 visual artists, 5 performers, and 3 writers were selected from a highly competitive pool of 167 applicants, by a jury of regarded arts industry experts. The incoming residents will join the 2025-2027 cohort of 14 artists in studio spaces on the Charlotte Street Campus in June and will publicly commence their residency at the annual Slide Slam event on Tuesday, June 16 at 6:30 PM in Charlotte Street’s Stern Theater (3333 Wyoming Street, Kansas City, MO).

With support from the Windgate Foundation, Charlotte Street’s Studio Residency Program provides visual artists, writers, and performing artists with a rich creative environment that promotes community-building, creative production, artistic experimentation, learning, and cross-disciplinary work. Approximately 30 artists each year receive free studio space (accessible 24/7), rehearsal space, professional development, exhibition and performance opportunities, and mentorships. Artists receive Residency for two-year terms, on a rotating basis, with a new cohort of approximately 15 joining each June.

VISUAL ARTISTS

Dora Agbas, @doraagbas

Poppy DeltaDawn, @poppydeltadawn

Adrienne Walker Hoard, @adriennewalkerhoard

Justin Korver, @justincaseyourewondering

Lisa Maione, @lisajmaione

Gaylin Eugene Nicholson, @gaylin_nicholson

Hunter Silvey, @hunty_702

Harold Smith Jr, @haroldsmithart

Chaneryna Thach, @chaneryna_thach

PERFORMANCE ARTISTS

Winston Dynamite Brown (The DynamitExperience), @thedynamiteexperience

Nick Hmeijak, @nick.jtr

Moo Contemporary (Kaitlyn Gardner Scahdë & Troy Gardner), @moocontemporary

Silvee (Hannah Kelly), @silveemusic

Austin Manuel Williamson, @amwsound

WRITERS

Leslie VonHolten, @leslievonh

Lindsay Kennedy

Tasjha Dixon, @tasjhadixon

Artist applications were submitted and scored through the online submission platform. This year’s jury reviewed and rated 167 applications individually and then as an in-person group. Charlotte Street administers the selection process, but staff are not voting panelists.

The jury panel included:

Victor Antillanca, VA-Films; Director & Producer, Documentary Filmmaker
Ann Dean, Lawrence Arts Center; photographer/instructor
Michael Schonhoff, Art + Design Labs and KCAI Gallery at the Kansas City Art Institute; Director

Learn more about of the artists in Charlotte Street’s Studio Residency program at the Slide Slam on Tuesday, June 16 at 6:30 PM. The annual Slide Slam event allows each artist to share a 3-minute presentation about their practice and goals with the audience.

For questions regarding the Studio Residency, please contact Patrick Alexander, Programming + Residency Manager at pat@charlottestreet.org.

ABOUT CHARLOTTE STREET’S STUDIO RESIDENCY PROGRAM
Charlotte Street’s Studio Residency Program provides free studio and rehearsal spaces to a mixed disciplinary cohort of exceptional artists for 2 year-long terms. Through the program’s offerings—which include free studio space, advisors, public programs, monthly cohort meetings and presentations, studio visits and access to a multidisciplinary network of artist peers—Charlotte Street’s Studio Residency Program encourages creative production, artistic experimentation, professional development, and community building. The program fosters Charlotte Street’s values of risk taking, openness, excellence, and collaboration by creating an environment where artists use the platforms and resources available to meet personal goals and career milestones.

ABOUT CHARLOTTE STREET
Charlotte Street centers Kansas City’s most forward-thinking visual artists, writers, and performers—acting as the primary incubator, provocateur, and connector for the region’s contemporary arts community, and its leading advocate on the national stage. Since 1997, Charlotte Street has distributed over $3 million in awards and grants to artists and their innovative projects and has hosted countless exhibitions, performances, convenings, and conversations connecting and challenging Kansas City’s contemporary art ecosystem. For more information about Charlotte Street, its awards, programs, and initiatives, visit www.charlottestreet.org.

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Kansas City, MO, April 29, 2026: Charlotte Street and the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas are pleased to announce the 2026 open call for Rocket Grants, with applications opening online Wednesday, May 6, 2026. The deadline to apply is Wednesday, June 17, 2026.

