Welcome to the Neighborhood - Charlotte Street

Posted July 11, 2018

Friday, August 24th through Saturday, September 22nd, 2018

Kansas City Artists on the Midwestern Experience

What defines the experience of a person living in the geographic middle of the United States? There are expectations of what that existence looks like, feels like. A picture painted with the residue of a black and white intro to the first ever movie in technicolor, a smear of bbq sauce on a paper bib, the quilt-like squares of “flyover country”. Welcome to the Neighborhood is an exhibition that presents the lived experience of midwesterners through the eyes of its artists – people who live or have lived in the Kansas City area. It presents the textured landscape, the complicated dichotomies, the hues and politics of a place that these artists have embraced as home.

For photos of the event, check out our flickr.

Artists included in the exhibition include Yoonmi Nam, Jessica Borusky, Rashawn Griffin, Patty Carroll, Rodolfo Marron III, Mike Sinclair, Rena Detrixhe, Glyneisha Johnson, Michael Krueger, Nedra Bonds, Deanna Dikeman, and Lara Shipley.

Exhibition Opening Reception: August 24, 2018, 6-9:00pm
Exhibition Closes: September 22
La Esquina Gallery (1000 W 25th St, Kansas City, MO 64108)

Participating Artists:

Event Details

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When

Friday, August 24 - Saturday, September 22

Where

La Esquina Gallery (1000 W 25th St, Kansas City, MO 64108)

Opening Reception

Friday, August 24th from 6-9 PM

In conjunction with the Welcome to the Neighborhood exhibition on display at la Esquina Gallery, Charlotte Street Foundation would love to welcome you to a free screening of multiple short films produced by local filmmakers. These filmmakers, through these curated videos, will welcome you into their lives on various levels: their hometowns, their families, their identities, and so much more. The free screening takes places Thursday, September 20th at 7:00 PM in Capsule (1664 Broadway Blvd).

Local filmmakers featured are: Meg Jamieson, King Kihei, David Wayne Reed and Savannah Rodgers.

Viewers are encouraged to come to Capsule (1664 Broadway Blvd, KCMO) for a free showing of these intimate short films and let themselves be welcome to new communities. Charlotte Street encourages you to bring friends and enjoy the films. Free drinks will be provided and the event is open to the public.

About the films:

Directed by Savannah Rodgers, Dragtivists is a short documentary about the intersection of activism and drag performance. This thought-provoking documentary follows Rayfield Lawrence and Caithe Alexander, two college students in Lawrence, KS whose activism and drag personas intersect in order to rise in revolution.

Using drones, dance, farm implements, heirloom quilts, agriculture, and video installation, Eternal Harvest is a short film by David Wayne Reed about the cycle of life as depicted by the growing season on a rural Kansas farm.

Bury My Gold in Earth (excerpt) 9 minutes 1999 – ongoing by Meg Jamieson

Filmed on 16mm film over the course of two decades, this film follows my mother, a northern Michigan cherry farm widow, as she faces the end of farming.

A blend of direct documentary, deeply subjective observation and moments of quiet reverie, I made this film to feel like home; like the painful, necessary, joyful changes that attend love and loss.

As part of the closing day for Welcome to the Neighborhood in la Esquina Gallery on Saturday, September 22nd, Charlotte Street Foundation is hosting a public program featuring Jessica Borusky.

Soonering: Noon is Made of Endless Edges is a six hour performance that begins at 6am and promptly finishes at 12pm; referencing the approximate length of time Sooners would wait on “unoccupied” land before the Land Run guns would fire off. This performance is free and open to the public.

The performance tableau will feature the figure on the east side of the la Esquina parking lot, sitting in a chair, looking toward the west, and waiting. The background, when viewed from the la Esquina balcony, includes the highway, liquor store, and more pavement – a nod to what has already been developed within that neighborhood. The figure will continue to look “forward/ahead” toward the west, take notes and drink from a QT cup (a Tulsa-based gas station company) until a gun is fired at 12pm and the figure runs to claim the other side of the parking lot; in an anticlimactic fashion.

Viewers are encouraged to witness the performance from the la Esquina balcony, in order to view the tableau. Optimal viewing time will be between 11:30 and noon. This is not an interactive performance. Following the performance will be a brief artist talk inside the gallery.

Sooner and Boomer Land Grabbing was connected to U.S. policies encouraging a continuation of stealing land, noted as the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889, which followed the Indian Appropriations Act of 1889. These policies officiated further displacement of people, while celebrating and nurturing American Exceptionalism.

Today, aesthetics of entrepreneurialism, gentrification, and corporatization may be considered within a lineage of Land Grabbing, Booming, and Sooning; often, contemporary language concerning progress, efficiency, and innovation are infused and haunted with this vicious past.