STUDIOS INC | 2020 a group exhibition featuring resident artists
Studios Inc
Studios Inc provides studio space, professional development, networking, and exhibitions for mid-career artists in Greater Kansas City. We engage the Kansas City community through our Exhibition Series Program, which exhibits resident artist works throughout the year, free to the public
Launched in 2003 to serve mid-career artists, Studios Inc is Kansas City’s nonprofit arts organization that offers pivotal three-year residencies to mid-career artists who are poised to significantly expand their careers in accordance with the career goals articulated in their residency application. Its competitive application process, sharp focus on career advancement, and commitment to serve the under-served population of mid-career artists set Studios Inc apart from other artist-support organizations.
Studios Inc offers a unique immersion experience for resident artists, who use their studio and exhibition space to produce and exhibit work, network and learn from one another, and attract and cultivate relationships with art patrons, collectors, and arts professionals.
1708 Campbell Street, Kansas City, MO 64108
816-994-7134 | info@thestudiosinc.org
www.studiosinc.org
Studios Inc is a welcome addition to the landscape of contemporary art practice. In the grand tradition of the non-profit studio and exhibition spaces of the 1960s and 1970s, it offers an alternative to artists in an art world increasingly dominated by a market mentality. It affords mid-career artists that most precious of gifts: the space and solitude necessary for the cultivation of serious art.
James Meyer National Gallery of Art: Associate Curator of Modern Art
Studios Inc | 2020, a group exhibition, was curated by exhibition interns Cicely Jones (pictured center) and Bianca Fields (pictured left). The exhibition interns were able to work with each of the artists at Studios Inc (such as Kevin Townsend, pictured right), as well as other area arts professionals to plan, curate, and install this group exhibition featuring 10 artists working in different mediums with various subjects and themes.
2020 STUDIOS INC RESIDENCY ARTIST ROSTER
KATHY LIAO (2018)
BENJAMIN ROSENTHAL (2018)
SUSAN WHITE (2018)
LORI RAYE ERICKSON (2019)
EMILY SALL (2019)
JUDITH G. LEVY (2020)
MARIE MCINERNEY (2020)
YOONMI NAM (2020)
KEVIN TOWNSEND (2020)
View of the group exhibition, Studios Inc | 2020
Kathy Liao (2018)
Kathy Liao is the Director of the Painting and Printmaking Studio Art Program at Missouri Western State University. Liao earned her MFA in Painting from Boston University and BFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Washington.
Liao is a painter who utilizes a mixed-media platform of paintings and photographs. It centers on different forms of art coagulating into a concept that examines the modern relationships of distance, intimacy, and technology, in layers of paintings based around moments, memories, and observations with and recorded snapshot photos.
Kathy Liao is a recipient of numerous awards including the Charlotte Street Foundation Studio Residency Grant, Elizabeth Greenshield Foundation Grant, Artist Grants from the Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Vermont Studio Center, and Jentel Artist Residency. In the past, Liao taught at Boston University, the University of Washington, Seattle University, and Gage Academy of Art. Her work has been shown in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Kansas City, and many other cities nationally and internationally.
Artist Patron: Jack & Karen Holland
Memory of Watermelons, 2017 by Kathy Liao
Oil and fabric on linen 54 x 32.5 inches
Benjamin Rosenthal (2018)
Benjamin Rosenthal holds an MFA in Art Studio from the University of California, Davis and a BFA in Art (Electronic TimeBased Media) from Carnegie Mellon University. His work has been exhibited internationally in such venues/festivals as the Stuttgarter Filmwinter (Stuttgart, Germany), High Concept Labs at Mana Contemporary (Chicago, IL), ESPACIO ENTER: Festival International Creatividad, Innovacíon y Cultural Digital (Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain), FILE Electronic Language International Festival (São Paulo, Brazil), Vanity Projects (New York, NY), Locomoción Festival de Animacion (Mexico City, Mexico), Wicked Queer: The Boston LGBT Film Festival (Cambridge, MA), PLUG Projects (Kansas City, Missouri), the LINOLEUM Festival of Contemporary Animation and Media Art (Kyiv, Ukraine), and SIGGRAPH Asia (Bangkok, Thailand), among others. He has been in residence at the Fjúk Arts Centre (Husavík, Iceland), Signal Culture (Owego, New York) and the Ox-Bow School of Art (Saugatuck, Michigan), the Charlotte Street Foundation (Kansas City, Missouri), and is currently in residence at The Studios Inc (Kansas City, Missouri).
Rosenthal is Associate Professor of Expanded Media and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Visual Art at the University of Kansas where he has been since 2012, and teaches video art, performance art, experimental animation, graduate seminar and interdisciplinary practices.
