Stephanie Alaniz, Melissa Dorn, Valaria Tatera, Kate E. Shaffer, Hadley Clark,
Summer Brooks, Bernadette Negrete
Opening Friday, February 21
Kansas City, MO, February 10, 2025: CharlotteStreet is presenting a new exhibition titled Fem-utility Closet: Cohabitate, curated by Melissa Dorn, February 21—April 5, 2025. An opening reception will be held on Friday, February 21, from 6:00–9:00 PM in the Charlotte Street Gallery (3333 Wyoming St, Kansas City, Missouri). This immersive installation, a cross between a utility closet and a cozy cocoon, unites the work of eight feminists who work in the realm of craft, creating physically or conceptually labor-intensive works. Artists include Stephanie Alaniz (Emporia, KS), Morgan Chandler Bouldes (Milwaukee, WI), Summer Brooks (Kansas City, MO), Hadley Clark (Kansas City, MO), Melissa Dorn (Milwaukee, WI), Bernadette Negrete (Kansas City, MO), Kate E. Schaffer (Milwaukee, WI), Valaria Tatera (Milwaukee, WI). On Saturday, February 22 from 11:00 AM–1:00 PM artists Melissa Dorn, Kate E. Schaffer, and Morgan Chandler Bouldes will be in the gallery for the open public program Fem-Utility Closet: Lap Work.
Fem-utility Closet: Cohabitate encourages people to give time and space to fully feel, engage with, and contemplate the world they’ve entered, potentially evoking a sense of wonder and delight. As they move closer to the objects and materials, they may begin to think about the everydayness of what is around them and the labor, most often unseen, that goes into our collective everydayness.
Melissa Dorn aims to create a space for maintenance, which she defines as the essential act of caring for oneself and one’s community, viewing it as a necessity rather than an indulgence. She is particularly interested in how craft can serve as a form of maintenance. The featured artists share works that they believe enhance their well-being and the well-being of their community. These often soft, tactile, and repetitive pieces foster collaboration with viewers through sensory memory.
Fem-utility Closet: Cohabitate is a soft place to land in a world full of indifference and the hard edges of patriarchy and capitalism. It is a place to reflect on how we interact with maintenance.
PROGRAMMING
Fem-utility Closet: Cohabitate Opening Reception
Friday, February 21 | 6:00–9:00 PM
Charlotte Street Gallery
Fem-utility Closet: Lap Work
Saturday, February 22 | 11:00 AM–1:00 PM
Charlotte Street Gallery
Program Description: Let’s circle up for conversation and crafting on Saturday, February 22. Please join artists Melissa Dorn, Kate E. Schaffer, and Morgan Chandler Bouldes for a public program following the opening. Participants will fortify themselves by viewing the exhibition and through chosen craft/art processes. As audience members find comfort in connecting, they may focus discussions around maintenance, feminism, and labor. Please come with any craft/art project that can be done on your lap. This program is free and open to the public.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Stephanie Alaniz (they/them) was born and raised in South Texas. They received their Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2016 from Texas A&M-Corpus Christi with an emphasis in Printmaking. They then went on to receive their Master of Fine Arts from West Virginia University in 2019. Stephanie’s current work focuses on normalizing insecurities, challenging anti-fat bias, discussing mental health issues, and the intersection of all of these topics. Through printmaking, textiles, drawing, and sculpture they are able to create work about these topics with the hope of inviting the viewer in to reflect on themself and how these topics influence the world around us. Stephanie has exhibited in numerous national and international exhibitions. They have also been included in a number of portfolio exchanges over the last eight years. They are currently on the board of Radical Intersectional Print Guild and have been since its conception in 2020. Stephanie currently lives in Emporia, Kansas where they teach art at Emporia State University and teach courses at the Lawrence Arts Center in Lawrence, Kansas.
