KANSAS CITY, MO, SEPTEMBER 18, 2026: Charlotte Street and the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas are pleased to announce the recipients of the 2026 Rocket Grants, a re-granting program of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. This year, 10 awardees will receive project-based grants of $6,000 for a total of $60,000 in funding. The 2026 recipients include Grace Ambrose, Lourdes Kalusha-Aguirre, Melissa Ferrer-Civil and Calvin Arsenia, Kim Riley, Luke Harbur, Jared Horman, Bryan Stalder, Sean Kenealy, Marian McClellan, and The Waiting Room in collaboration with Harrison Street DIY.
The selected projects involve a variety of workshops aimed at accessibility, film screening events and initiatives, performance-based celebrations of queer resilience, outdoor exhibitions in unconventional spaces, and more. “Artists of our region continue to expand definitions for art, explore new places where it thrives, and invite many communities to participate. This year’s Rocket Grants recipients offer a broader view of our communities through surprising, somber, and sometimes zany projects of note,” said Saralyn Reece Hardy, Spencer Museum Director.
The awardees were selected from a highly competitive pool of 84 applications. The jury consisted of three jurors: Joshua Rios (artist and Associate Professor at School of the Art Institute, Chicago, IL); Meg Hahn (artist and Development & Special Projects Manager at SPACE, Portland, ME); Thomas Huang (artist and Associate Professor of Design at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS); and Camry Ivory (artist and recent Rocket Grant recipient, Kansas City, MO).
“This year, we received over 80 Rocket Grant applications. The jury was impressed by the talent on display from our region’s artists and were extremely conscientious in their deliberations at all points in the process. While only ten artists were ultimately selected to receive awards, each of the applicants represents a significant contribution to our region’s creative identity, “ said Elizabeth Spavento, Charlotte Street Co-Executive Director.
The public is invited to celebrate this year’s recipients at an awards ceremony from 6:30-8:00 PM on Thursday, September 24 at Charlotte Street in Kansas City, Missouri. This event is free and open to all and is an opportunity for audiences to learn more about each project and connect with the artists.
For more information about Rocket Grants and this year’s award recipients, visit the Rocket Grants website.
Here is the complete list of the 2026 Rocket Grants recipients:
FROM LOG TO STOOL: GREEN WOODWORKING,
TRADITIONAL CRAFT, AND COMMUNITY BUILDING
Grace Ambrose, with her background in woodworking and teaching at craft schools and woodshops around the country, is organizing two free two-day workshops called: “From Log to Stool: Green Woodworking, Traditional Craft, and Community Building.” Participants can make their own stools through a practice called green woodworking, a traditional means of woodworking that aims at creating sustainable furniture. These workshops will take place at venues such as city parks or community gardens, where participants will each be given a small kit of hand tools to process the parts as opposed to using machines, offering both accessibility and intentionality.
FORWARD, TOGETHER
Lourdes Kalusha-Aguirre presents Forward, Together, a film screening and discussion event at venues in the Lawrence and Kansas City areas. This is a story of the Lawrence-El Papaturro friendship committee, a group that is part of a “grassroots transnational peace and justice network known as U.S.-El Salvador Sister Cities.” Through an anthology narrative style, the film follows both Salvadoran and U.S. American born protagonists and illustrates not only the confrontations of their struggles across time and geography, but also their stories in finding solidarity in unlikely places. Proposing to offer ordinary citizens a model for being a part of international solidarity movements, Kalusha-Aguirre hopes to provide them with ways to make meaningful change in their communities.
MELANATED MEASURES : LAUNCH : GREENWOOD CENTENI
Melissa Ferrer-Civil, Kanas City’s first poet laureate, and Calvin Arsenia, internationally renowned harpist singer/songwriter, pair together to celebrate the centennial year of the Greenwood Social Hall, a historically Black religious institution and cultural pillar in the Black Community. Through their event series, A Nation In Exile (ANIE), they’ve partnered with Greenwood Social Halls’ Launch of events to resurrect with new programming in Black August 2027 called “Melanated Measures.” This will invite writers to Kansas City and pair them with local musicians to share their works, followed by sounds from Kadesh Flow and Calvin Arsenia. Other parts of the series include workshops, a dance clinic, and an exhibit featuring black artists from Kansas City and around the country.
THE RECKONING
Kim Riley combines theater, visual art, history, and civic dialogue, in the “The Reckoning,” an immersive play that follows William Adams, a successful Black corporate executive who discovers the stories of transcending the realities of racism in America he grew up with no longer explain the world around him. This play transforms the audience into participants, beginning with a gallery installation called “The Myth of Immunity,” exploring the promise and limits of respectability and achievement, and follows with a performance at the Buck O’Neil Education and Research Center.