Artist Talk with Caitlin Horsmon Photo Credit: Courtney Wasso Artist Patron: Chad Troutwinequarter-scale nerve[s][s][s]em, 2019-20 by Benjamin Rosenthal
Analog SD video 43 minutes
Susan White (2018)
Susan White has been an adjunct professor at the Kansas City Art Institute as well as at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. She’s earned a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and a BA from Drury University. Her work has been supported by three Inspiration Grants from ArtsKC and artist grants from the Nerman Museum, the Daum Museum and the Salina Art Center, the Avenue of the Arts Foundation and the Creative Capital Foundation for a Professional Development Workshop.
An international travel grant from the Lighton International Artist Exchange Program supported her artist residency at Youkobo Art Space in Tokyo. White exhibited a thorn installation, Flag IV, in an exhibition in Como, Italy in 2019, with support from ArtsKC.
Susan White works with thorns from the honey locust tree to create discrete sculptures and large scale installations. She also makes pyrographs, burn drawings influenced by the burning of the prairie in the spring, a kind of fertility ritual that restores nitrogen to the soil.
Much of White’s work evokes a sense of stillness, of quietness. Through the use of organic materials and processes she explores the elemental relationship of the body to the landscape, the cellular nature of the body/the granular nature of the soil, the sense of time and space in the natural world.
Artist Talk with Caitlin Horsmon Photo Credit: Courtney Wasso Artist Patron: Kate Mead
The Chant of the Prayer Flags I-V, 2015 by Susan White
Suite of pyrographs on paper 93 X 14 1/4 inches (framed)
Lori Raye Erickson (2019)
Lori Raye Erickson utilizes humor to address political, social, and economic topics. Never confining herself to one particular medium or methodology, she prefers to allow the message to freely manifest through drawing, painting, and sculpture. Previously her work has incorporated subject matter from Boy Scouts and Clowns to Monkeys and Religion. Erickson’s latest series of work is rather political and once again incorporates different mediums that each individually contributes to the object’s message.
Born and raised in Des Moines, Iowa, she found art at an early age, studying at the Des Moines Art Center.
Erickson left Iowa to earn her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute. Some of her awards include the Charlotte Street Grant, Avenue of the Arts and Liquitex Award of Excellence among others. Her work is in collections throughout the United States and Hong Kong.
Artist Talk with Caitlin Horsmon Photo Credit: Courtney Wasso Artist Patron: Whitney Kerr Jr.
Made in the USA, 2020 by Lori Raye Erickson
Lead and acrylic on vintage high chair 41 x 20 x 20 inches
Emily Sall (2019)
Emily Sall received her BFA in painting from KCAI in 2005. She has shown both locally and nationally. In 2007, Emily was awarded the Charlotte Street Foundation’s Visual Artist Fellowship, and was commissioned to create work for Missouri Bank Artboards in 2009. Emily lives and works in Kansas City and recently completed a large scale mural for the Plaza Academy.
Sall’s mediums of choice are paintings and drawings with various materials; centered on the relationship between structure and shape.
Sall states that, “My work has always been architecturally influenced. I am interested in creating shifting, mounting, teetering landscapes of tension, balance, imbalance and harmonious visual landscapes.” Sall describes herself as a “builder of these ideas.”
Artist Talk with Caitlin Horsmon Photo Credit: Courtney Wasso Artist Patron: Brad & Linda Nicholson
Everything Connects, 2020 by Emily Sall
Acrylic on wood panel 78 x 78 inches (8x8 inches per panel)
Judith G. Levy (2020)
Judith G. Levy possesses an extensive curriculum vitae with recent awards including an Inspiration Grant from ArtsKC, a Charlotte Street Fellowship for an Art Omi Artist Residency, and a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship. Levy’s artwork has been exhibited regionally and nationally.
Levy’s work is about history, culture and identity. She explores complexity, commonality and contradiction through personal stories, historical narratives and socio-cultural, and environmental issues. The artist uses her queer gaze to examine memory, authenticity, and desire, while she reconfigures and recreates in order to describe departures from traditional understandings and to create new meanings. The use of text, found objects and appropriated materials is an effort to create links between external and internal worlds.
The ideas in her texts, prints, signs, installations, photographs, videos and neon work push language and imagery to evolve and to more accurately represent an ever-changing world, one in which concepts of identity are often center stage. Using appropriation and found objects allows Levy to react, question, and reshape, as she reveals junctures where self-definition, interpersonal relationships, culture, the environment and history wrestle to establish meaning.
Artist Talk with Caitlin Horsmon Photo Credit: Courtney Wasso Artist Patron: Kerri Reisdorf
Portraits of Queer Couples, 2020 by Judith G. Levy
Suite of archival digital photographic prints 20 x28 inches (framed)
Marie Bannerot McInerney (2020)
Marie Bannerot McInerney is Assistant Professor of Fiber at the Kansas City Art Institute. McInerney earned an MFA in Visual Art from Washington University in St. Louis, MO.
