El Equipo De Todos, 2022
Kansas City, MO, April 6, 2022: The newly installed Crossroads Artboards featuring artists Angie Jennings and Cesar Lopez are on view in the heart of the Crossroads Located at 125 Southwest Boulevard. The Artboards capture the creative spirit of the Crossroads neighborhood, serving as an alternative outdoor platform where artists’ work can be viewed during all hours of the day, via a collaboration with the Crossroads Community Association. The new work will be on display through the end of June.
He flips his skirt while dancing, 2022
Angie Jennings says about her Artboards, “I am mostly known for my street photography, yet since the pandemic I have turned my camera inward to ordinary things and found objects, making these familiar things strange or different than their original intent. The work is titled He Flips his Skirt While Dancing. It’s an abstract study of an ordinary object that is widely used by everyone. While working on this piece, I would leave the image on my screen for days and look at it from a distance to determine the mood and story I wish to convey. The first thing that came to mind was a Dancing Dervish, but, to me, it’s not. It is a man with a long skirt dancing. The image kept telling me that it was male or very masculine. The blue came about as it was reminiscent of the sky. A dancer floating in the sky. It’s Santorini in the abstract. When I was creating this piece, I also kept seeing the scene of a white-hot sun and the cerulean sky, and the man dancing in the joy of the air. The right side depicts him flipping his skirt on a cloud and the left side of this image is a detail of the flipped up ‘skirt.’”
El Equipo De Todos, 2022
Cesar E. Lopez says about his Artboards, “Kansas City is in the heart of it all, geographically and culturally. My billboard El Equipo De Todos joins the city’s bid for the World Cup. The 2026 World Cup will be a post-national event, expanding beyond the borders of a single country. The billboard is an homage to the nickname the United States Soccer team has around the world. To immigrant communities like mine, the US National team is the identity adopted and supported when we cannot support our homelands. The team is known as the “everyone-team.” The billboard depicts a group of characters running together, and another in action. These digital renderings allow me to cover the character in a single flag. The flag is composed of red, white, and blue draped over all of the characters at once, one skin, one identity, one team, many nations.”
ABOUT ANGIE JENNINGS
Angie Jennings, b.1965, has been photographing for over 30 years. Most notable for her street photography in which she searches out and captures serendipitous humorous moments and portraiture, currently she has shifted her focus to more abstract work. Her imagery can be seen as stories in either a single image or series. She has worked in different photographic mediums, such as film, photogravure, digital, VanDyke, and cyanotype, and has exhibited extensively in Kansas City, Nebraska, Oregon,
Oklahoma, Vermont, Colorado, and Beijing, China. She was awarded two Artist Inc. fellowships, a Charlotte Street StartUp Residency, honorable mention in the 13th Annual Pollux Award and 16th annual Julia Margaret Cameron Award for Women Photographers, as well as 2 public art grants through Kansas City Art in the Loop and the KC Streetcar. She also runs Kansas City Society for Contemporary Photography, a photographic arts organization.
ABOUT CESAR E. LOPEZ
Cesar E. Lopez,b.1991 (Coatepeque, Guatemala) is an artist living and working in Kansas City, and is a graduate of the Kansas City Art Institute (’19). He emigrated to America at a young age, which shaped his life with themes of nationality and identity. Cesar is a recipient of the DACA program, allowing immigrants to live and work in America. In his work he uses geographic language such as flags, maps and globes to make visual and culturally significant works. Merging formal elements of painting and personal history, Cesar’s work explores the 3rd space through showcasing fictitious flags and manipulating them into personal interpretations. His sampling of geographic symbols indicates meaning while retaining abstract form, which touches on the duality of his practice and identity.
ABOUT CROSSROADS COMMUNITY ASSOCIATION
The mission of the Crossroads Community Association shall be to support, promote, advance, and encourage the revitalization of the community as a thriving, safe and attractive center of art, history, enterprise, commerce, culture, residence, entertainment, education and other activity; to inform and educate the members of this association and the public about community issues; to provide a forum to address community objectives and issues; to build a strong community through communication, cooperation, planning and leadership; to build a strong partnership between business owners, property owners, tenants and residents to ensure community involvement; and to enhance the quality of life within the community. For more information visit https://kccrossroads.org/about/cca/
ABOUT ARTBOARDS
The Crossroads Artboards were launched in the fall of 2008 as a partnership between Charlotte Street Foundation and Missouri Bank (now BOK Financial). The Artboards program is currently supported in part by the Crossroads Community Association. 98 Kansas City area artists have been featured on the ARTBOARDS to date. For a complete listing and more information, go to https://charlottestreet.org/awards/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 $2 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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