With support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Rocket Grants provide direct funding to artists in the Kansas City region who are creating exceptional, under-the-radar, and artist-centered projects in public spaces. Artists, curators, collectives, and collaborative groups residing within an 80-mile radius of the Kansas City metropolitan area are eligible to apply.

The Rocket Grants program awards project-based grants of $6,000 to individuals or artist groups for projects that exist outside established venues such as museums, galleries, theaters or arts districts. Artists are encouraged to address the community at large, or choose a smaller, targeted audience. The long-term goals of the Rocket Grants program are to encourage emerging and non-traditional artistic practices in the Kansas City region, to contribute to a thriving arts community, and to build bridges between geographic and cultural communities.

“The Rocket Grants program provides critical funding to individual artists and culture bearers who have bold ideas and build unconventional projects. We are grateful to our partner the Spencer Museum for helping us build a dynamic arts and culture ecosystem and to the Warhol Foundation for their forward-thinking vision that brings regional artists into the national spotlight,” said Elizabeth Spavento, Co-Executive Director at Charlotte Street.

Rocket Grants projects encompass a broad range of visual art, performance, film, video, new media, publications, social practice, and interdisciplinary work. The Rocket Grants Blog includes an online archive and documentation of past projects.

Rocket Grants are selected by a jury of four arts professionals, working both locally and nationally. Each proposal will be evaluated on criteria including innovation, thoughtful context, feasibility, and meaningful impact.

To apply, artists must submit a Letter of Interest (LOI) online by June 17, 2026. The LOI should include a project summary, the artists involved, the intended audience, the specific context of the work, budget needs, and relevance of the project. The jury will assess the Letters of Interest and invite selected projects to complete a full application in July 2026. Rocket Grants recipients will be announced in September 2026.

For any questions, please contact Kimberly Kitada, Charlotte Street’s Gallery & Programs Manager, at kimberly@charlottestreet.org.

Rocket Grant FAQ Sessions

The public is invited to attend in-person information sessions that will answer questions about the application and jury process:

May 21, 2026 | 6 PM to 7 PM at the Spencer Museum at KU

1301 Mississippi Street, Lawrence, KS 66045

June 10, 2026 | 6 PM to 7 PM at the Charlotte Street Library

3333 Wyoming Street, Kansas City, MO 64111

A recording of the info session scheduled for May 21st at the Spencer Museum will be made available on our website.

ABOUT THE SPENCER MUSEUM OF ART

The Spencer Museum of Art, located on the University of Kansas Lawrence campus, explores the intersection of art, ideas, and experiences. With a diverse collection of more than 48,000 works, the Spencer is the only museum in Kansas with contemporary and historic artwork in all mediums from cultures across six continents. The Spencer Museum facilitates arts engagement and research through exhibitions, artist commissions and residencies, conferences, performances, lectures, children’s art activities, and arts and culture festivals. Admission to the Spencer Museum of Art is free.

ABOUT CHARLOTTE STREET

Charlotte Street centers Kansas City’s most forward-thinking visual artists, writers, and performers—acting as the primary incubator, provocateur, and connector for the region’s contemporary arts community, and its leading advocate on the national stage. Since 1997, Charlotte Street has distributed over $3 million in awards and grants to artists and their innovative projects, and connected individual artists to each other and to the greater Kansas City community. For more information about Charlotte Street, its awards, programs, and initiatives, visit www.charlottestreet.org.

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KANSAS CITY, MO, April 20, 2026: Charlotte Street’s Studio Residency Program opens its doors on Saturday, April 25, 2026, for its much-anticipated annual Open Studios event. This free, one-day-only community program takes place from 3:00–10:00 PM at Charlotte Street’s campus at 3333 Wyoming Street, Kansas City, MO 64111. Open Studios highlights recent work of the 31 visual artists, writers, and performers currently in Charlotte Street’s Studio Residency Program.

Open Studios is an open invitation to the community to step into the creative process—explore studios, meet the artists, watch performances, listen to writers read new work, and see how artists are experimenting, collaborating, and evolving their practice.

