Friday, October 16 through Saturday, December 12, 2026
The Emily & Todd Voth Artspace is pleased to present the 2026 Charlotte Street Visual Artist Awards, featuring new work by 2026 Fellows Heehyun Choi, Eric Conrad, and Mikey Yates.
Though ranging widely in form and approach, this year’s three Visual Artist Fellows have in common the exploration of the personal in the object. Questions of belonging, culture, and identity are reified in relics and keepsakes. Working at the blurred, shifting boundary between private and public, they offer narratives of family and history, place and migration, intimacy and vulnerability.
The 2026 Charlotte Street Visual Artist Awards were selected by a panel of nationally esteemed arts professionals, including Abel González Fernández, Assistant Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; Larry Ossei-Mensah, Curator and Cultural Critic & Co-Founder & President, ARTNOIR Co.; and Raechell Smith, Director and Curator, Emily & Todd Voth Artspace, who will serve as the exhibition curator for the Artspace.
Since 1997, Charlotte Street has distributed over $3 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.
Public Programs and Events
Wednesdays, November 4, 11, and 18
7:00–8:30 p.m.
Artists in Dialogue
Join us for Artists in Dialogue, a series of intimate conversations that invite a closer look at contemporary art practice and reveal the diverse themes and creative approaches that engage the artists. Set in the gallery alongside works in the exhibition, the artists discuss artistic research, inspirations, and influences.
Exhibition Details
ABOUT THE 2026 CHARLOTTE STREET VISUAL ARTIST AWARD FELLOWS
Heehyun Choi is a moving image artist and educator based in Kansas City and South Korea. Her practice is grounded in interest in the physicality and virtuality in projected images, the unseen beings outside the camera frame, and the subjectivity and variability of the act of seeing. Her films have been screened internationally, including at Edinburgh International Film Festival, 25 FPSFestival, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, Experimental Film and Video Festival in Seoul (EXiS), and Ann Arbor Film Festival, where she received the Juror Award. Choi’s work has been exhibited in gallery spaces, including her recent solo exhibition at LDK DT in Seoul and a Korea Arts Foundation America Awardee Solo Exhibition at Korean Cultural Center Los Angeles, as well as group exhibitions at the Kempe rMuseum of Contemporary Art, AHL Foundation Gallery, New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art, among others. She currently serves as Assistant Professor in the Photography & Filmmaking department at the Kansas City Art Institute.
Eric Leif Conrad was born in Toronto, Canada and explores vulnerability, psychology, and the human condition through textile-based sculptures, mixed-media installations, and drawings. Eric received his BA in mathematics and art from Kalamazoo College and an MFA degree in painting and printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design. He was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and participated in artist residencies at Frans Masereel Centrum in Belgium, Fine Arts Work Center in Massachusetts, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Nebraska, Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado, and Instituto Superior Latinoamericano de Arte in Chile. He has shown his work in over 20 solo exhibitions and 100 group exhibitions both nationally and internationally. Eric has also created site-specific installations and public art including exhibitions at the Miami-Dade International Airport in Florida and the SACO Contemporary Art Biennale in Chile. Eric is Assistant Professor of textiles and foundations at the University of Kansas.
Mikey Yates was born in Sulzbach-Rosenberg, Germany and currently lives and works in Kansas City, Missouri. He earned a BFA from Missouri State University and an MFA from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Yates has presented recent solo exhibitions at COMA Gallery, Sydney, Nazarian/Curcio, Los Angeles, and Taymour Grahne, London. His work has also been included in group exhibitions at the Columbus Museum of Art, The Hole, New York, Steven Zevitas Gallery, Boston, and 1969 Gallery, New York among others. Yates is a two-time recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant and was a 2023 resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
