Charlotte Street Foundation is excited to announce the three local recipients of the 2022 Visual Artist Awards and two local recipients of the 2022 Generative Performing Artist Awards. This year, Charlotte Street’s Visual Artist Awards were given to Andrew Mcilvaine, Harold Smith Jr., and Johanna Winters. Recipients of the 2022 Generative Performing Artist Awards are The Black Creatures and Calvin Arsenia Scott. Since 1997, 27 performing artists and 103 visual artists in the Kansas City region have received this highly regarded award.
Harold Smith Jr., Untitled (Man of Color Series)
Each Charlotte Street Visual Artist Award Fellow receives an unrestricted cash grant of $10,000, recognition by Charlotte Street at the time of the award announcement and throughout 2022—including announcements to media, web-based marketing and promotional efforts, special events, and inclusion in the 2022 Charlotte Street Visual Artist Award Fellows Exhibition at H&R Block Artspace at the Kansas City Art Institute later in the 2022 calendar year.
The 2022 Charlotte Street Generative Performing Artist Awards recognize two exceptional artists in the fields of dance, theatre, music, opera, sound art, performance art, multimedia performance, spoken word, puppetry or hybrid performance-based forms. Both of the artists will also receive an unrestricted
cash award of $10,000 and their public performances will be promoted by Charlotte Street throughout the rest of 2022 calendar year.
All of the 2022 Charlotte Street Award Fellows were selected through competitive processes beginning with open calls for applications from artists based in the five-county Kansas City Metro Area. Artist selections were made by a panel of jurors consisting of renowned and qualified arts professionals. Jurors participated in virtual interviews, presentations, and studio visits, resulting in the selection of 10 finalists for the Generative Performing Artists Awards and 10 finalists for the Visual Artist Awards.
The Generative Performing Artist Awards panel included: Kat Fackler (she/her), a dancer and choreographer as well as theEvents + Project Manager at The Union for Contemporary Art (Omaha, NE). Matthew Nelson (he/him), a multidisciplinary independent artist, musician, founder and entrepreneur as well as a Founder & Creative Director of BIYDIY and CEO of Favorite, a specialized fragrance and product brand (San Juan, Puerto Rico). David Wayne Reed (he/him), an actor, writer, director, and producer. Reed hosts and produces the live storytelling show, Shelf Life (Kansas City, MO). danilo machado (he/they) **please be aware danilo’s name is to be stylized in lowercase**. machadois a poet, curator, and critic. They are the Producer of Public Programs at the Brooklyn Museum and recently Curatorial Assistant at Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens (New York, NY).
The Visual Artist Awards panel included: Alexsandra Mitchell (she/her), an arts administrator, scholar, speaker, and creative. Mitchell currently serves as the Manager of Education and Public Programs at the California African American Museum (Los Angeles, CA). Rica Maestas (she/her), a burqueña artist, author, arts worker, and social practitioner ( Albuquerque, NM). Hallie Ringle (she/her), the Hugh Kaul Curator of Contemporary Art at the Birmingham Museum of Art (Birmingham, AL). Raechell Smith (she/her), Director and Curator of the Kansas City Art Institute’s H&R Block Artspace.
ABOUT THE VISUAL ARTIST AWARD WINNERS
Harold Smith Jr (he/his) is a Kansas City born and based visual artist whose internationally exhibited and collected work includes painting, collage, mixed media, performance, video, sound, and assemblage. His broad practice addresses issues of the complexity of the black male experience in the Western world through exploring the tension between Westernized societal perceptions of and attitudes toward black masculinity and how these perceptions and attitudes impact it. In his “Man of Color” series, Harold addresses these issues through his use of color, stroke, texture, line, and space. Harold’s practice is grounded in the social commentary tradition of figurative urban expressionism embodied by artists such as Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, Kerry James Marshall, and others. His usage of clashing palettes and aggressive strokes creates a visual incarnation of the issues addressed in his work. Primarily a self-taught painter, Smith received a BS in Computer Science from Union College and a MAT in Multidisciplinary Studies from Webster University. Harold has been the subject of solo exhibitions and included in group exhibitions at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art and the American Jazz Museum. He has also been included in group exhibitions at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art and the Charlotte Street Foundation.
Image above – Harold Smith Jr., Crown I
Johanna Winters (she/her) is a puppeteer and educator based in Kansas City, MO. Her work engages puppetry, video, performance, and sculpture to dispatch anxieties about aging in a female body. She holds an MFA from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, and a BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. She has been awarded residencies at the Corporation of Yaddo, Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency, Lawrence Arts Center, ACRE, Vermont Studio Center, Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, Guttenberg Arts, and Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław, Poland. Prior to her artistic pursuits, Johanna trained as a professional cross country skier and competed on an Olympic-development ski team based in the upper Midwest.
Johanna’s work has been exhibited and performed nationally – recently at Coop Gallery (Nashville, TN), and Soo Visual Arts Center (Minneapolis, MN). She currently teaches at the Kansas City Art Institute.
Image above – Johanna Winters, HOWWTOBEHAAYV(REHURSAAL).