Visual Artist Residents and Writers will have their studios open on the third floor of Charlotte Street’s Campus, while Performing Artist Residents will be performing across campus, including music performances in the lobby from Henry Scamurra at 3:30 PM, and Kadesh Flow at 4:00 PM; readings from Writing Residents at 5:00 PM in the Kemper Library; dance and movement performances in the Stern Theater from Arianna Hughlett at 4:30 PM, Tara Leigh Burgat at 5:00 PM, Anna Boehm at 5:30 PM, Sam McReynolds at 6:00 PM and Katie Brennan at 6:30 PM; a music performance from Christina Silvius in the Studio Residency Garden at 7:00 PM; and musical performances in the Stern Theater from Isaiah Petrie at 8:30 PM, Agrekulture at 9:00 PM, and Paris Williams at 9:30 PM.

For more information on performances, stay tuned to Charlotte Street’s website by going to bit.ly/CST-OpenStudios2026.

For interview requests with Residency + Programs Manager Pat Alexander or participating artists, contact Amanda Middaugh at amanda@charlottestreet.org or 816-994-7734. 

ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE

FIRST YEAR RESIDENTS
(2025-2027)

SECOND YEAR RESIDENTS
(2024-2026)

ABOUT THE STUDIO RESIDENCY PROGRAM

Charlotte Street’s Studio Residency program supports visual artists, writers, and performing artists by providing free studio space, rehearsal space, professional development, and opportunities for exhibition, performance, mentorship and cross-disciplinary collaboration. The residency cultivates an environment of experimentation, dialogue, and community-building for approximately 30 artists each year. Charlotte Street’s annual Open Studios event makes Resident art more accessible to a broad public audience and encourages exchange and collaboration among the Studio Residents. Artists receive Residency for two-year terms, on a rotating basis, with a new cohort of approximately 15 joining each June.

ABOUT CHARLOTTE STREET
Charlotte Street centers Kansas City’s most forward-thinking visual artists, writers, and performers—acting as the primary incubator, provocateur, and connector for the region’s contemporary arts community, and its leading advocate on the national stage. Since 1997, Charlotte Street has distributed over $3 million in awards and grants to artists and their innovative projects and has hosted countless exhibitions, performances, convenings, and conversations connecting and challenging Kansas City’s contemporary art ecosystem. For more information about Charlotte Street, its awards, programs, and initiatives, visit www.charlottestreet.org.

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View the press release as a PDF here.

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Kansas City, MO, March 9, 2026: Charlotte Street is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2026 Visual Artist and Generative Performing Artist Awards, honoring the outstanding achievements of Kansas City area contemporary artists. This year, Charlotte Street’s Visual Artist Fellows are Heehyun Choi, Eric Conrad, and Mikey Yates. Recipients of the Generative Performing Artist Fellowship are Dwight Frizzell and Karen Lisondra.

Since 1997, Charlotte Street’s Visual Artist Awards have supported 114 outstanding artists living in the Kansas City area through annual, unrestricted cash awards with more than $921,500 distributed directly to visual artists. This year’s Visual Artist Fellows have practices that span moving image, soft sculpture, drawing, and painting. Choi’s films explore the physical and virtual dimensions of projected images and the subjectivity of seeing; Conrad’s textile sculptures and installations examine vulnerability and the human condition; and Yates’ paintings investigate contemporary image-making through intimate moments and interpersonal connections. 

Charlotte Street launched its Generative Performing Artist Awards in 2008 as a parallel program to the Visual Artist Awards. To date, the organization has distributed $350,000 to 35 performing artists whose work expands the genre of performance. Generative Performing Artist Fellow Frizzell creates collectively based, socially engaged work spanning experimental music, filmmaking, and sound art, while Lisondra integrates devised theater, movement practices, and sound exploration into multidisciplinary performance. 

Each artist will receive an unrestricted cash grant of $10,000 and recognition by Charlotte Street throughout 2026—including announcements to media, web-based marketing and promotional efforts, and special events. Generative Performing Artist Fellows are further recognized with a professional video production piece filmed in the Charlotte Street Stern Theater. Visual Artist Fellows are further recognized with a professionally curated exhibition premiering at the Emily & Todd Voth Artspace in late fall 2026.

