Friday, December 5, 2025 from 7-8 PM
Join us for a screening of the two films featured in the 2026 Charlotte Street Visual Artist Awards, My Mother’s Tongue Ties Me Together—Hùng Lê’sTrở Về Quê Hương and Noelle Choy’s Wonders of the World.
Trở Về Quê Hương—In 2023, Hùng Lê traveled back to Việt Nam with his family for the first time in many years. During the trip, Lê documented intimate moments of everyday life to recreate a sense of place without relying on language. Overlaid with patterns and stylized text, Lê’s video attempts to forgo the use of written language in storytelling and instead relies on visual motifs and sounds as the main interpreters.
Wonders of the World–Noelle Choy’s mother immigrated to San Francisco from Taiwan. In 2024, Choy and her brother met their aunt in the Bay Area to remap their mother’s life before they were born. They visited landmark locations from her story, including the restaurant her family would go to in Oakland and the rose garden where she married. This rhythmic, non-linear, collage-style video feels dream-like and becomes focused on the relationships between Choy, her aunt, and her brother, with Choy’s mother and grandmother as silent fourth and fifth characters. This rhythmic, non-linear, collage-style video feels dream-like and becomes focused on the relationships between Choy, her aunt, and her brother, with Choy’s mother and grandmother as silent fourth and fifth characters.
Featured Image courtesy of the Spencer Museum of Art.
ABOUT MY MOTHER’S TONGUE TIES ME TOGETHER
Since 1997, the Charlotte Street Visual Artist Awards have celebrated the outstanding achievements of contemporary artists living in the Kansas City area. Awardees receive an unrestricted cash award and an opportunity to exhibit in a prominent museum setting. The Spencer Museum of Art is honored to host this exhibition for the first time featuring the selected artists for 2025: Noelle Choy, Hùng Lê, and Merry Sun.
All three artists explore themes of cultural mythmaking, memory, and migration through a range of media. Choy’s theatrical sculptures, performative objects, and videos use improvised materials and methods to explore personal stories and counternarratives to process immense grief and longing. Lê’s textile collages investigate the aftermath of the American War in Việt Nam and how personal and collective memory is created and preserved through objects, photographs, education, archives, and propaganda. Sun’s interactive, architectural, soundscape installations encourage audiences to reflect on migration, movement, and belonging while considering their own spaces, places, and surroundings.
The 2025 Charlotte Street Awards were selected through a competitive process beginning with an open call for applications from artists based in the five-county Kansas City Metro Area and in Douglas County, Kansas. Selections were made by a panel of arts professionals from across the country: Alex Paik, Samantha Best, Alex Santana, and Sydney Pursel.
This series of videos explores the work of the three featured artists in the exhibition My Mother’s Tongue Ties Me Together. Learn more about each artist, their process, and the work they created for the exhibition.