THIS IS US: LGBTQ+
Luke Harbur presents “This Is Us: LGBTQ+,” an annual 4-hour daytime celebration that showcases multigenerational queer voices through workshops and a cabaret. The event will focus on anecdotes and artistic expressions that surround queer resilience, offering a “Pay What You Can” entry to each part of the experience, ensuring accessibility to interested patrons. Workshops will offer attendees the chance to design both a pride flag, which will be led by visual artist Triangle Head Universe (Evan Maddox), as well as a drag look to represent what pride looks like to them, led by Burly Esque (Spencer Ruwe). In addition to these workshops, the cabaret will feature cast members who will perform one number representing their own expression of queer resilience.
IF LIFE’S A DRAG, KANSAS CITY’S BEEN LIVING
Jared Horman painted the mural at Passions KC in Westport featuring 18 local drag artists earlier this year, and to celebrate their stories, he’s created his next project: “If Life’s a Drag, Kansas City’s Been Living.” To share each of the artists’ stories and other local artists, this project builds a public website and launches it with a live storytelling event, alongside a call to action to preserve KC’s rich LGBTQ+ history. The website would preserve written histories, share archival photographs, and include an ephemera to tell each story.
THE FRONT PAGE PROJECT
Bryan Stalder transforms the cover of Northeast News with “The Front Page Project,” an accessible public gallery aimed at turning print media into a platform for community storytelling, portfolio development, and local artistic expression. As a widely distributed newspaper in one of Kansas City’s most culturally diverse, working-class neighborhoods, Northeast News issues will be able to highlight featured artists through this initiative, removing financial barriers, providing mentorship and exposure for local artists, and prompting for an end-of-the-year public exhibition to bring each artist’s works together in a physical gallery space.
POCKET CINEMA PROJECT
Sean Kenealy presents “Pocket Cinema Project,” a micro-budget filmmaking initiative that offers an accessible filmmaking experience. This project starts with a series of free workshops led by Kansas City filmmakers, writers, and artists, and culminates in a free public film festival featuring a selection of the participant films, along with artist talks and community events. Kenealy hopes to create space for new voices, unconventional approaches, and stories that can be made when barriers to filmmaking are intentionally lowered.
REFLECTED
Marian McClellan introduces “Reflected,” a Playback Theater training program offered inside women’s shelters in Kansas City. “Playback Theater” is an interactive approach to improvisational theater, where audience members share a story and a trained ensemble enacts it. Through this approach, residents of the shelters can build community by choosing to tell their stories, see it reflected with care, and hold others’ stories in return. These workshops will culminate in a closing mini-showcase, where the participating residents, along with Improv Springboard players, will perform for an audience of their choosing.
SITE FOUR
The Waiting Room and Harrison Street DIY collaborate in “Site Four,” an event to reignite Site Projects. This is a one-day outdoor exhibition and collaboration between artist-run galleries and alternative art spaces in Kansas City that will take place at the Harrison Street DIY Skate Park in October 2026. Artists are invited to activate public spaces in the city’s urban core while also creating a network of independent, artist-run spaces. As an important community-building initiative and creative achievement, this project also aims to celebrate the park and serve as a fundraiser for the park to be built again in a new location.
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 connected individual artists to each other and to the greater Kansas City community. For more information about Charlotte Street, its awards, programs, and initiatives, visit www.charlottestreet.org.
ABOUT THE SPENCER MUSEUM OF ART
The Spencer Museum of Art, located on the University of Kansas Lawrence campus, explores the intersection of art, ideas, and experiences. With a diverse collection of more than 48,000 works, the Spencer is the only museum in Kansas with contemporary and historic artwork in all mediums from cultures across six continents. The Spencer Museum facilitates arts engagement and research through exhibitions, artist commissions and residencies, conferences, performances, lectures, children’s art activities, and arts and culture festivals. Admission to the Spencer Museum of Art is free. Learn more at spencerart.ku.edu.
ABOUT THE ANDY WARHOL FOUNDATION FOR VISUAL ARTS
In accordance with Andy Warhol’s will, the mission of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts is the advancement of the visual arts. The Foundation manages an innovative and flexible grants program while also preserving Warhol’s legacy through creative and responsible licensing policies and extensive scholarly research for ongoing catalogue raisonné projects. To date, the Foundation has given over $260 million in cash grants to more than 1,000 arts organizations in 49 states and abroad and has donated 52,786 works of art to 322 institutions worldwide.
View press release as PDF HERE.
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