The 2026 Charlotte Street Awards were selected through a competitive process beginning with an open call for applications from artists based in the five-county Kansas City Metro Area and in Douglas County, Kansas. Selections were made by a panel of jurors consisting of renowned arts professionals. Jurors participated in in-person interviews, presentations, and studio visits, resulting in the selection of 10 finalists for the Visual Artist Awards and 8 finalists for the Generative Performing Artists Awards, participating in in-person presentations, and studio visits to determine this year’s fellows. 

VISUAL ARTIST AWARD FELLOWS

Heehyun Choi

Heehyun Choi is a moving image artist and educator based in South Korea and the United States. Her practice is grounded on the interest in the physicality and virtuality in projected images, the unseen beings outside the camera frame, and the subjectivity and variability of the act of seeing. Choi received her BA in Art&Technology at Sogang University and MFA in Film & Video at California Institute of the Arts.

Her films have been screened internationally, including at Edinburgh International Film Festival, 25 FPS Festival, Images Festival, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, Busan Museum of Contemporary Art, Experimental Film and Video Festival in Seoul (EXiS), and Ann Arbor Film Festival, where she received the Mariam Ghani Juror Award. Choi’s work has been exhibited in gallery spaces, including her recent Korea Arts Foundation America Awardee Solo Exhibition at Korean Cultural Center Los Angeles, and in group exhibitions at AHL Foundation Gallery, New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art, Tiger Strikes Asteroid LA, and Post Territory Ujeongguk.

She is the recipient of the 2024 KAFA (Korea Arts Foundation of America) Award, WNDX x NIMAC Experimental Moving Image Award, AHL Foundation Artist Fellowship, Alison Doerner Fund for Women Pioneers in Filmmaking, and The Lightning Fund by Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) and Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. She is an Assistant Professor in the Photography & Filmmaking department at the Kansas City Art Institute.

Eric Conrad

Eric Leif Conrad was born in Toronto, Canada and explores vulnerability, psychology, and the human condition through textile-based sculptures, mixed-media installations, and drawings. Eric received his BA in mathematics and art from Kalamazoo College and an MFA degree in painting and printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design. He was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and participated in artist residencies at Frans Masereel Centrum in Belgium, the Fine Arts Work Center in Massachusetts, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Nebraska, Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado, and Instituto Superior Latinoamericano de Arte in Chile. He has shown his work in over 20 solo exhibitions and 100 group exhibitions both nationally and internationally. Eric has also created site-specific installations and public art including exhibitions at the Miami-Dade International Airport in Florida and the the SACO Contemporary Art Biennale in Chile. Eric is an Assistant Professor of textiles and foundations at the University of Kansas.

Mikey Yates

Mikey Yates was born in Sulzbach-Rosenberg, Germany and lives and works in Kansas City, Missouri. He earned a BFA from Missouri State University and an MFA from the University of Colorado Boulder. Yates has presented recent solo exhibitions at COMA Gallery, Sydney; Nazarian/Curcio, Los Angeles; and Taymour Grahne, London. His work has also been included in group exhibitions at the Columbus Museum of Art; The Hole, New York; Steven Zevitas Gallery, Boston; and 1969 Gallery, New York among others. Yates is a two-time recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant and was a 2023 resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

GENERATIVE PERFORMING ARTIST AWARD FELLOWS

Dwight Frizzell

Dwight Frizzell (b. 1956) grew up in Independence, Missouri where Harry Truman was his neighbor. They frequented the same library, had the same barber, and talked to a living fossil (a ginkgo tree) on their daily walks. As a youngster, Dwight learned of Truman’s nuclear bombing of civilian populations and became a life-long pacifist. He worked to re-elect Senator Stuart Symington and was active in student politics.

By 1974 Dwight had chosen to respond to injustice with inclusive art making rather than divisive politics. That same year he was ordained in support of his Conscientious Objector status. Since then he has been creating collectively-based, socially engaged art through filmmaking, music, writing and performance.

In 1976 Dwight released his Beyond the Black Crack LP, the first publication of music based on the physics of black holes. The record was widely reviewed, featured in the infamous Nurse with Wound list (1979), and reissued on Paradigm Discs (2000).

