ARTSpEAK RADIO with Héctor Casanova, Renée Cinderhouse, Patrick Alexander, Cory Imig, Melaney Mitchell

Wednesday, November 27, 2019, noon -1PM CST, 90.1fm KKFI Kansas City Community Radio, streaming live www.kkfi.org

Producer/host Maria Vasquez Boyd welcomes Héctor Casanova, Renée Cinderhouse, Pat Alexander, Melaney Mitchell, and Cory Imig.

RENÉE CINDERHOUSE & HÉCTOR CASANOVA-The Green Door Gallery began in 2000 as a collective of KCAI alumni: Héctor Casanova and Renée Cinderhouse (née Laferriere; still a student at the time), along with John Baker, Kellie Bloxsom-Rys, and Rachel Stuart-Haas. All five artists shared studio space in the second floor of the old Post Office building in Kansas City’s West Bottoms. It comprised 6,000 ft2 of industrial space sectioned into thirds: a 1 bedroom apartment, a central space with two large rooms, and two more large rooms in the back which were used as art studios. The space was largely raw and unfinished, with no heating or cooling, only one bathroom, and was prone to severe roof leaks… when it rained outside, it rained just as hard in some areas of the building, necessitating tarps and rows of buckets to mitigate the floods.
None of the artist-run spaces in the West Bottoms in the 1990s and early 2000s were zoned for residential use; all those who stood ground and claimed space went through many trials and travails with city inspections to continue to live and create ground-breaking cultural events within these raw warehouse spaces. Set alongside (and practically on) the train tracks that ran through the West Bottoms, all art, music, street events were set to the pound and pace of the trains passing … and their deafening whistles and clang of RR crossing warnings at the nearby intersections of tracks and streets (all hours all day and night every day). The Green Door Gallery did not see the other galleries in the West Bottoms as competitors, but rather as family, as mutually supportive members of a community that grew stronger and richer for having each other there. The best years, and the best turnout for shows, were those when the Dirt, the Fahrenheit and the Green Door were all in operation. The galleries would synchronize their calendars in order to have openings on the same nights, maximizing foot traffic and audience enthusiasm.
Cinderhouse & Casanova ran the Green Door Gallery from 2000-2008 because they recognized that Kansas City had a vibrant pool of artists making great work everywhere, but they were not getting the attention they deserved. This is still the case today; the need for artist-run spaces still exists and is as pressing as ever, especially with shifts in affordable housing and the trend to remodel warehouse spaces into lofts and condos.
As case in point, major shifts in property ownership in the West Bottoms led to steep and sudden increases in rent, forcing most artists out. The huge mixed-use studio, exhibition space, sneaky living quarters, became financially untenable, and the neighborhood no longer provides the “wild-west” of opportunity for artists and musicians it once did.
After 7+ years of ongoing exhibitions the Green Door Gallery officially closed in February of 2008. The gallery went out in style with a final “Farewell Musical Fandango” closing party featuring American Catastrophe and E.I.O. (Experimental Instrument Orchestra) and a massive moving sale. Renée Cinderhouse & Héctor Casanova have passed the torch on to the next generation of up-and-coming artist-run spaces, and continue to create artwork from their home in Kansas City, fueled by the same fervor and desire to see the world improved by art and artists that kept the Green Door Gallery open all those years.

Héctor Casanova is an Assistant Professor in the Illustration Dept. at the Kansas City Art Institute, and an Instructor at The Illustration Academy, teaching courses on Comics & Sequential Art, Illustration and Muralism. He has been working as a fine and graphic artist for over 20 years, doing work for collectors, magazines and corporations nationally and abroad. He was staff
Editorial Artist at The Kansas City Star from 1999 – 2014. His comics work include the graphic novels Screamland with writer Harold Sipe (Image Comics, 2008, 2010) and The Lurkers with writer Steve Niles (IDW, 2006), as well as his own weekly comic strip Guffman & Godot (2000 – 2003). He was co-founder and
curator of the Green Door Gallery, an alternative art space dedicated to showcasing the work of established and emerging artists from Kansas City and
beyond. He has received awards from American Illustration, Print and Society of News Designers, and was the recipient of The Pitch’s 2008 Mastermind Award for his artistic contributions to Kansas City.

