KANSAS CITY, Mo, July 23, 2019: Charlotte Street Foundation is excited to announce the selection of 32 artists and collectives for its year-long Studio Residency program in Town Pavilion. The residency tenure begins September 2019 and runs through August of 2020. Charlotte Street Foundation’s Studio Residency provides free studio, meeting and rehearsal space on the 6th floor of Town Pavilion in downtown Kansas City, MO. Charlotte Street also provides additional support regarding networking, studio visits, professional development, and marketing for all artists. Artists will kick off their residency at Charlotte Street Foundation’s annual Slide Slam event on Wednesday, September 11 at Capsule (located at 1664 Broadway Blvd).
Of the 32 artists selected, 10 residents are performing artists, 16 of them are visual artists, and 6 of them are writers. 11 residents are returning for a second-year in the program. 28 artists currently reside in the Kansas City metro area, with 4 of them residing in Lawrence, KS. 112 artists applied for residency this year and residents were selected from a pool of regional jurors, including: Elvis Achelpohl (architectural designer at BNIM in Kansas City, MO), Jade Osborne (artist, activist and activator in Kansas City, MO), Jade Powers (Assistant Curator at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, MO), and Kati Toivanen (Professor at UMKC).
LIST OF 2019-20 STUDIO RESIDENTS
Performing Artists (10):
Seth Davis (Liberty, MO)
Tristian Griffin (Raymore, MO) *
Kota Hayden (Kansas City, MO)
Melinda Hedgecorth (Liberty, MO)
KC Public Theatre (Kansas City, MO) *
Kyle Mullins (Kansas City, MO) *
Kaia Nutting (Kansas City, MO) *
Carrie Anne Wallen (Kansas City, MO)
Dylan Ward (Roeland Park, KS)
Jeramy Zimmerman (Kansas City, MO)
Visual Artists (16):
Iliann Alvarez (Kansas City, MO) *
Nazanin Amiri Meers (Lawrence, KS) *
Craig Auge (Kansas City, MO)
JE Baker (Kansas City, MO) *
Michelle Chan (Overland Park, KS)
Drea DiCarlo (Kansas City, MO)
Bo Hubbard (Kansas City, MO) *
Rachel Hubbard (Kansas City, MO)
Mary Clara Hutchison (Kansas City, MO)
Leon Jones (Kansas City, MO)
Bailey Mastin (Olathe, KS)
Andrew Ordonez (Kansas City, MO)
Kiki Serna (Kansas City, MO) *
Allison Sheldon (Lawrence, KS)
Will Toney (Raytown, MO)
Benjamin Todd Wills (Lawrence, KS) *
Writers (6):
Vanessa Aricco (Kansas City, MO)
CJ Charbonneau (Kansas City, MO)
Derek Graf (Kansas City, MO)
Jackie Hedeman (Lawrence, KS)
Kevin Kilroy (Kansas City, MO) *
Michelle Tyrene Johnson (Kansas City, KS)
* indicates second-year as a resident
ABOUT THE JURY
Elvis Achelpohl is an architectural designer and a team member in BNIM’s Kansas City office. Elvis recently completed the 10th and Wyandotte Garage, a collaboration between BNIM and artist Andy Brayman. Many projects Elvis has assisted have been in service of the arts, from the expansion of the John F. Kennedy Center and the new Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University (both in conjunction with Steven Holl Architects), to an ongoing series of collaborations with Dashboard, an art company headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. He’s currently working on the renovation of four historic buildings in Kansas City’s West Bottoms. Elvis grew up a block west of Charlotte Street and attends as many CSF functions as he can.
Jade Osborne is an artist, activist and activator who began her career by creating spoken word and multimedia dance performances in Kansas City. She has since added to her training with Capoeria Beribazu, Aerial Fabric Acrobatics, Pilobolus Dance, Acroyoga, Interplay, Biodanza instructors as well as with Shamanic, Brazilian and Native American healers. It is through her various studies that she has developed a unique style of movement and theory that works to strengthen energetic connections, thus inspiring a clearer sense of individual purpose and community resonance. (Photo by Brandon Parigo)
Jade Powers, originally from Indianapolis, Indiana, earned a Master’s degree in religious studies from Indiana University and holds a Bachelor’s degree in art history and religious studies from DePauw University. Powers has a special interest in modern and contemporary African American and Indian art.
Before joining Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art as assistant curator, Powers was the 2017-2018 Romare Bearden Graduate Museum Fellow at the Saint Louis Art Museum. There, Powers created the first museum-wide gallery guide to comprehensively highlight works by artists of African descent and began research for the 2019 exhibition, Shape of Abstraction, showcasing a recent gift of over eighty abstract works by African American artists. At Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Powers has curated four Permanent Collection exhibitions — Deconstructing Marcus Jansen, Abstracted Wonders: The Power of Lines, Color Application, and Child’s Play: An Exploration of Adolescence — and is working on several upcoming projects.
Kati Toivanen grew up in Finland and came to the United States to study art. Since receiving a Master of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1992, Toivanen has been an active artist and university educator. One of Toivanen’s sixteen solo art exhibitions was favorably reviewed in Art in America and her works have been published and exhibited nationally and abroad. Toivanen is a 2001 recipient of the Charlotte Street Visual Artist Award and she has received several other grants to support her creative production.
Toivanen has completed six funded site-specific temporary public art projects in Kansas City, MO, and Lawrence, KS, including Avenue of the Arts in 2002. Professor Toivanen served as the Associate Dean for Undergraduate Programs in the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Missouri – Kansas City 2011-2018 after chairing the Art & Art History Department since 2009.
ABOUT CHARLOTTE STREET
Charlotte Street identifies the needs and fuels the evolution of an ever-changing multidisciplinary arts ecosystem, acting as its primary provocateur. Charlotte Street cultivates the contemporary, the exceptional, and the unexpected in the practice of artists working in and engaging with the Kansas City art community. Since 1997, Charlotte Street has distributed over $1.5 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.
Read the full press release in PDF form here.
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