Generative Performing Artist Award Fellows: Vanessa Aricco, Jass Couch
Kansas City, MO, February 25, 2025: Charlotte Street is pleased to announce the 2025 recipients of the 2025 Visual Artist and Generative Performing Artist Awards, honoring the outstanding achievements of Kansas City contemporary artists. This year, Charlotte Street’s Visual Artist Fellows are Noelle Choy, Hùng Lê, and Merry Sun. Recipients of the Generative Performing Artist Fellowship are Vanessa Aricco and Jass Couch.
Since 1997, Charlotte Street’s Visual Artist Award has supported 113 outstanding artists living in Kansas City through annual, unrestricted cash awards, with a total of $871,500 now distributed directly to visual artists. This year’s Visual Artist Fellows explore themes of cultural myth-making and memory through a range of media: Choy’s performative sculptures and video create counter-narratives diasporic experience, Lê’s installations and collages examine the complexities of personal and collective memory in the aftermath of the American War in Vietnam, and Sun’s interactive, architectural soundscapes reflect on migration, movement, and belonging.
Charlotte Street launched its Generative Performing Artist Awards in 2008 as a parallel program to the Visual Artist Awards. Charlotte Street continues to act as a catalyst for discovering and supporting contemporary performing art and has now distributed $330,000 to 33 performing artists whose works expand the genres of performance. Generative Performing Artist Fellow Couch creates immersive musical experiences that integrate live instrumentation, digital tools, and audience interaction, while Aricco merges poetry, music, and movement—transforming the spoken word into a visceral, multimedia performance.
Each artist will receive an unrestricted cash grant of $10,000 and recognition by Charlotte Street throughout 2025—including announcements to media, web-based marketing and promotional efforts, and special events. Visual Artist Fellows are further recognized with a professionally curated exhibition premiering at the Spencer Museum of Art in 2025.For the majority of the fellows, this is their first opportunity to exhibit work in a prominent museum setting.
The 2025 Charlotte Street Awards were selected through a competitive process beginning with an open call for applications from artists based in the five-county Kansas City Metro Area and in Douglas County, Kansas. Selections were made by a panel of jurors consisting of renowned arts professionals. Jurors participated in in-person interviews, presentations, and studio visits, resulting in the selection of 10 finalists for the Visual Artist Awards and 10 finalists for the Generative Performing Artists Awards.
VISUAL ARTIST AWARD FELLOWS
Noelle Choy Artist Statement
My work lives mostly as performative sculpture, objects, and video, to seek counter-narratives in cultural myth-making and the phenomenon of getting big in our bodies. Using improvised methods and materials, elements ask for immediacy as theatrically sentimental props, distorting biographies, and racing my disembodied weight down a hill to simulate a haunted memory. I’m thinking about the enormity of closeness and celebration, often working in collaboration to realize both complex productions and smaller narratives. My mom only spoke Chinese when she was cursing. Otherwise, she said she didn’t remember. Diaspora is an obstacle course, not a single precious object. This activates the role of reenactment into the unreliable and absurd such as with intergenerational time travel, or peeling an orange. Like a parent, a surprise, or a dream come true, we hold ourselves and others, intangibly, and with levity.
Hùng Lê Artist Statement
In my dream, Việt Nam was never touched by war. The sun scorches her skin, free of the orange stain, and the rain slows down her breath, reminding her that she is alive. The fields provide and homes stand tall. Here, there were never any bullet shells nor neglected land mines. In this dream, my parents still call Việt Nam home. Má became a weather woman who learned English because she wanted to and Ba became an actor whose father never dragged him out of the audition line. They met by chance and reminisced about their hometown. They fell in love and never had kids. In my dream, they were just two kids in love and they were happy. Memories are fragile and can easily be manipulated, making it an essential site of investigation to consider not only what we choose to remember but also what we actively choose to forget. My practice examines the aftermath of the American War in Việt Nam, in particular how personal memory is retained within objects, photographs, and oral traditions compared to how collective or national memory is created and preserved through education, archives, and propaganda. The work continuously attempts to engage with themes of immigration, sexuality, nationality, and the American Dream by weaving together individual narratives and shared history. Unearthing and re-creating memories employ it as a method of resistance and empowerment by centering neglected narratives as a form of personal documentation that negotiates the personal relationship with the social. The continuous picking of these inherited memories highlights how our longing to belong intertwines our perception of ourselves with larger conversations of race, nationality, and gender.
