Kansas City, MO, July 19, 2023: Charlotte Street is pleased to present the upcoming exhibition Potential Futures: Prototypes. An opening reception will be held on Friday, August 11, 2023 from 6 PM to 9 PM at the Charlotte Street Gallery at 3333 Wyoming Street, Kansas City, MO. The exhibition will remain on view through September 23, 2023.
Potential Futures: Prototypes is a decentralized exhibition model that brings together visual artists, designers, and change-makers. Instead of being confined to a gallery setting, the works of this exhibit are dispersed throughout Kansas City and beyond. Each of the projects approaches a particular set of issues—such as affordable housing, shared community space, environmental sustainability, human relationships to land—from a contemporary artistic lens. In these case studies, artists are problem-solvers: they are seeing a need in their community or neighborhood, envisioning changes, and building prototypes.
The exhibit will feature 8 artists: Amy Cantrell and Ponkho Bermejo (Asheville, NC), Mikal Floyd-Pruitt (Milwaukee, WI), JC Franco (Kansas City, MO), Zach Frazier (Kansas City, MO), Sia Joung (Kansas City, MO), Sydney Pursel (Lawrence, KS), and Carl Stafford (Kansas City, MO).
Potential Futures: Prototypes invites viewers to make change in their own neighborhoods. With a fold-out map designed by artist Zach Frazier, visitors will pinpoint specific sites of socially-engaged projects in Kansas City. Audience members are encouraged to visit these sites, organizations, and educational centers. The exhibit advocates for grassroots efforts that exist in community, and prioritizes small actions that will lead to impactful social change.
For artist Carl Stafford’s Boon Area 1 project, the site is an environmental, functional art installation that acts as a contemporary community garden. Boon Area 1 provides a prototype for a site that could be replicated in multiple neighborhoods in the Kansas City area. Ideally, this model would be adapted in other cities or states.
Mikal Floyd-Pruitt is a co-founder of the project HomeWorks: Bronzeville, which is located in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Milwaukee, WI. Through this community-centered work, Floyd-Pruitt and his collaborators renovate properties to create live/work spaces for artists. They have structured a rent-to-own process to assist artists with economic opportunity and longevity.
Community organizers Amy Cantrell and Poncho Bermejo conceptualized a new model to jumpstart solutions for the housing crisis in Asheville, NC. In response to the unhoused populations, Cantrell and Bermejo envisioned a community of 12 tiny homes called BeLoved Village. The project generated support through donated supplies and volunteer labor from artists, architects, engineers, and other professionals.
PROGRAMMING
Opening Reception
Friday, August 11, 2023 6 PM to 9 PM
Charlotte Street Gallery at 3333 Wyoming Street, Kansas City, MO
RSVP – https://bit.ly/potentialfutures_prototypes
ABOUT KIMI KITADA
Kimi Kitada is a curator based in Kansas City, MO. Currently, she serves as Gallery + Programs Manager at Charlotte Street. Previously, she was Curatorial Assistant at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2019-2020). From 2014 to 2018, she was Public Programs & Research Coordinator at Independent Curators International (ICI) in New York. Her recent exhibitions include: Handiwork: Art, Craft, and the Space Between at Charlotte Street, Kansas City (2022); With Liberty and Justice at Charlotte Street, Kansas City (2021); where we came from & where we are going at Transformer, Washington DC (2019); and reset at Garis & Hahn, New York (2016). Kitada received a BA in Art History and Classics from Bucknell University and an MA in Museum Studies from NYU.
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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