Stephanie Alaniz on their Fat Quilts series: My Fat Quilts seriesis a love letter to my fellow fatties. In a society that refuses to value us, I want to take this platform and give us a voice to speak and challenge the norm that has been present for the entirety of our lives and beyond. Existing in a larger body in an anti-fat society is incredibly difficult, people are cruel and hurtful and often treat fat people as if they are the lowest form of life. The use of the word “fat” has been taking back by the fat activist community as a descriptor rather than a negative, for many words such as “overweight” and “obese” are considered slurs, as obese translates from its origin to mean “having eaten oneself fat” and “overweight” suggests that there is a weight that everyone universally must be. This work’s intention is to challenge the social norms while deconstructing how we see fat bodies so that we can reconstruct our views through a lens of radical kindness, empathy, and understanding. These large scale quilts feature relief prints on fabric that are then appliquéd to larger quilt tops and assembled quilts. By using the relief process, the action of removing material from the block is meant to reflect the idea that a “good fat person” is one who is actively trying to make their body smaller. However, in the end the block is still a fat person and highlights their fat body. These quilts can become larger and monumental, taking up the space. They can also be folded up, making them smaller as a way to reference how we have been taught to take up as little space as possible especially when existing in public with straight-sized people.
Alaniz lives, educates, and creates art work in Emporia, Kansas on unceded ancestral land belonging to the Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo), Wazhazhe (Osage), Washtáge Moⁿzháⁿm (Kaw/Kanza), and Očeti Šakówiŋ (Sioux) people. Indigenous people are the past, present, and future of this land.
Summer Brooks is creating multi-media ceramic sculptures based on her experiences as a Black woman.
Brooks’ Artist Statement
The renaissance of Black femininity is upon us, signaling a transformative shift away from entrenched stereotypes toward a celebration of our unique identity and womanhood. This liberation, however, is not without its challenges, as it confronts longstanding narratives that have sought to constrain and control Black women’s bodies and identities.
In the face of hostility, manifested in various forms of resistance to our autonomy, we boldly assert our right to self-expression. Whether through the choice of attire, the pursuit of diverse interests, or the unabashed embrace of joy, we defy attempts to diminish our happiness and presence.
Driven by the conviction that our stories deserve a fresh interpretation, I infuse my art with an homage to this newfound freedom, joy, and femininity. In my pieces, I capture the gentle essence of Black women, steering away from the harshness of our past. Figures created are embellished in glitter, diamonds, and gold as a testament to the strength, resilience, and inherent power that permeates our communities.
Morgan Chandler Bouldes is an Educator, Interdisciplinary Artist and Writer. Presently, her thoughts are heavily centered around the invisible web & connective tissue of Humankind that are shared experience & emotion. The foundation of her practice is deeply rooted in sharing her personal narrative through experimental storytelling. Her works include, but are not limited to: photography, performance, film, audio & spoken and written word, installation and quilting. Embracing the Ethereal, she meditates heavily on connectedness, spiritual identity, ancestry & the passing of time.
Morgan is a recent graduate of Cranbrook Academy of Art, obtaining a MFA in Photography as well as holding a BFA in Photography from Wayne State University. In 2021 she was a recipient of the AICAD Post-Graduate Teaching Fellowship. Following her 2 year term as a Teaching Fellow she now serves as a full time faculty member at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.
Hadley Clark gives presence to absence; gives new purpose to old discards; gives form to thought. With an education in Painting (BFA, University of Kansas 2001) as well as in Garment Design and Construction (BFA Fashion Design with Honors, The New School | Parsons Paris 2010), Clark’s work exists in the middle distance between art and fashion.
Eschewing some of the commercial strictures of the fashion industry–seasonal collections, exported labor, textile waste–Clark’s methods more closely resemble those of an artist. Working patiently, often alone, Clark designs and constructs her garments according to deadlines set by the work itself. Part painter, part fashion designer, and part sculptor, Clark’s garments have employed materials as varied as silk, cotton, wool, soiled natural fibers, beeswax, salt, hair, and medical gauze.
In 2015, Clark began to rely on textile remnants and deadstock fabric as her primary construction materials. The resulting garments–cut from bolts of donated, repurposed, and meticulously collaged scraps–are documents of dual states; neither new nor used, both art object and wearable garment, dead-come-alive.
This material awareness, and a resulting interest in empowering individuals to fix and tailor garments as opposed to discarding them, led Clark to found her own sewing school in 2017, which she operates out of her studio. In the intervening three years, Clark has logged hundreds of hours teaching hundreds of students, eventually expanding the footprint of her classroom to include the textile department at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, and The Kansas City Art Institute.
Melissa Dorn is a Milwaukee artist obsessed with industrial mop heads, feminism, and labor. Her sculpture, paintings, and installations utilize craft, pulling at threads of her history, midwesterness, and the ordinary.
