Clay Yoga Sculpt (Casey Whittier/Andrew Castañeda/Erin Conyers) (right)r Hoard (left) and Yulie Urano (right)
KANSAS CITY, MO, August 18, 2025: Charlotte Street is pleased to premiere Crossroads Artboards this summer by artists Kati Toivanen and Clay Yoga Sculpt (Casey Whittier/Andrew Castañeda/Erin Conyers), 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 September 2025.
This round of Artboards features deeply personal and collaborative works that explore themes of healing, transformation, and the intersection of practice and memory. Katie Toivanen’s Chimera delves into her experience as a bone marrow transplant recipient, living with the complex reality of a body that now houses blood and immune cells from a male donor, while the rest of her cells remain her own. Through organic imagery that evokes blood, tissue, and cellular matter, Toivanen reflects on the ongoing process of healing, balancing both her personal and medical narratives.
Meanwhile, Clay Yoga Sculpt (Casey Whittier, Andrew Castañeda, and Erin Conyers) present a collaborative body of work that links the physical practices of yoga, ceramics, and skateboarding. Their documentary-style images capture the intersection of these disciplines, emphasizing how hours of practice manifest in fleeting moments of action. The artists use yoga as a grounding force, which not only enhances their physical work but also shapes their perspectives on impermanence and transformation. Their approach to ceramics and skateboarding celebrates the beauty of process and the evidence left behind as a record of time.
Kati Toivanen on her Artboards:
A person with two different sets of DNA is called a chimera and I am one of them. In the summer of 2022, I was diagnosed with an aggressive form of leukemia and in 2023 I received a bone marrow transplant from an anonymous donor to heal my blood. My donor is a healthy young man, so my blood and immune cells are now male, but the rest of my cells remain female. My cancer is in remission, but my body remains a battleground between the donated and my own cells. This comingling manifests in symptoms of graft-versus-host disease. In this series of images I manipulate and explore elements that resemble blood, cells, tissue, and other organic matter as I imagine and visualize the ongoing process of healing and growth in my body.
Clay Yoga Sculpt on their Artboards:
A photograph captures action – one frozen moment – only possible due to countless hours of practice. Captured action documents a subject’s sensitive material understanding: just as a skateboarder is attuned to the potential of a corner in the urban landscape, a ceramic artist understands the potential transformation of a heap of clay. The act may leave evidence at the spot. Hundreds of scratches might surface a rail, evidencing the practice and attempts leading up to one victorious moment frozen in a photo. These images reflect the documentary style common in skateboarding. These images were made in Kansas City by artists who met here and have maintained connections through their ceramics and movement practices. The spaces were collaboratively constructed and work began with a group yoga session. Yoga can prepare the body for opportunities which require strength, presence, agility, and longevity. For Andrew, yoga enhances not only his physical ceramic and photographic practices, but also his skateboarding. For Casey, it is part of a larger desire to live with flexibility as a core value- literally and figuratively. For Erin, it is the thread that connects her to the ever changing and temporary nature of all things, reminding her how to appreciate each moment with more gratitude and awareness. In Erin Conyers: Yoga and Casey Whittier: Yoga, Erin and Casey practice yoga atop mounds of malleable clay. The floor surface’s resistance is no longer fixed. Erin and Casey react to the thixotropic material grounding their yoga practice. But, this also becomes ceramic practice: this approach to sculpting clay allows new perspectives, unburdened by pottery-centric conventions that are part of our training and education. Here, the evidence of Erin and Casey’s practices are fired as a record, compiling time into a solid object. Clay becomes the spot, the obstacle, the record.
Documentation of these artboards can be found at bit.ly/artboards-summer2025
For interview requests contact Amanda Middaugh at [email protected] or 816-994-7734.
ABOUT KATI TOIVANEN
Kati Toivanen grew up in Finland and came to the United States for her formal art education. Since receiving her Master of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1992, Toivanen has been an active artist and university educator. One of Toivanen’s sixteen solo art exhibitions was favorably reviewed in Art in America and her works have been published and exhibited nationally and abroad. In 2001 Toivanen received a Charlotte Street Award, a highly regarded artist grant in Kansas City and she has received several other grants to support her creative production. In addition, she has completed ten funded site-specific public art projects which include a permanent public art commission for the new Kansas City International Airport that opened in March 2023. “I Spy Carry-On,” her project for the airport, is a triptych of digitally composed photographs. In her work, Toivanen explores personal history and narrative through imagery, objects, and installations, often incorporating elements of play and games. Toivanen is a Professor of Studio Art at the University of Missouri- Kansas City.
ABOUT CLAY YOGA SCULPT
This is a collaborative work by Casey Whittier, Andrew Castañeda, and Erin Conyers.
Casey Whittier received her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and MFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is interested in the metaphorical and philosophical power of visual art and the ways in which the ceramic material creates direct connections between the geology of the earth, basic human needs, and complex metaphysical desires. Repetitive processes and systems of reliance are often used as metaphors for our interconnectedness. Whittier teaches ceramics and social practice at the Kansas City Art Institute and is a Studios Inc Fellow. She believes in making art anywhere and everywhere. Whittier was named a 2020 Emerging Artist by Ceramics Monthly Magazine. She serves as President for Artaxis.org.
Andrew Castañeda grew up surfing and skateboarding in sunny southern California. Constantly analyzing the symbols of the world around him, Andrew constructs his own symbologies and tells his own stories. Andrew’s work is the product of his responses to the situations where he finds himself. Andrew has work in several private collections including: Harvard Ceramics Collection, the Charlotte Street Foundation Cup Library, the Penn State Ceramics Teaching Collection, The American Museum of Ceramic Arts, and the Kansas City Art Institute Teaching Collection. Andrew earned his BFA in ceramics from the Kansas City Art Institute, and then his MFA from Penn State University. Andrew was Harvard AIR from 2021-2022 and has worked as a production potter and fine art photographer across the US.
Erin Conyers was born in Springfield, Missouri and moved to Kansas City, Missouri in 2015. She received her BFA in ceramics from the Kansas City Art Institute. Working with ceramic materials and mixed media, Erin focuses on capturing the effects of people’s relationships from living and existing within our urban environment. She received the Ken Ferguson Scholarship and the Regina Brown Student Undergraduate Fellowship. Erin has exhibited at KCAI and local galleries. Her work is included in the Ken Ferguson Teaching Collection. Her experience includes being a teacher’s assistant and a reclaim assistant under Casey Whittier and interning or working directly with: Linda Lighton; Karen McCoy; Brett Reif. Erin has been an artist in residence at Fish Factory in Iceland and completed 500 hours of yoga teacher training. Erin works out of her ceramics studio in Kansas City, teaches weekly yoga classes, and hosts international yoga retreats.
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.