Merry Sun Artist Statement
My practice is the construction of compositional infrastructures that address the sense of “unbelonging” which accompanies migration and movement. Having been reared in the crevice between two countries, on the sill of the liminal, in constant, yet stagnant motion, my work regards migration and the vagrancy of self to the self. I was born in Shenyang, China in 1996. My parents immigrated to the States for work when I was less than a year old, leaving me in the care of grandparents for much of my early youth. My own immigration process was fraught and resulted in further temporary fragmentation of our family unit. Since then, I have lived in three countries and dwelled in twelve cities, with no identifiable hometown that I consider to be my own. I no longer possess memories of my time spent in China with my kin, having been long lost to time and repressed grief. My tongue knows of two languages, though one is raw and fleeting due to neglect. I feel as if I am a fragmented body between two lands across spans of sea. From this, movement and migration have become the constants in my lived experience and the primary subject of my artistic practice. My work addresses such memories and their denial, teasing at the distinction between not knowing and forgetting. I’ve traveled east to go west, stood west to come from the east, and returned east as a foreign body once more. How many revolutions is a particular obliged to take before finding the allowance to simply be where they are? It is this continuous oscillation between the absolute and the uncertain that my practice regards, slipping “aboutness” to situate itself in the excluded middle of being and belonging.
GENERATIVE PERFORMING ARTIST AWARD FELLOWS
Vanessa Aricco Artist Statement
My work as a multimedia poet, writer, and performance artist is built on exploring conflict and duality, the precarious nature of capitalism and pop culture, and environmental anxiety. I take a raw, non-judgmental approach to interrogating my own lived experiences. I seek to combine music and poetry to make poetry more accessible and more immediate, for poetry to have an embodied visual presence, and to use my hula hooping as a site-specific, living sculpture — part go-go dancer, part deep meditation — as a way to obtain transformation.
Jass Couch Artist Statement
As a musician, creative, poet and vocalist I create art that expresses my experiences. My original music journey started with my first project, recorded and produced by myself. on my iPad and iPhone, using Apple headphones since I didn’t have access to a studio or studio equipment. I also sang at open mics until I was fortunate enough to play my own stages. My work is deeply rooted in live performance, where the energy of the audience and the spontaneity of the moment shape each show. I create music that evolves with each performance, allowing for unique interactions with the audience. At the heart of my music is the hope and intention to create connection and joy. I strive to create a space where people can come together, celebrate, and experience the power of music. I draw inspiration from a lot of musical genres and artists. My influences range from classic soul and funk to contemporary/neo-soul R&B, all of which inspire my approach to songwriting and performance. My experiences performing alongside renowned artists like Morris Day & The Time and Thundercat have shaped my understanding of stage presence and audience engagement.
VISUAL ARTIST AWARDS JURY
Sydney Pursel (Curator for Public Practice, Spencer Museum of Art at KU)
Alex Santana (Independent Curator, Writer and Assoc. Editor, Intervenxionsat The Latinx Project, NYC, NY)
Alex Paik (Independent Curator, Writer, Founder and Director Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Los Angeles, CA)
Samantha Best (Senior Manager for Exhibitions and Publications, Seattle Art Museum)
Image: Visual Artist Awards Jury (Alex Santana, Alex Paik, Sydney Pursel, Samantha Best) visit Visual Artist Award Fellow Merry Sun’s studio.
GENERATIVE PERFORMING ARTIST AWARDS JURY
AD Boynton II (writer, poet, artist, and Lecturer at KU)
Damon Davis (Emmy-award winning, Post Disciplinary Artist, STL, MO)
Maria Rowinska (Program Manager & Performance Instructor, Material Institute, New Orleans, LA)
Rachelle Rafailedes Mucha (Director of Foundation and Gov Grants, Director of Artist Residency, LA Dance Project)
Image: Generative Performing Artist Awards Jury (left to right, top to bottom: Rachelle Rafailedes Mucha, Damon Davis, AD Boynton II, Maria Rowinska)
For interview requests contact Amanda Middaugh at [email protected] or 816-994-7734.
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 $2.5 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.
ABOUT THE SPENCER MUSEUM OF ART
The Spencer Museum of Art, located on the University of Kansas Lawrence campus, explores the intersection of art, ideas, and experiences. With a diverse collection of more than 48,000 works, the Spencer is the only museum in Kansas with contemporary and historic artwork in all mediums from cultures across six continents. The Spencer Museum facilitates arts engagement and research through exhibitions, artist commissions and residencies, conferences, performances, lectures, children’s art activities, and arts and culture festivals. Admission to the Spencer Museum of Art is free. Learn more at spencerart.ku.edu
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View the Press Release as a PDF here.
