Wednesday, April 2, 2025 from 6:00-8:00 PM
Kicking off The Guest Critic series, we’re thrilled to welcome TK Smith to Kansas City on April 2 from 6:00–7:30 PM! Join us for a public critique in the Charlotte Street Stern Theater, lead by TK followed by an opportunity for audience critique and Q&A.
The artists participating in The Guest Critic: TK Smith are Kate Clements and Harold Smith.
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 TK SMITH
TK Smith is a curator, writer, and cultural historian. His interdisciplinary research engages materiality to analyze art, identity, and culture. As a public scholar, he serves as a conduit between artists, ideas, and communities to produce thoughtful exhibitions, publications, and programs. He currently works as Curator, Arts of Africa and the African Diaspora, at the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University. Smith’s writing has been published in exhibition catalogues, academic journals, and periodicals, including Art Papers where he is a contributing editor. In 2022, he was awarded an Andy Warhol Writers Grant and in 2024 he was awarded a Leo and Dorothea Rabkin Prize. He has been a visiting lecturer at numerous academic and cultural institutions, including Cornell University, where he taught undergraduate courses on cultural criticism. Smith is a doctoral candidate in the History of American Civilization program at the University of Delaware, where he is completing his dissertation Granite, Power, and Piss: The Transformation of a Confederate Symbol.
ABOUT KATE CLEMENTS
Kate Clements (b.1989) constructs delicate and ornate paintings and installations comprised of kiln fused glass panels. Working with frit, a type of crushed glass, she sifts, scatters, and pushes the sugar-like substance on a kiln shelf to form dimensional drawings. The wafer-thin panels reference naturalistic designs and floral motifs that she uses to explore ideas of beauty, taste, and impermanence. Utilizing the seductive qualities of glass, Clements draws the viewer in, but upon further inspection the work reflects a nervous tension and precariousness that is palpable.
ABOUT HAROLD SMITH
Harold Smith is a Kansas City based visual artist whose internationally exhibited and collected work includes painting, collage, mixed media, performance, video, sound, and assemblage.
Smith’s work focuses on the complexity of black masculinity in America by exploring and expressing the simultaneously complementary and contradictory internal and external narratives that black men in America must navigate in order to survive and flourish.
Smith also write for KC Studio magazine.
