In 2021, the Tarble Arts Center initiated a free public wellness program open to all. Participants are invited to experience a Full Moon Sound Bath to support collective stillness, gratitude, and reflection. With the metaphor provided by the darkest possible sky, New Moon Yoga invites participants to consider the potentiality of blank space and new beginnings through heart-opening flows. All are welcome to join in community care, movement, and intention-setting.
September 23 and 30, 2024
Tarble Arts Center
This workshop with visual artist Hadley Clark presents sewing as a type of listening and mending as an empathetic gesture. Accessing the long history of the sewing circle and quilting bee as spaces of informal discourse and even activism while also considering the impacts of animal materials in fashion as well as the fashion industry’s impact on the Earth’s waterways, Clark will teach tangible sewing and listening skills that can be used to mend clothing and help participants learn more about how we impact our communities, other communities, more-than-human communities, and the spaces we all share on this planet.
H&R Block Artspace
The Kansas City Artists’ Voices Summit was a public gathering of artists and arts administrators who voiced their concerns for themselves and their communities. Just within the past year, rising urban development and constantly-changing venues/spaces in the Kansas City metro area have many artists worried for the sustainability of artist practices and livelihood in Kansas City.
View a copy of the printable zine produced from this event here.
2018-2019
H&R Block Artspace
Commonspace was a conceptual and sometimes nomadic programmatic container from 2018-19 that underscored the Artspace’s role as a commons on campus, and amplified the institutional mission to be a cultural resource available to all members of the community for collective benefit.
Commonspace programs considered how creativity, action, and information intersect. These programs and events were originated by the Artspace, organized in partnership with various collaborators, or proposed by the general public, and they took place in Artspace galleries and travelled to other physical and digital locations. Each Commonspace project focused on engaging audiences around issues of urgency and resonance, creating new bodies of knowledge, and bringing together artists, scholars, activists, librarians, students, and political and cultural leaders for in-depth exploration into how knowledge is gathered, processed, and shared.
“I want to express my gratitude for Artspace, especially their Commonspace programming. Because of their compassion, kindness, and commitment to advancing the arts for everyone, I have had nothing short of a life changing educational experience. I have learned about time, surveillance, redwood trees, and the opening sequence of Run Lola Run. I have made new friends, heard from internationally renowned scholars, and laid down under billowed sheets with meteor shards. All the while, I felt included, heard, and safe. Most importantly to me, I feel that my container for compassion has expanded a little more. For that, I am eternally grateful.” —Commonspace participant, November 19, 2018
Partnerships: CJ Janovy, Creative Capital, For Freedoms, Informality Blog, Jay T. Johnson, KCAI Advancement, KCAI Career Services, KCAI Communications, KCAI Housing and Student Activities, KCAI Fiber Department, KCAI Staff Advisory Council, League of Women Voters, Lisa Murphy, Lutz Koepnick, the Magic Sock Fund, and Open Spaces.
Third Thursdays, June 2018 - May 2019
H&R Block Artspace
PDF Club was a reading and conversation group hosted by H&R Block Artspace in collaboration with Informality, a slow media publication that focuses on empowering and growing the base of arts writers in Kansas City.
Each month, Melaney Mitchell and Jennifer Baker choose a pdf article that relates to the exhibition(s) on view at the Artspace. These open source pdfs were available for download so that participants could read and reflect on their own time before coming together to ask questions, share thoughts, and discuss ideas. The organizers maintained a PDF Digital Commons to archive the program and allow online commenting and discussion.
August 18 – November 6, 2018
H&R Block Artspace
Founded in 2016 by artists Hank Willis Thomas and Eric Gottesman, For Freedoms Federation is a nonpartisan project and artist-led platform for action and engagement that encourages new forms of critical discourse to build greater participation in American Democracy. In 2018 For Freedoms launched the 50 State Initiative during the lead-up to the midterm elections to engage in partnerships with organizations nationally. For its part, the Artspace hosted a campaign sign-making workshop August 18 with incoming freshman students during their orientation to create campaign-style lawn signs, which are currently displayed on the east side of the KCAI campus on Oak Street, and a voter registration event on campus, September 18, hosted by the League of Women Voters.
