Charlotte Street welcomes its new curator (and takes out the trash), and other art events this week
From her home base in Miami, and lately working in New York City with Creative Time, Lynnette Miranda has coordinated art conferences at the 2015 Venice Biennale, the Boys and Girls High School (Brooklyn) and Park Avenue Armory (for ART21). Now she’s the Charlotte Street Foundation’s new curator-in-residence. Over the next 18 months, she’ll assemble five exhibitions at La Esquina (1000 West 25th Street). Go there Thursday evening and you can meet her and hear about her plans for the space. The presentation starts at 6 p.m., after which comes a “speed dating” exercise allowing gallerygoers to ask her questions.
Overland Park’s Hawthorne Plaza is home to a commercial gallery representing local and nationally successful artists who tend toward landscapes, conventional still-lifes and other matches-the-sofa paintings. The latest show at the Rice Gallery of Fine Art (4829 West 119th Street) showcases one of its less conventional artists, a self-taught American realist born and raised and still stationed in Southern California, who nevertheless conveys a distinctly Midwestern sense of bleakness. Jamie Perry seems to understand the feelings you get while, say, traveling across Kansas and finding that the only landmarks you see are lonely farmhouses far and few between, under big skies whose weather provides most of the scenic variation. Perry’s show of new works opens with a 5-8 p.m. reception Friday, August 26.
August 26 is final Friday in Lawrence, and one of the highlights is the Fresh Ink Juried Print Show that Wonder Fair (841 Massachusetts) has been bringing us for the past two years as part of its mission to, as promotional materials assert, “establish Lawrence as a preeminent center for creative print culture in the United States and to highlight the importance of printed matter in the world entire.” (That’s not an un-serious ambition, but the phrasing should be read with an eye toward self-referential comedy.) Printmaker Katie Baldwin, assistant professor at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, has selected 21 pieces from 92 artists — representing 32 states and three countries — who submitted nearly 300 works for consideration. Today’s 6-10 p.m. reception, where a Best in Show prize will be designated, includes “fresh — and possibly inky — drinks,” according to Wonder Fair.
The name — KCAI Crossroads Gallery: Center for Contemporary Practice — is a mouthful, and the hours (noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, with First Friday events only in the summer) favor bankers over art strollers. But a special August 27 event at the space (1819 Grand), which usually opens on Saturdays only for appointments, benefits the more casually curious. The doors swing wide at 11 that morning, ahead of an 11:45 screening of Guido van der Werve’s absurdist film Nummer zes, followed by a discussion of the current show, The Position We’re In (featuring works by van der Werve, Hamish Fulton and Kent Monkman), with Kansas City Art Institute professor Karen McCoy, KCAI assistant professor Rebecca Dubay and artist and GLAMA co-founder Christopher Leitch.
Spartan Press and Prospero’s Books have just issued the 20th volume of their POP Poetry book series: Air Becomes Glass, by visual and performing artist Chico Sierra. Saturday’s 7-10 p.m. party, open-mic and reading (at 8), at Prospero’s (1800 West 39th Street), promises to be different from the usual book event, with songs performed by Sierra on guitar. Norma E. Cantú, a professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, says these poems, “with simple, forceful language and images, linger in the mind and leave a bittersweet aftertaste.” José Faus, a member of the Latino Writers Collective, writes of the book’s opening poem, “Saudade” (a Portuguese word without an easy English translation; it loosely means melancholic longing or nostalgia), that it’s “one of many threads that opens like an intoxicating whisper — an invitation to ride the breeze ‘kissed by a thousand lips / formed out of my skin.’ It is a cautionary and redemptive telling.” Yet the cover tonight (including a copy of the book) is just $10.
One person’s trash — you know the rest. And so it goes even for Charlotte Street’s 2015-16 resident artists, who now must clean out their studios. So Paragraph Gallery (23 East 12th Street) is hosting a swap-and-shop from noon to 4 p.m. Sunday, August 28. Kicked to the Curb is where you might find supplies, finished works, or any number of other objects that you might find as useful as their former owners once did.
Epsten Gallery (5500 West 123rd Street, Leawood) is one of the many venues in the metro that makes a point to support our art-school anchor, its students, teachers and alumni. Opening from 1 to 4 p.m. Sunday, August 28, is Fresh: KCAI Alumni, a tightly curated show of 13 artists from the class of 1964 all the way up to 2015. Local heavyweights Bruce Hartman (of the Nerman Museum), Erin Dziedzic (the Kemper Museum) and James Martin have selected works by Max Adrian, Ariel Bowman, Shenequa Brooks, Ellen Carey, Mary Ann Coonrod, Chris Daharsh, Molly Garrett, Suzanne Klotz, Mike Lyon, Andy Maugh, Amy Myers, Stephen Proski, and Patricia Stegman. Collectively, this diverse group seemingly covers it all: identity, architecture, sexuality, natural history, technologies, culture and more. And the show is a good way to get introduced to, or learn more about, their studio practices and inspirations.