Selected exhibitions: Fem-utility Closet, IA+A Hillyer Contemporary Arts Center; Fem-utility Closet: Louise, Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts (LHUCA); Sarah Ball Allis Art Museum, Charles Allis Art Museum; Soft Power, Minneapolis College of Art and Design Concourse Gallery; 3 Faces of Eve, 5 Points Gallery; Made in Paint, The Sam & Adele Golden Gallery; Existing in Thought, Scout Gallery; Tension in the Ordinary, James May Gallery; Mobile Home, Var Gallery; Infauxstructure, Opalka Gallery, Sage College;The Book Club: What Would We Do With Lynne Tillman, Frank Juarez Gallery; Mopping Up, Frank Juarez Gallery; The Jump Off, Urban Institute for Contemporary Art; Detroit Biennale, Museum of New Art; Wisconsin Artists Biennial, Museum of Wisconsin Art; Preservatif, Stockholm Gallery; Forward 2014, Charles Allis Art Museum; Up, Down!, River Edge Gallery; Schematic, UW-Sheboygan; Eight Counties, John Michael Kohler Arts Center; Art Chicago and Aqua Art Miami, Hotcakes Gallery. Select collections: Saint Kate – The Arts Hotel; Northwestern Mutual; Mandel Group; UW Hospital and Clinics; Milwaukee Area Technical College.
Dorn earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design.
Bernadette Negrete on her practice: “My practice bridges multiple disciplines – personal, political, material. I create sculptural and conceptual assemblages that reference sexuality, relationships, religion, and traditional Mexican ideologies. In many of these works, everyday objects like cardboard and tile undergo subtle and fundamental transformations in order to open up discussions about identity. These changes act as a type of material research, opening our awareness to the spaces between identity and objecthood. I investigate how materials, cultural objects, and ideologies evolve using a wide range of processes (such as screen printing, plaster and poetry). These investigations function as a performance, and the resulting objects act as their translations. These re-contextualised objects can then go on to function in a gallery or domestic setting as critiques on culture, reflections on identity, or synonyms for the sentimental.
One of the main inspirations behind my practice is my relationship to my family and the labor they put into building a future out of scraps. In particular, I aim to reveal the way these scraps and their labor have persevered into everyday moments in our lives. I’ve always been drawn to how life becomes translated through objects and human residue to become these abstracted yet compacted bookmarks of everyday moments. My work walks the line between contemporary and crafty in the same way I do Brown and White culture. It often pretends to be something it is not, cardboard impersonates tile or a pillow pretends to be a balloon. Here, I build a world of torch songs and grease.
In this world, there is no femininity without labor. The labor of childbirth, a labor of love, to labor means to be working class. The gendered divisions of labor in my family motivate the methods of artistic creation I use. When does craft become art? What crafts will make my grandmother proud? And what crafts will she not be able to understand?”
Kate E. Schaffer (BS 2006, MLC; MFA 2016, SAIC) is a Milwaukee artist working at the nexus of feminism, queer theory, and Abstractionist Aesthetics. Her paintings, installations, performances, and writings, explore the fixity and possibility of time and space. Schaffer holds concurrent positions at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design and Mount Mary University and teaches in Milwaukee Public Schools where she encourages students of all ages to consider the possibilities the world holds for them.
Valaria Tatera is a Wisconsin based visual artist, lecturer, curator and activist whose work investigates the intersection of ethnicity, gender, commerce, and the environment. An enrolled member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, Valaria explores self identity and contemporary Indigenous issues such as the impact of colonization on Indigenous Erasure, Visibility and Resilience.
Her intention is “ to create a physical manifestation of work that holds visual and personal space for statistics that often erase the individual”. Valaria earned an M.F.A in 3-D from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, M.A. and B.F.A. in Ceramics from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She exhibits regionally and nationally at various galleries and institutions. Recently, she is a recipient of a FCA foundation micro grant and The Woodland Indian Grant. She was a finalist for the Mary Nohl fellows in 2020 and 2019. Valaria will be featured in the 2022 Wisconsin Biennial, in fall 2022 a solo exhibition at Sweet Briar College and is a co-curator of No More Stolen Sisters. Her current installation Kill the Indian Save the Man is on view at the Museum of Wisconsin Art til January 2022.
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.
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View the Press Release as a PDF here.
