Kiki Serna, Samantha Haan, Yoonmi Nam, Ranran Fan, Yangbin Park
Kansas City MO, November 4, 2025: Charlotte Street presents a new exhibition titled Shifting Tongues, curated by Danqi Cai [dan-CHI Tsai], November 14, 2025–January 3, 2026. An opening reception will be held on Friday, November 14, from 6:00–9:00 PM in the Charlotte Street Gallery (3333 Wyoming St, Kansas City, MO).
Shifting Tongues gathers eight artists who explore the ruptures and reinventions of language—how it falters, adapts, and shapes identity. Their work spans painting, printmaking, handmade paper, ceramics, interactive art, and immersive installation. Artists include Renata Cassiano Alvarez (Veracruz, Mexico/Springdale, AR), Nada Bayazid (Overland Park, KS), Danqi Cai (Fayetteville, AR), Ranran Fan (Denton, TX), Samantha Haan (New Haven, CT/Kansas City, MO), Yoonmi Nam (Lawrence, KS), Yangbin Park (Memphis, TN), and Kiki Serna (New Haven, CT/Kansas City, MO).
While the exhibition began with a curatorial inquiry into linguistic relativism and multilingual experience, the assembled work expands this premise, moving across mediums and cultural contexts to explore the porous boundary between what is spoken and what is felt, what is inherited and what is made anew.
Language in this exhibition is not only verbal or textual—it is gestural, material, sonic, and spatial. Some artists foreground the structure of language itself, fragmenting and recombining linguistic forms. Other work reflects on the loss, transformation, or reconstitution of language through migration and memory. Still others craft devices and environments that stretch communication into sensory, interactive, and embodied realms. Across these approaches, language takes material form through acts of translation, reinterpretation, and reinvention.
EXHIBITION PROGRAMMING
All programs are at Charlotte Street (3333 Wyoming St, Kansas City, MO) and are free and open to the public.
Shifting Tongues Opening Reception | November 14, 6:00–9:00 PM
Live Scoring Refrain in Three Parts | November 14, 7:00–7:30 PM
In collaboration with the UMKC Conservatory’s Sight x Sound Series, Hannah Guzman (soprano) and David Oosse (vibraphone) will perform a score composed by Rodrigo Camargo for Danqi Cai’s multimedia installation, Refrain in Three Parts.
Shifting with Óscar Trujillo | November 15, 2:00–3:30 PM
Shifting is a somatics based performance workshop inspired by the sights and sounds of Shifting Tongues. This 90-min experience will move us through presence, alignment, confusion and creative responsiveness in voice, movement and writing. This direct dialogue with the visual work and soundscapes present in the gallery explores language through improvisation. Dress comfy, bring water and a journal. All abilities welcome. No experience necessary.
Óscar Trujillo is an embodiment practitioner with The Embodiment Institute whose practice bridges somatic education, the expressive arts, bodywork and intuitive energy reading. Óscar currently makes movement work in Kansas City and performs with Joe Goode Performance Group in San Francisco.
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.
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View the press release as a PDF here.
