Kansas City MO, June 24, 2025: Parade opens at Charlotte Street (3333 Wyoming St., Kansas City, MO) on Friday, June 27–August 16, and explores the celebratory spirit of creative experimentation and artistic assembly. This group exhibition is a collaborative effort between members of Hyperlink Art Collective and Kansas City-based artists, each responding to the theme of “Parade” through their unique practices and perspectives. An opening reception for the exhibition will be held on Friday, June 27 from 6:00–9:00 PM in the Charlotte Street Gallery and will include a performance from Tobias Fike and Theresa Anderson at 8:00 PM.
Parade includes works across painting, sculpture, installation, sound, video, and performance— each pushing the boundaries of artistic discipline. The exhibition draws on the collective strength and diversity of its contributors to explore the sensorial and emotional experiences of a parade: as a communal display of strength, celebration, rhythm, and transformation.
Featured works include Rebecca Vaughan’s delicate ink and gouache drawings of umbrellas, evoking the vibrant bustle of New Orleans’ Second Line parades, and a live performance by Tobias Fike and Theresa Anderson exploring cadence, momentum, and the evolving presence of bodies in motion. Marissa Shell’s floating, stuffed and felted green clouds echo the surreal scale and softness of parade floats as they drift and morph through space. Emily Blair Quinn, Tobias Fike & Matt Harris, and Xi Zhang grapple with the disorienting emotional memory of parades through distorted and hallucinatory faces—a remembering of a sense of space but not distinct visual memories. Fike and Harris’ collaborative sculptures, for instance, incorporate oozing, cloth-formed faces that slump over simple metal frames.
Summer Ventis’ monotype balloon prints ask viewers to reflect on the repetition and surprise of visual encounters in a procession, while Theresa Anderson’s powerline (site conditioner)—a striped, rainbow-hued sculpture—disrupts and connects space like a parade route rerouted through sensation.
The full artist lineup includes: Theresa Anderson, Clay Yoga Sculpt (Andrew Castañeda, Erin Conyers, Casey Whittier), Fike & Harris, Tobias Fike, Ian Fisher, Matthew Harris, Daisy McGowan, Marissa Shell, Summer Ventis, Emily Blair Quinn, Rebecca Vaughan, Kathryn Wingard, and Xi Zhang. Together, these artists blur disciplinary boundaries and invite participation, deepening a collective practice that is both experimental and expansive.
Parade will run from June 27 through August 16, 2025, at Charlotte Street Gallery. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Friday, 12:00–5:00 PM and Saturday 11:00 AM–5:00 PM. Admission is free and open to all.
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 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.
###
View the press release as a PDF here.
