KANSAS CITY, MO, DECEMBER 19, 2023: Premiering at Charlotte Street (3333 Wyoming) on January 19, 2024, 6:00-9:00 PM is the exhibition Miss/They Camaraderie 2024, curated by Charlotte Street Curatorial Fellow Yashi Davalos. In a subversive and imaginative display of beauty, femininity, and non-binary expression, Miss/They Camaraderie 2024 is an exhibition in pageant form that draws upon archival research, contemporary lens-based practices and installation sculpture.
The seven artists featured include Boi Boy (Kansas City, MO), John Brant (Kansas City, MO), Delaney George (Los Angeles, CA), Jackob Graves (Kansas City, MO), Nasir Anthony Montalvo (Kansas City, MO), Sun Young Park (Kansas City, MO), and Trenity Thomas (New Orleans, LA).
Miss/They Camaraderie 2024 immerses viewers in a world of drag and Black pageantry where the artworks are the “beauty queens” and the exhibition, the stage. Delaney George captures the Black femme aesthetic in the proud portraits of Teen Dream #1; Nasir Anthony Montalvo highlights the contributions of local Black LGBTQIA2S+ community members in the digital archive {B/qKC}; and performance-based artist Boi Boy constructs narratives through multiple drag personas in Miss Fortune.
Following the exhibition opening is the satirical performance Miss/They Camaraderie 2024 Pageant, featuring drag artists Boi Boy, Korea Kelly, and Alej Martinez, garments designed by Dustin Loveland, an intensive panel on the matter of “world peace,” and a final crowning of a local contestant. Audiences are invited to participate in this night of glamour and spectacle on Friday, February 9 at Charlotte Street.
PROGRAMMING
Opening Reception | Friday, January 19, 2024, 6:00-9:00 PM, Charlotte Street Gallery
Miss/They Camaraderie 2024 Pageant | Friday, February 9, 2024, 6:00-8:00 PM, Charlotte Street Gallery
Artist Talk | Friday, March 1, 2024, 6:00-7:00 PM, Charlotte Street Kemper Library
ABOUT YASHI DAVALOS
Yashi Davalos (Yashira Lopez Davalos) b.1995, is an emerging artist and independent curator. Her upbringing as an Afro-Latinx Atlanta native mobilizes her objective as a curator to build artistic dialogue critiquing hyper-capitalist focus on cultural tokenism vs. non-monolithic aspects of identity. As an experimental lens-based artist she explores the social intersections of photo realism and archival manipulation. Yashi is a member of the 501c3 artist-run collective gallery, The Front Gallery New Orleans. Her past curations include Echolocation: Industrialized Persona and Past Present and Afro-Futurism at The Front Gallery. Yashi is currently the curatorial fellow at Charlotte Street in Kansas City where she currently lives and works. Her art has also been exhibited throughout New Orleans, at Plug Gallery in KCMO, Mint Gallery ATL, and In Partnership with Elevate ATL for Atlanta Art Week.
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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View the Press Release as a PDF here.
