Saturday, June 7, 2025 from 1:00-2:30 PM
The Guest Critic series continues and we’re thrilled to welcome Jovanna Venegas to Kansas City on June 7 from 1:00–2:30 PM! Join us for a public critique in the Charlotte Street Stern Theater, lead by Jovanna followed by an opportunity for audience critique and Q&A.
SunYoung Park and Steve Gurysh will be the participating artists in The Guest Critic: Jovanna Venegas.
ABOUT STEVE GURYSH
b. Winston-Salem, NC USA 1984
Steve Gurysh is an artist living in Lawrence, KS where he is an Associate Professor of Sculpture in the Department of Visual Art at the University of Kansas.
His work is recognized by a fluid approach to process and material, responding to communal and beyond-human ways of understanding place, technology and the scale of planetary phenomena. Through sculpture, time-based media, and art in the public realm, his practice compresses expansive logics into potent objects and experiences that contain wild materialities, dislocated subjects, social contracts, digital to physical translations, and speculative relationships to time. His projects are often developed in collaboration and correspondence with scientists, engineers, other artists, communities, and non-human participants.
Recent projects include the transformation of uranium ore into a radioactive photographic print, the meticulous reproduction of graffitied river rocks along a glacial river, and the recreation of a column from an astronomical observatory carved into the volume of a 200-year-old wind fallen oak tree.
He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including residencies at Wassaic Project, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, the WATERSHED+ Dynamic Environment Lab and a fellowship at the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University. He has exhibited works at Contemporary Calgary, Alberta, Canada; the Knockdown Center, Queens, New York; W139, Amsterdam; El Museo de la Ciudad, Querétaro, Mexico; La Société des Arts Technologiques, Montréal; The Engine Room, Wellington, New Zealand; and in the center of the Allegheny River.
ABOUT SUNYOUNG PARK
SunYoung Park (b. 1990 South Korean) navigates the intersection of imagination and reality, using diverse materials to express contrasting surfaces, focusing on ceramics and mixed media. She earned her BFA and MFA from Hong-Ik University in Seoul and an MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Park has exhibited nationally and internationally, participating in residencies at the Clayarch Gimhae Museum, Charlotte Street Foundation, and the Wassaic Project. Her work has been shown in prestigious exhibitions, including the Jingdezhen International Ceramic Art Biennale, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. She lives and works in Kansas City, MO.
ABOUT THE GUEST CRITIC
Charlotte Street presents The Guest Critic, a three-part programming series that will bring nationally recognized curators to Kansas City for a public artist critique. The 2025 series will feature: TK Smith (Curator, Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University, Atlanta, GA), Jovanna Venegas (Curator, SculptureCenter, New York, NY), and Taylor Bythewood-Porter (Curator, Museum of Riverside, Riverside, CA).
The Guest Critic is a critique series, which pairs national curators with Kansas City artists who have either exhibited work in a contemporary space outside of Kansas City, or completed a national or international residency. The program will take place in the Charlotte Street Stern Theater, where works will be staged for a public critique with our guest curators, and the artists will be selected by program facilitators Yashi Davalos and Kimi Kitada. At the end of the curator’s critique, the audience will have an opportunity to engage in critiques and Q&A.
ABOUT JOVANNA VENEGAS
Jovanna Venegas currently serves as curator of SculptureCenter in New York, where she has organized projects and exhibitions with Alexa West and ASMA. From 2017 to 2023, she was at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, ending her tenure as associate curator of contemporary art. During her time there, she curated exhibitions with Fernando Palma Rodríguez (2023) and Liz Hernández (2021) and co-organized New Work: Wu Tsang (2021); Shifting the Silence (2022); the 2022 SECA Art Award; and Sitting on Chrome: Mario Ayala, rafa esparza, and Guadalupe Rosales (2023-2024). Additionally, she served as curatorial advisor for the Whitney Biennial 2022 on the U.S./Mexico border region. Venegas holds a BA in art history from the University of California at Los Angeles and an MA in curatorial practice from the School of Visual Arts, New York.
