KANSAS CITY, MO, April 8, 2025: Charlotte Street is pleased to premiere Crossroads Artboards this spring by artists Adrienne Walker Hoard and Yulie Urano, currently installed at 125 Southwest Boulevard. The Artboards program captures the creative spirit of the Crossroads neighborhood and serving as an alternative outdoor platform where artists’ work can be viewed during all hours of the day. The current work will remain on view through the end of June 2025.
Adrienne Walker Hoard says of her Artboards: “The hands of women create and sustain our world and all its inhabitants. Tidying up, tying together, tenderly maintaining order and comfort in the midst of chaos. Generational hands are presented. The solo image board shows the powerful grandmother whose hands conduct purposeful magic within the community. The joint image board presents the young maiden’s hands with her perfect pink polish and the mother in celebration with her tambourine. These beautiful hands tell stories of hopefulness, happiness and hard work.”
Yulie Urano says of her Artboards: “Heritage and history, bloodlines and storylines are what inspires me to work with intimate materials. These detail images of a series “take cover” are of Japanese sashiko embroidery on handmade paper with embedded hair from myself and my family, using our hair as a vehicle to explore the physical foundations to our sense of self. In these images the hair is a graphic element representing the growth of familial lines that inform us of our past as it gets integrated with the structural quality of the sashiko process to create traditional Americana quilt patterns. I try to use this interplay of organic lines and geometric stitching to mimic how identities are influenced by both nature and nurture; coming together to form an image that inextricably links the two concepts.”
Documentation of these artboards can be found at bit.ly/artboards-spring2025
For interview requests contact Amanda Middaugh at [email protected] or 816-994-7734.
ABOUT ADRIENNE WALKER HOARD
Adrienne Walker Hoard is an Artist, a painter, photographer, jeweler and scholar. She holds an MFA in painting and design, and an EdD in the psychology of visual perception. Dr. Hoard is a former Fulbright Scholar to South Korea and a former Senior Ford Foundation Post-doctoral Fellow at Northwestern University. She has lived and exhibited as an artist in Italy, South Korea and South Africa. Her local solo exhibitions include the Kansas City Artist’s Coalition in 2023, Commerce Bank BOX Gallery in 2020 and the Kansas City Public Library in 2019. As an aesthetic educator and researcher, her articles on the Black Aesthetic have been published in the USA and Brazil. She retired after 31 years as a professor in the University of Missouri System. Dr. Hoard has provided visual arts learning experiences and fun opportunities for multi-generational audiences globally. Her Art is her service. She states,” I live to create beauty, capture beautiful experiences and assist others in seeing beauty in themselves and their world. As an artist, I am blessed that it’s my job to do so.”
ABOUT YULIE URANO
Yulie Urano is a fiber artist living and working in Kansas City, KS. She received her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2011. Her experience with interlocking structures inform her material choices, and by pushing the possible relationships between form, material, and textile processes, she creates work that allows exploration of her ideas on self-identity. Yulie was a recipient of the 2011 Windgate Fellowship Award and was a 2022 Center for Craft Career Advancement Fellow.
ABOUT CROSSROADS ARTBOARDS
Since 2008, the Crossroads Artboards has featured over 100 commissioned works by Kansas City-area artists. The Artboards capture the creative spirit of the Crossroads neighborhood while serving as an alternative platform for contemporary art. For a complete listing of artists and more information, visit charlottestreet.org/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 $2.5 million in awards and grants to artists and their innovative projects and has hosted countless exhibitions, performances, convenings, and conversations connecting and challenging Kansas City’s contemporary art ecosystem. 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.
