Kansas City MO, July 22, 2026: Charlotte Street is pleased to present Digital Prairie, a group exhibition curated by Steve Gurysh and Poppy DeltaDawn that brings together artists working across craft, computation, music, and ecological practice to examine the intertwined relationships between technology, landscape, and human intervention. Featuring work by Colette + Jeff Bangert, Raven Chacon, Poppy DeltaDawn, Steve Gurysh, Michael Jones McKean, and Jeanine Oleson, the exhibition will be on view in the Charlotte Street Gallery (3333 Wyoming St., Kansas City, MO 64111) from August 15 through September 26, 2026. An opening reception will take place on Saturday, August 15, from 3:00–5:00 PM.
“The subject of all my work has been landscape. The elements of the computer work and my hand work are often repetitive, like leaves, trees, grass and other natural landscape elements are… The form of grass as grass, leaves as leaves, is what I’m exploring… Grass as form. Grass is also random and random is a natural computer facility. Computer grass is natural grass.” — Colette Bangert (In: Leavitt, R, ed. Artist and computer, 1976).
Digital Prairie is a technological choir reverberating the landscape. Through the vocabularies, gestures, and geometries of machine language, musical composition, basketry, weaving and threadwork, tree harvesting, mystic architecture, computer-aided imaging and expression; together, these artists present craft, technology, and environment as a holistic and monstrous hybrid, an intergenerational, cross-cultural survey of human-computer-prairie interaction.
The prairie itself serves as subject and cautionary tale, as an ecosystem broken by innovation. John Deere’s steel prairie-breaking plow of 1837 could finally slice through millennia-old root systems that wooden plows could not penetrate. By 1874, Joseph F. Glidden’s patented machine was mass-producing barbed wire, a low-cost means of enclosing agricultural land across the largely treeless plains. Over four decades, these technologies accelerated Western expansion and enabled the systematic displacement of Native peoples from ancestral lands.
The artists in Digital Prairie reconfigure traditional and speculative knowledge through the lens of computer-aided craft, material culture and practices in land stewardship and connection. Their works converge on a critical insight that computational abstraction leaves concrete ecological footprints—marks of human activity in the geological record through an irreversible meshing of environment and infrastructure. This exhibition asks whether technology might be reoriented from an extractive force toward a regenerative one. Can our digital tools learn to grow like grass—randomly, recursively?
CURATED AND ORGANIZED BY
Steve Gurysh + Poppy DeltaDawn
CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS
Colette + Jeff Bangert, Raven Chacon, Poppy DeltaDawn, Steve Gurysh, Michael Jones McKean, Jeanine Oleson
PERFORMANCE PROGRAM
ADDITIONAL PROGRAMS SUPPORTED BY
The University of Kansas
For interview requests contact Amanda Middaugh at [email protected] or 816-994-7734.
ARTIST BIOS
Colette Stuebe Bangert and Charles Jeffries Bangert (Lawrence, KS) were a collaboration. CSB + CJB = CB; as they signed their computer-ink-plotter drawings on paper beginning in the mid 1960’s in eastern Kansas. The algorithmic ink drawings on paper reflected their lives living in the landscape of the midwestern Grasslands. Simple lines of many colors, vertical, horizontal, curved and circling or crossing, open or dense as are natural landscape elements. According to Colette “The programs were written by Jeff who was a mathematician and programmer. As a life long visual artist, the program’s visual contents were influenced and developed using my hand work on paper and canvas. The algorithmic work in turn influenced my own hand work on paper, canvas and later thread on cloth.” Their work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NYC; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, Kansas.
Raven Chacon is a composer, performer and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, Chacon has exhibited, performed, or had works performed at LACMA, The Renaissance Society, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Borealis Festival, SITE Santa Fe, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival, and Swiss Institute Contemporary Art New York. As a member of Postcommodity from 2009-2018, he co-created artworks presented at the Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, Carnegie International 57, as well as the 2-mile long land art installation Repellent Fence. His solo artworks are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum and National Museum of the American Indian, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Getty Research Institute, the University of New Mexico Art Museum, and various private collections.
Poppy DeltaDawn (Lawrence, KS) is an artist, writer, and teacher exploring the dialogue between contemporary life and traditional making practices through textiles and sculpture. Her location-specific practice is currently informed by the material culture of the Kansas prairieland, where she challenges the relationship between inherited craft knowledge, technology, and contemporary making. Recent residencies include Fire Island Artist Residency (FIAR), Berea College, Unstable Design Lab (CU Boulder), and Tallgrass Artist Residency. DeltaDawn is an Assistant Professor of Art in Textiles + Fiber at the University of Kansas, where she is restoring a 3 Acre Hay Meadow.
Steve Gurysh (Lawrence, KS) is an artist working in sculpture, computational craft, and art in the public realm, responding to collective and beyond-human ways of understanding place, ecology, and the scale of planetary phenomena. Receiving residencies at the Volland Foundation, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, the WATERSHED+ Dynamic Environment Lab, he has exhibited at W139, Amsterdam; El Museo de la Ciudad, Querétaro, Mexico; The Engine Room, Wellington, New Zealand; and in the center of the Allegheny River. Gurysh is an Associate Professor of Sculpture in the Department of Visual Art at the University of Kansas.
Michael Jones McKean (b. Federated States of Micronesia, lives/works in the US and France) is a sculptor whose work explores the nature of objects in relation to folklore, technology, anthropology, and geography. McKean has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Nancy Graves Foundation Award, and has lectured and shown his work extensively around the world. He is currently an Associate Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in the Sculpture + Extended Media Department where he has taught since 2006. McKean is also the inaugural Artist-in-Residence of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, and the Centro de Interpretação do Abrigo do Lagar Velho in Portugal.
Jeanine Oleson (New York, NY) is an interdisciplinary artist working with images, materiality and language, which she forms into complex and humorous objects, instruments, images, videos and performances through a queer and feminist lens. Oleson has exhibited and performed at venues including: The Kitchen, NY; Cubitt Gallery, London; Commonwealth & Council, LA; Grand Arts, Kansas City, MO; MoMA P.S.1, NY; Coreana Museum, Seoul; SculptureCenter, NY; Beta-Local, San Juan, PR; Socrates Sculpture Park, NY. Oleson was a 2024 Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome and has been in residence at Macdowell Colony, Hammer Museum, New Museum, Smack Mellon Studio Program and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Oleson teaches at Rutgers University and lives in Brooklyn, NY.
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 $3 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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