Andrew Mcilvaine (he/him) is a Mexican American interdisciplinary artist. Born in San Antonio, Texas, and later moved to Missouri, Mcilvaine creates work about displacement and replacement and how these issues effect both cultural and personal memory, identity, and a sense of self. Mcilvaine earned his BA in studio art from the University of Missouri – Kansas City. After receiving his BA, Mcilvaine moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where he attained his MFA from Washington University in St. Louis in painting and drawing. Currently, Mcilvaine lives and works in Kansas City and holds a visiting lecturer position in the foundation program at KCAI.
Image above – Andrew Mcilvane My Storm, My Garden, My Dream
ABOUT THE GENERATIVE PERFORMING ARTIST AWARD WINNERS
Calvin Arsenia Scott (he/him)
“My musical training began in churches but my creative intentions and sexuality shifted both my worldview and my stage. I am thirty-one years old, six-foot-six inches tall, from West African and Northern European ancestry, and I have been writing original scores and lyrics for twenty years and playing the harp for eleven. I grew up in Olathe, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City. I have traveled to twenty-two states and nine countries with my instrument. My largest harp, Romeo, weighs eighty-seven pounds, is six feet tall, two feet wide, and three feet deep. Transporting my instrument and myself is no small feat. I use my harp and my voice to elevate my audience. Roses, costuming, and scent amplify the favor of each show. When I lift my voice, I lift it for everyone. When I adorn my body, I adorn everyone. Joy is protest. Music and storytelling create a universal human experience. Pop songs and classical music deserve equal footing. Harps are dedicated to churches and symphonies, angels and death. Harps are encumbered by their cost, rarity, and the music written for them. Because my art is my religion, I am singing as far as heaven and as close as my heart. The harp, like all instruments, can equally present the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and Britney Spears. Pairing genres of music breaks down barriers of class, race, gender, and sexuality. My voice and my fingers catching forty-seven strings is a platform for transforming language, honoring the life of my enslaved great, great, great grandmother Alice Gilliam Scott, and a lifelong mission to add my layer to the history and future of performance.”
The Black Creatures
Jade Green (they/them) and Xavier Martin (he/him)
are a multifaceted music duo from Kansas City. Gleefully tinkering with elements of soul, hip-hop, and EDM, they’re here to tell interdimensional stories – through all-original, lyric-heavy songs and live performances. Influenced by neo-soul sirens like Erykah Badu and Alicia Keys, wordsmiths like Da Brat and Tech N9ne, and composers a la Daft Punk and Robert Glasper, they make music that defies genre and tradition in an effort to break generational curses. They aim to honor the past, celebrate the present, and transcend the expectations of the future by creating consistently unique songs, videos, images, and interactive live performances.
ABOUT THE VISUAL ARTIST AWARDS PANEL
Alexsandra Mitchell (she/her) is an arts administrator, scholar, speaker, and creative – whose work intersects the field of Africana Studies, the arts, the African Diaspora, spirituality, libraries, and archives. She currently serves as the Manager of Education and Public Programs at the California African American Museum.
Alexsandra served as a reference librarian and an archivist at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. Prior to joining the staff in the Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division, Alexsandra was a lecturer at New York University’s Gallatin School for Individualized Study, and worked with institutions such as National Geographic Television, The Library of Congress, The West African Research Center in Dakar, Senegal, The New York Historical Society, and The Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn, New York. She has appeared on the Travel Channel’s “Mysteries at the Museum”, and NPR. Alexsandra was a visiting professor at Pratt University’s School of Information, where she created her own course: Archiving the Diaspora: Collections, Community, and Culture.
She is co-author of Research Techniques and Strategies for the Study of Black Writings, Rowman & Littlefield (forthcoming) and a contributor to Pushing the Margins: Women of Color and Intersectionality in Library and Information Science.
Rica Maestas (she/her) is a burqueña artist, author, arts worker, and social practitioner working in Albuquerque, NM. She graduated with a MA in public humanities from Brown University–attending with the generous support of the University of Southern California Renaissance Scholarship–and currently manages digital storytelling & membership engagement at SITE Santa Fe. An avid polymath, Maestas creates socially engaged projects, performances, paintings, and assemblages inspired by the desert, loneliness, hybridity, and misunderstanding. She has received numerous grants for her artistic work, curated independent exhibitions and institutional projects, published written work in diverse forums, exhibited artwork nationwide, and participated in the 2022 Santa Fe Art Institute’s Labor Residency. Profiles of her creative work have appeared in the Providence Journal, the Brown Daily Herald, and the Coastal Post.
Hallie Ringle (she/her) is the Hugh Kaul Curator of Contemporary Art at the Birmingham Museum of Art, where she’s curated Celestia Morgan: REDLINE and Wall to Wall: Merritt Johnson (co-curated). Ringle was formerly Assistant Curator at The Studio Museum in Harlem, where she curated Maren Hassinger: Monuments, Firelei Baez: Joy Out of Fire, Fictions (co-curated), Rico Gatson: Icons 2007–2017, Video Studio: Meeting Points, Palatable: Food and Contemporary Art, and Salon Style. She is a fall 2018 Andy Warhol Curatorial Fellow. Ringle has a BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MA from the University of Texas at Austin.