Renée Cinderhouse’s sculptures and site-specific installations have been shown throughout the U.S. and abroad, most notably at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Scope Miami, artLA,The Amarillo Museum of Art and The New Bedford Art Museum. Cinderhouse’s immersive works have been staged in wildlife refuges in Costa Rica, Florida and Wyoming, historic sites and theaters, and several artist residency programs.
Cinderhouse was co-founder and curator of the Green Door Gallery in Kansas City MO from 2000-2008. She is the recipient of a National Award in Small Sculpture by National Society for Arts and Letters, three Inspiration Grants, a Creative Capital Professional Development Grant, a Competitive Merit Grant and was awarded “Best Artist of Kansas City” in 2005 and 2012.
Renée Cinderhouse has collaborated with museum directors from the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago and the Kansas City Museum for access to their permanent collections to create new bodies of work. Cinderhouse has served as guest curator for galleries and museums and as an artist-consultant for national architecture firms. A Kansas City studio artist, with degrees in both Sculpture and Art History, her work is in private collections, both nationally and internationally.

Impractical Spaces involves a symposium and a publication organized by Melaney Ann Mitchell and Cory Imig focused on the history and impact of artist-run spaces in Kansas City. Artist-run spaces are galleries and collectives run by artists that provide alternatives to established institutions and commercial galleries of a city. These spaces respond directly to the needs of the local arts community. They are some of the deepest advocates for alternative practices, working with shoestring budgets to create contexts for and conversations about what artists are exploring. They are rich in risk, advocate for the sticky, the uncomfortable, the experimental, and the avant-garde. Kansas City’s art history is dependent upon them. Because of their DIY nature, and small budgets, the documentation of these spaces often falls short or remains ephemeral. Through conducting extensive research, hosting a symposium, and printing this free limited-run publication, Melaney and Cory would like to honor these Impractical Spaces and their impact.
This project is also a partnership with the national Impractical Spaces project, which is a collaboration between Art F City and Beyond Alternatives. The national project aims to document the history of artist-run spaces in at least 50 cities across the United States. Because the KC Edition of this project will be one of the first to be completed it will contextualize Kansas City within a larger national conversation about these types of spaces, as well as set a precedent and highlight the Kansas City art scene. Through associated public programming and the subsequent publication, Melaney and Cory will create an historical object with lasting effect, and develop a scalable strategy for archiving these types of spaces and their impacts.
Previous publications, such as The Phonebook (produced by Three Walls in Chicago) have showcased an overview of the current national scope of artist-run spaces. Impractical Spaces will dive deep into their larger socio-cultural impact by establishing a symposium at its core to invite community engagement. The team hopes to record stories, gather ephemera, and provide a platform for conversations – featuring both artists who currently run spaces and those who have done so in the past. The symposium will also include panel discussions with current and former artist-run space leaders, and both lectures and workshops from Impractical Spaces national editorial partners Paddy Johnson (Art F City) and Dulcee Boehm (Beyond Alternatives).
The symposium will feature a curated display of ephemera: postcards, posters, letters, images, press clippings, and other leftovers from collective work. The walls will create an intentional space to honor pre-internet archives, and these materials will then be documented for use in the publication. Such memory traces will be augmented by published interviews and commissioned essays that will discuss the development of the Kansas City artist community and the impact of alternative spaces. Impractical Spaces aims to foster dialogues about these histories, bring awareness to already existing archives (such as the CSF Living Archive), and provide a platform for the current artist-run community to engage and grow from the experimentation and lessons from the past.
At the intersection between cataloguing the history of the artist-run movement and interactive public programming, Impractical Spaces hopes to inspire and grow future spaces that will respond to Kansas City’s unique environment.
https://rocketgrants.org/rocket-grants-projects/the-projects-2019-2020/impractical-spaces/

CORY IMIG is an artist, educator, and arts administrator based in the Midwest. Her work takes the form of large-scale installations that alter spaces physically, visually, and temporally. Cory has exhibited in numerous exhibitions across the United States, in spaces such as Savannah College of Art and Design, Museum of Art and Southwest School of Art (San Antonio) as well as attended residencies at Art Omi International Art Center and ACRE. In addition to her studio practice, she is a founding member of PLUG Projects (2011), a curatorial collaboration in the Stockyards District of Kansas City, as well as Say Uncle (2015), a nomadic residency and exhibition program. She is currently co-director of Beyond Alternatives, a symposium that focuses on artist-led organizing outside of large metropolitan areas and co-editor of Impractical Spaces a forthcoming book documenting the artist-run community across the United States.

MELANEY ANN MITCHELL- is an artist, writer, and organizer based in KC, MO. Mitchell is a current studio resident at The Drugstore in midtown. She was the Founder and Senior Editor of Informality Blog, an online arts criticism platform for documenting the conversation about Kansas City contemporary art and culture, where she remains an Editor at Large. In addition, she was a Co-Director/Curator at PLUG Projects (2016-2017) and the Director of Subterranean Gallery (2012-2015). Her curatorial, writing, and visual art practices all revolve around the intersection of our lives with digital culture and its impact on our identities

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