Her work has been exhibited regionally, nationally, and internationally in such venues AMoA Biennale 600 2019 Textile + Fiber in Amarillo, TX, Han Tianheng Art Museum Shanghai, Shanghai City, China, St. Louis Artists Guild, among others.
McInerney’s primary discipline is fiber, however, her practice is multidisciplinary by nature. She incorporates sculpture, textiles, installation, sound, light, performance and drawing into her practice. Formally trained in textiles, she has always been interested in making unexpected tactile relationships through material processes.
Her recent work distills moving sunlight into discrete moments captured through installation and mark-making. McInerney is an artist interested in exhibiting multi-sensory site-responsive installations within the region.
Artist Talk with Caitlin Horsmon Photo Credit: Courtney Wasso Artist Patron: Zach & Gina BickelLinear A, 2016 by Marie
Bannerot McInerneyFound books, abaca, flax and ink
Dimensions variable
Yoonmi Nam (2020)
Yoonmi Nam is a Visual Arts Professor at the University of Kansas. Nam earned an MFA in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence, RI, and a BFA in Printmaking from Hongik University in Seoul, Korea.
Nam has been working and showing as an artist for almost two decades, exhibiting both nationally and internationally. Nam is trained in printmaking and painting, having achieved success and acclaim for her two-dimensional work. In the last 5 years, her work has shifted as she has begun to explore works that are sculptural using materials such as glass, clay, paper, plaster, wax, and silicone.
Nam is interested in the fleeting nature of the present moment and the common and extraordinary way we structure our surroundings within it. She thinks about the beauty and the irony of the perpetual and inevitable passing of time.
Artist Talk with Caitlin Horsmon Photo Credit: Courtney Wasso Artist Patron: Mike & Linda LyonSketch Books, Take-out Containers, and Still Life, 2019 by
Porcelain and glaze
Variable Dimensions
Blizz and Winstead’s, 2018 by Yoonmi Nam Lithograph 33 x 18 inches Yoonmi NamKevin Townsend (2020)
Kevin Townsend is a mid-career artist and an educator with 18 years of experience. Townsend earned an MFA in Art Practice from the School of Visual Arts in New York City, NY and a BFA in Fine Art from the Corcoran School of Arts + Design at George Washington University, in Washington DC.
Townsend has exhibited and performed in NYC, Portland, London, Ohio, Kansas City, Boston, Indio, Toronto, and Brisbane Australia. His work and practice have been written about and featured in Hyperallergic, HiFructose, FMG Arts, SFMOMA’s blog, The Portland Press Herald, The 2018 International Drawing Anthology and new drawing text entitled: Performance Drawing: New Practices since the 1960s / Marking Line and Body in Time and Space, by Jane Grisewood.
His current expanded drawing practice centers around performative, durational-drawing, sound, video, and installation. Large scale, ephemerality, and public nature define the most recent works he’s produced. While differing in materials, at the center of each work is a simple, humble gesture or mark that repeats over a fixed duration. Through their quiet repetition on the surfaces of and in response to a specific site, these marks/ gestures coalesce and construct vast fields, flows, and spaces.
Artist Talk with Caitlin Horsmon Photo Credit: Courtney Wasso Artist Patron: Brad SatterwhiteRecursion Field, 2020 by Kevin Townsend
Latex emulsion and acrylic, video 36 hour durational drawing 360 sq ft
Patty Carroll (Extension Program)
Patty Carroll is known for her use of highly intense, saturated color photographs since the 1970s. Her most recent project, “Anonymous Women”, is a 3-part series of studio installations made for the camera, addressing women and domestic status, and camouflages the figure in drapery and/or domestic objects. The photographs are exhibited in large scale and the work was published as a monograph released in January of 2017 by Daylight Books. This work has been exhibited in China several times, as well as won various awards. Carroll was one of the “Top 50” awarded by Photolucida in 2014. Carroll taught photography for many years and has enthusiastically returned to the studio to delight viewers with her sense of humor and critique of home life.
Her work is represented by Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Martha Schneider Gallery in Chicago, and Martine Chaisson Gallery in New Orleans, and has been collected nationally and internationally.
Wallpapered, 2017 by Patty Carroll
Archival digital photograph 40 x 40 inches
Studios Inc’s three-year residency program provides a unique immersion experience that allows mid-career artists to use their studio space to conceptualize, produce, and exhibit their work.
With support from the Neighborhood Tourism Development Fund, Studios Inc serves the Kansas City Community and Crossroads Arts District by offering a free, open-to-the-public exhibition series throughout the year, which includes opening receptions, First Friday receptions, artist talks, regular gallery hours, as well as scheduled tours and events. It is our hope to showcase and promote high-quality, interesting artwork to both visitors and members of the Kansas City community.
Courtney Wasson, Executive Director courtney@thestudiosinc.org thestudiosinc.org