AIA Kansas City: The American Institute of Architects

Charlotte Street Foundation’s Urban Culture Project presents ARRIVAL / DEPARTURE

OPENING RECEPTION: FRIDAY, APRIL 9, 6-9PM
With performance by Leone Reeves & gallery talk with artists beginning at 6pm
Exhibition Hours: THURSDAYS + SATURDAYS, 12-5PM + by appointment
On view April 2-May 22, 2010

Kansas City Art Institute, Thursday, April 8, 7pm, Epperson Auditorium

Featured Artists: Cortney Andrews (Brooklyn, NY) , Anthony Baab (Kansas City, MO), Jonah Criswell (Kansas City, MO), Peter Demos (Brooklyn, NY), Dennis Dotty (St. Louis) , Rachel Frank (Brooklyn, NY), Lauren McEntire (Kansas City, MO) , Martin Murphy (Astoria, NY), Shawn Powell (Astoria, NY), Leone Reeves (Kansas City, MO), Alexis Semtner (Brooklyn, NY).
Curators: Maria Elena Buszek & Jonah Criswell (Kansas City, MO).

The exhibition Arrival/Departure brings together early career artists who recognize Kansas City as the site of their first significant contact with the art world, and as the place that launched them on careers as professional artists. A microcosm of contemporary art discourse, the Kansas City arts community informed the mediums, concepts and trajectories of these fledgling artist/thinkers. This exhibition brings back to Kansas City young Kansas City Art Institute alumni who have since gone on to build careers in other cities, as well as showcasing the work of peers who have remained here, or moved back to Kansas City after living and/or studying in other places. Since their undergraduate study at KCAI, these artists have gone to some of the country’s most prestigious graduate programs, exhibited regularly (both nationally and internationally), and worked closely with established artists, theorists and curators.

Decisively broad, Arrival/Departure explores the faces and concerns of art today, in work ranging from installation, performance and sculpture to experimen­tal drawing, fiber based works, painting and photography. It encompasses such con­cerns as: the animal, abstraction, body and memory, causality, domesticity, pop culture and the sublime. When placed in relation to each other, the themes made manifest in each artist’s body of work begins to articulate a system of complex concerns that are vital to field of contemporary art today. And in varied ways, each artist shares their current destination with their point of origin.