Friday, November 2, 2018
Building on traditional town hall meetings used by politicians to connect with their constituencies, answer questions, and promote their campaigns, For Freedoms Town Halls are non-partisan, artist-led forums that bring together experts from various fields in cities across the country to connect art, civic engagement, and direct action.
For a For Freedoms Town Hall on Slowness, three artists, two scholars, one journalist, and one curator guided an exchange of ideas that sought to encourage more active, collaborative, inclusive, and empathetic communities. For the first half of the evening, guest panelists presented research from their respective fields in relationship to the aesthetics and methodologies of slowness. For the second half of the evening three artists joined the panelists to engage the audience in a conversation about intentional slowness, how we experience time, and the ways we remember our pasts, see the present, and plan for our futures.
Panelists: C.J. Janovy, Jay Johnson, Lutz Koepnick
Artists: Marie Bannerot McInerney, Jarrett Mellenbruch, Jillian Youngbird
Moderator: Jennifer Baker
Nelson Atkins Museum of Art
Four artists considered the contexts of queerness, citizenship, ecology, climate, capitalism, leisure, replication, and salvation in order to examine water within the politics of belonging. Utilizing performance, action, and object-making, each artist offers strategies of engagement that encourage inclusion and dialogue, while offering multiple perspectives on water as substance and belonging as status.
Panel Moderator: Jennifer Baker, Kansas City, MO
Panelists: Laurencia Strauss, Miami, FL; Denis Rodriguez + Leonardo Remor, Porto Alegre, Brazil; Amber Hawk Swanson, New York, NY
The panelists discussed how artists can employ objects to engage action and how one performs the act of making. As a first generation US citizen, Laurencia Strauss proposes immigrant experiences as valuable resource to imagine solutions for a population facing relocation due to sea-level rise. Strauss employs sculptural action in public spaces by offering popsicles and napkins printed with stories from previous participants in exchange for stories about place, identity, migration, and belonging. Porto Alegre is a city with a pristine river landscape that is being privatized by developers to deny public access. As an act of protest, Denis Rodriguez and Leonardo Remor’s project Water Fantasy invites participants to carry inflatable innertubes on the long walk to the closest remaining access point in order to simply spend time with water. Amber Hawk Swanson’s search for community has shaped her practice and led to projects engaging collaborators belonging to silicone sex doll forums. Her most recent project, DOLLY, will involve the casting of a life-sized penetrable silicone dolphin as an exploration of love, eroticism, seduction, objectification, violence, and captivity. This project of giving presence to the objectified has involved embodied research in saltwater sensory deprivation tanks.
Laurencia Strauss, Leonardo Remor, and Denis Rodriguez followed their presentation with a residency in the Printmaking Department at the Kansas City Art Institute, working with students on a project examining Kansas City’s fountains in relationship to the city’s racial divide.
October 14, 2016
Pulitzer Art Foundation
The third annual St. Louis Small Press Expo kicked off with an opening event at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation that celebrated independent publishing and the art of the book. Demonstrations, performances, and appearances by innovators in the small press community were featured throughout the Pulitzer galleries, inviting connections between architecture, the art on view, and the book as form.
Featured works include: a performative reading by comic artist Marnie Galloway; live hand papermaking with Taller Leñateros; bookbinding demos with Sean Shearer of BOAAT Press; a dramatic reading of selection from La Petite Maison (The Little House, 1763) by Jean-François de Bastide in a gallery of 18th century decorative arts on loan from the J. Paul Getty Museum; a lecture performance by artist Chloë Bass; a talk on Claes Oldenburg’s drawing by artist and critical writer Buzz Spector; a vendor fair featuring publications from Brainfreeze Comics, neither/nor zine distro, and St. Louis Zine Club; as well as an interactive zine-making station hosted by The Moon Zine.