“If the idea of Sun Ra’s Arkestra jamming with electric-era Miles Davis and Frank Zappa on some distant burnt-out asteroid appeals, then this could be for you.” —Edwin Pouncey, Top

Dwight began an 11-year master-adept relationship with Sun Ra after meeting him in Chicago in 1980. Frizzell is a founding member of the Black Crack Revue, newEar contemporary chamber ensemble, National Audio Theatre Festivals, Alter Destiny and Myth-Science Ensemble. He has received Peabody and Golden Reel Awards for his radio work.

His new projects include MU: The Cosmic Void that Created the Universe (with Shanté Clair, Jacob Souders and Brad Cox), Ergosphere (sonifying black hole physics with Michael Henry and Greg Mackender), and Journey of Turtles, a multi-channel soundscape composition featuring the rejuvenating waters of Greer Springs in Missouri’s Ozarks (with Marideth Sisco, Thomas Aber and Tony Brewer).

Dwight holds a terminal degree in Sound Design for Theatre from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He is Professor and Sound Head at the Kansas City Art Institute.

Karen Lisondra

Karen Lisondra is an award-winning international performing artist, theater-maker, and educator. An original company dancer in Argentina’s aerial sensation Fuerza Bruta, she later toured three continents with El Teatro de los Andes’ production of Homer’s Odyssey and received three Bolivian National Theater Awards for her one-woman show Mocambo.

In Kansas City, she created a Spanish-language radio drama for KC Public Theater, co-created and directed We Are the Landscape through Charlotte Street Residencies, and co-wrote and directed A Storytelling Project/Pachakutec with UMKC’s MFA Acting and Directing program. She has puppeteered for the Lyric Opera, Fire Tale Theater, and Art in the Loop.
Trained in devised and anthropological theater, Karen integrates butoh, contact improvisation, Chen tai chi, and sound exploration into her creative laboratory, as well as into
mindful-movement workshops for Midwest Alliance for Mindfulness, Art is Mentorship, and InterUrban ArtHouse. She is a veteran yoga instructor for Yoga at the Kauffman, Maya Yoga, and the Kansas City Indian Center Youth Camp, a certified DanceAbility International inclusive-dance teacher, and a cancer survivor.

She is a recipient of the Lighton International Artist Exchange Program and has completed artist residencies with Teatro BioBio/Danza Expansiva (Concepción, Chile), Teatro Tierra (Bogotá, Colombia), Teatro Epi d’Or (Pontigny, France), and the Charlotte Street Foundation
(Kansas City, MO).

Karen is currently adapting her stage play Princess Goddess Witch Weaver—a kaleidoscopic, modern reimagining of The Odyssey—into a film. She can also be seen onstage as Helen in Trojan Women MCI at the Unicorn Theatre.

VISUAL ARTIST AWARDS JURY 

Abel González Fernández-Assistant Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit—MOCAD Larry Ossei-Mensah-Curator and Cultural Critic; Curator, The Medium Group;  

Co Founder & President, ARTNOIR Co. 

Raechell Smith-Director and Curator, Emily & Todd Voth Artspace

GENERATIVE PERFORMING ARTIST AWARDS JURY 

Brandon Alvendia-Artist, Curator and Educator; Technical Director, Public Media Institute 

Jeff Harshbarger-Composer and Bandleader 

Arien Wilkerson-Artistic Director, Tnmot Aztro Dance Company and Program Manager, Judson Memorial Church

For interview requests contact Amanda Middaugh at amanda@charlottestreet.org or 816-994-7734.

ABOUT CHARLOTTE STREET
Charlotte Street centers Kansas City’s most forward-thinking visual artists, writers, and performers—acting as the primary incubator, provocateur, and connector for the region’s contemporary arts community, and its leading advocate on the national stage. Since 1997, Charlotte Street has distributed over $3 million in awards and grants to artists and their innovative projects and has hosted countless exhibitions, performances, convenings, and conversations connecting and challenging Kansas City’s contemporary art ecosystem. For more information about Charlotte Street, its awards, programs, and initiatives, visit www.charlottestreet.org.

ABOUT THE EMILY & TODD VOTH ARTSPACE
Since 1999, the Artspace has championed emerging and established contemporary artists through exhibitions, public programming, and educational initiatives. As an integral part of KCAI, the Artspace is a bridge that connects campus and the wider Kansas City community, promoting engagement with contemporary art and fostering future generations of artists and creative professionals. 

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