Raechell Smith (she/her) has served as Director and Curator of the H&R Block Artspace at the Kansas City Art Institute since its founding in 1999. Smith has curated solo exhibitions featuring the work of Sonya Clark, Nicky Nodjoumi, Dawit L. Petros, Simone Leigh, Kate Gilmore, Ghada Amer, Wenda Gu, and Shirin Neshat and she has produced public art billboards in collaboration with Stanley Whitney, Paul Anthony Smith, Yara Said and the Refugee Nation, Deanna Dikeman, and Jenny Holzer. Smith has also curated and co-curated thematic exhibitions exploring a range of timely and topical issues, including State of the World, On Watch, Making Histories, Humor Me, and Cryptozoology: Out of Time Place Scale. As an advocate for artists and the cultural organizations that support them, Smith has been honored to contribute service to Charlotte Street Foundation, Missouri Arts Council, Tulsa Artist Fellowship, Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition, National Endowment for the Arts, Artadia, US Artists, and Anonymous Was a Woman, among others.
ABOUT THE GENERATIVE PERFORMING ARTIST AWARDS PANEL
danilo machado (he/they) was born in Medellín, Colombia and is a poet, curator, and critic living on occupied land interested in language’s potential for revealing tenderness, erasure, and relationships to power. A 2020-2021 Poetry Project Emerge-Surface-Be Fellow, their writing has been featured in Hyperallergic, ArtCritical, ArtPapers, Poem-A-Day, The Recluse, GenderFail, No, Dear, Long River Review, TAYO Literary Magazine, and alongside exhibitions at CUE Art Foundation, Denny Dimin Gallery, Abrons Art Center, and Real Art Ways. An honors graduate of the University of Connecticut, danilo is Producer of Public Programs at the Brooklyn Museum and recently Curatorial Assistant at Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens. danilo is the curator of the exhibitions Otherwise Obscured: Erasure in Body and Text (Franklin Street Works, 2019-20), support structures (Virtual/8th Floor Gallery, featuring the 2019-20 cohort of Art Beyond Sight’s Art and Disability Residency), and We turn (EFA Project Space, 2021).
Image Description: A queer brown person wearing corduroy overalls, brown mask, and pink glasses poses with one leg crossed over the other. They stand on a gray stone path littered with leaves and surrounded by greenery.
Matthew Nelson (he/him) is a multidisciplinary independent artist, musician and entrepreneur who lives and works from his home/studio in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Originally from Fort Worth, Texas, Matthew was formally educated at Prairie View A&M University where he received a double Bachelor’s degree in Communication Theory & Marketing. He later attended The University of Pennsylvania where he received an M.S.Ed. in Postsecondary Education with a focus on Race & Equity.
In 2015, Matthew moved to Puerto Rico & founded BELIEVE IN YOURSELF DO IT YOURSELF or BIYDIY, an art organization which owns & operates a record label, product company, fragrance company & art studios in San Juan, Brooklyn, Houston and Wales. BIYDIY is a modern organization of artists around the world who create together to produce organic and innovative art, music and culture projects of the highest quality. Matthew’s recent work exists in the mediums of music (studio production & performing as a DJ), web2 and web3 design and film.
Matthew serves as Owner & Creative Director of BIYDIY and Owner of Favorite, a specialized fragrance and product brand.
David Wayne Reed (he/him) is an actor, writer, director, and producer. His work can be found on page, stage and film. Reed hosts and produces the popular live storytelling show, Shelf Life.
He is the 2019 Charlotte Street Generative Performing Arts Fellow. He has been awarded grants and residencies from Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Puffin Foundation, Arts KC, is a member of the Dramatists Guild, and was named one of the reasons we love KC by the Pitch. Reed serves on the Municipal Arts Commission of Kansas City, MO and on the executive committee for the 1% for Public Art at the new Kansas City International Airport.
Kat Fackler (she/her) is a dancer, choreographer, and co-director of tbd. dance collective living in Omaha, NE. She has been studying movement for almost 25 years while attending studios, masterclasses, and workshops across the country. Kat produces movement-based projects, workshops, and performances for tbd. dance collective in collaboration with various artists and organizations throughout the Omaha community. More recently, she has produced and choreographed for The Movement Series at KANEKO, as well as several short dance films and music videos.
In addition to tbd., Kat also works as the Events + Project Manager at The Union for Contemporary Art.
Image Description: White background with the image of a white woman in her early thirties with dark, curly brown hair wearing bright red lipstick and a white tank top. Image is cropped just below the waist. Her left arm is bent so that the elbow sticks out to directly to the side and her left hand is resting on top of her head, palm towards the camera. Her right arm is extended straight overheard, her hand forming a claw shape as it reaches upwards. Her body is leaned slightly towards the left and her gaze and head is turned towards the right. Her eyes are closed.
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 $1.85 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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