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Pushing Art Boundaries in the Midwest.

Charlotte Street Foundation wants Kansas Citians to get outside of the box with art – whether they’re artists or simply patrons.

“Here at Charlotte Street, we want to be artist driven,” explains Marketing and Communications Manager Mason Kilpatrick. “We hear and get so many wild, visionary ideas from these young artists who have a hard time finding places to try their ideas out in because they’re so new or foreign to the Kansas City community. So what we do is we provide them the resources that they need to get it done, whether that be cash, free space, technology, or connections to help them out.”

The organization was founded in 1997 by David Hughes Jr. to support emerging local artists creating challenging, contemporary work. Charlotte Street facilitates venues that artists can use for free, paying them to produce shows and offering them to the community for free to remove the financial barrier associated with experimental works for both artists and audiences.

“We believe in the beauty of challenging yourself in any sense or sphere, not even just within the arts,” Kilpatrick explains.

Kansas City has developed a strong arts culture over the years, he says, but by offering support for up-and-coming talents, Charlotte Street hopes to keep innovators in the Kansas City community.

“One thing in the past that Kansas City always had to compete with is that we’re in the Midwest, so we have this negative connotation of being a flyover state,” Kilpatrick says. “We don’t have the reputation, or quite frankly, the

arts money, that exists in New York or Los Angeles, Chicago, all these bigger cultural arts hubs.”

Artists across disciplines can apply for studio residencies, which provide recipients with free studio and rehearsal space, professional development, and exhibition and performance opportunities. The foundation also offers a startup residency program fostering artist-run businesses and organizations by providing them with rentfree space and marketing. Additionally, Charlotte Street annually awards three visual artists and two performing artists $10,000 in unrestricted funds, meaning they can use the money however they choose.

Perhaps one of Charlotte Street’s most recognizable programs is the Rocket Grants it gives in conjunction with the University of Kansas’ Spencer Museum of Art using funding from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Each year, the program distributes $60,000 to artists for non-traditional project based ideas.

“The importance of supporting people and artists first isn’t, obviously, just people are people and they deserve to be treated with respect, but it’s how do we keep the vision, how do we keep this great talent, and how do we keep these new ideas here in Kansas City for Kansas City?” Kilpatrick adds.

But this spring, local artists faced an entirely new set of challenges in the wake of COVID-19. Kilpatrick says one of the first things Charlotte Street did was restructure the Rocket Grants program to provide $1,000 emergency relief grants through a randomized lottery system. Charlotte Street started with $60,000 but raised an additional $105,000, all of which was given out. The organization plans to offer another round of emergency grants through a similar process this fall.

In the meantime, the foundation has found other ways of encouraging artists to continue challenging audiences. Announced in July, Art Where You’re At gives 10 artists $500 to put together socially distant works by the end of the year. Commissioned projects include a dance exploration and

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nature walk-through of Cliff Drive with public tours by Katherine Brennan and a drive-in theater performance featuring live flamenco from local group Siento y Vivo Flamenco in the Northland proposed by Melinda Hedgecorth.

“Art is very social,” Kilpatrick says. “People want to talk, they want to be able to experience things together, so we wanted to respond to that by giving artists the ability and giving them funding to do their projects not in arts spaces, basically. Do you want to do it on the street, do you want to do in your backyard and have people watch with social distance? Do you want to do a livestream? We know there are still many artists who, despite this pain and crisis, are wanting to make art because that’s how they respond to crisis and pain, so we’re researching options of how do we continue to support that outdoors.”

Innovative programming is just part of what’s on the horizon for Charlotte Street. Depending on safety recommendations, the foundation hopes to open its new campus in the Roanoke Industrial corridor in 2021. The new facility will include gallery space; black box theatre; studio space for more than 30 visual artists, performance-based artists, and writers; conference rooms for community meetings; a courtyard space for outdoor performances and gatherings; and administrative offices.

“The idea was to bring all of our programs under one roof,” Kilpatrick says, ”so artists can begin to collaborate with each other.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kelsey Cipolla is a local writer, editor, and social media specialist. Kelsey has covered everything from the Kansas City culinary scene to home design, health, fitness trends, hidden gems, and nonprofit in the Kansas City community.

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