Artspeak

Artspeak Radio, Wednesday, April 9, 2025, 9am -10am CST, 90.1fm KKFI Kansas City Community Radio, streaming live audio www.kkfi.org

Producer/host Maria Vasquez Boyd author Tamara Dean, Artist Thrive and Mid America Alliance Member, Diane R. Scott, Jade Osborne, and Amy Kligman.

Tamara Dean stepped away from the sterile hum of office life and moved to a farm in Wisconsin’s Driftless Area—a land marked by steep hills and deeply carved valleys, laced with spring-fed streams. She was searching for a different way of being: to live lightly on the planet, to find grounding in the rituals of self-sufficiency, and to imagine a future that would be resilient in the face of climate upheaval. In SHELTER AND STORM: At Home in the Driftless (University of Minnesota Press; April 22, 2025), Dean shares twelve finely honed essays that weave together nature, history, and science as she unravels the mysteries of the place she came to call home.
Featured in The American Scholar, The Georgia Review, The Guardian, Orion, and The Southern Review, these essays are rooted in the land but come alive through Dean’s insatiable curiosity. In Slow Blues, she tracks down elusive blue-glowing fireflies; in Good Neighbors, she engineers a beaver-friendly waterway to console a dying neighbor distraught over flooded land. She burns a hay field to recreate a prairie and builds a house from earthen blocks. Elsewhere in the book, she unearths the tale of Nancy Ann Harris, a woman buried on Dean’s farm in 1876 after complications from her 10th abortion—a story that reverberates with questions about historical memory and how we assign value to those who lived before us.
SHELTER AND STORM invites readers to step into the Driftless Area’s untamed beauty and meditate on how we tend the earth in times of uncertainty, what we owe our neighbors, and ways we thrive in community. How do moments of ecological stewardship reveal the deeper threads of human connection? And how do we honor both the land that has shaped us for millennia and the lives of those who will inherit it from us?
Tamara Dean has been camping, fishing, hiking, and gathering wild foods from an early age, led and inspired by her parents. Her essays and stories have been published in The American Scholar, The Georgia Review, the Guardian, One Story, Orion, and The Progressive, and she is author of The Human-Powered Home: Choosing Muscles over Motors. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin and returns to the Driftless area often. More at: www.tamaradean.media.

DIANE SCOTT, JADE OSBORNE, & AMY KLIGMAN-Artists, arts leaders, educators, and funders from across the United States are invited to expand their creative circle at the annual 2025 Artists Thrive Summit in Kansas City, Missouri, May 6–8, 2025.

This event offers a powerful networking hub to help connect attendees with passionate colleagues from across the region and country. As part of the Summit, Artists Thrive has partnered with Kansas City organizations to craft regional experiences, including tours to cultural venues embedded in the community.
Tours and interactive experiences include InterUrban ArtHouse in Overland Park, Englewood Arts Center in Independence, Charlotte Street in Kansas City, and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art at Johnson County Community College.

Attendees will spark collaborations, share best practices, and find inspiration alongside a diverse group of individuals who share a similar dedication to the arts. The Summit’s flexible format ensures everyone—introverts, extroverts, seasoned professionals, or those new to the field—can make lasting
connections.

KC-based Summit Leadership
Mid-America Arts Alliance is the lead local Artists Thrive organizational partner with venue contributions from Charlotte Street and Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.
Local artists and leaders have been highly active in planning the sessions and tailoring the experience to bring the community together.
Learn about the planning of the event with insights from host Mid-America Arts Alliance’s Artist Services Director Diane Scott and Program Officer Jade Osborne, as well as artist Amy Kligman, whose exhibition will be featured during the the summit.
The 2025 summit will be held at the Kauffman Foundation Conference
Center, 4801 Rockhill Road, Kansas City, Missouri 64110, near Kansas City’s
Country Club Plaza district.

Artists Thrive aims to raise the value of artists in every community. Artists Thrive is a growing initiative offering activities, practices, language, visions and values of what it means to succeed and thrive as an artist – and what it means to have a thriving arts sector and, eventually, thriving communities. It is a set of interconnected and holistic resources that can
guide us in improving our performance and, ultimately, the conditions in which artists can thrive. Artists Thrive is funded by the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation. Learn more at www.artiststhrive.org.

Mid-America Arts Alliance (M-AAA) partners with and supports artists, organizations, and communities to grow access to the arts, culture, and creativity throughout Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, and beyond. To learn more about M-AAA grants, programs, exhibitions, and
fellowships, visit www.maaa.org and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, Threads, and LinkedIn.

DIANE R. SCOTT is an arts administrator, educator, and writer specializing in the development of resources and programming to support artists in the management of enduring artistic practices. The director of Artist Services at the US Regional Arts Organization Mid-America Arts Alliance, Scott is the founding director and principal designer of the Artist INC professional development program. Now in its 16th year, Artist INC programs have been offered in eight states and completed by more than 2,500 artists. Scott has also had a 20-year career in higher
education. In her experiences in both nonprofit artist services and higher education, she operates as a liaison between collegiate arts entrepreneurship education and artist professional development in the field. Her book, Artist Entrepreneurship for Life: Making Art Work for You was released by Routledge in 2025. Scott has led the M-AAA partnership with Artists Thrive.

JADE OSBORNE is an arts administrator and an innovative creative person who is passionate about the arts and community. She is an multidisciplinary artist and experiential curator. She explores the space in between the self, the other, and the living art that is created when we are together. Jade has performed and presented on stages in 14 countries interlacing social practice/community outreach with each of her appearances.
She is an award winner and grantee of ArtsKC, KC and Chicago Fringe Festivals, Afest, Missouri Arts Council, COMBAT, among
others. She served as artist advisor for the new airport in Kansas City. She is currently serving as performing arts director for Art in the Loop public arts project and M-AAA’s artist services program officer for Artists 360, Catalyze and Interchange. Osborne has served on the local planning committee for the 2025 Artists Thrive Summit in Kansas City.

AMY KLIGMAN is an artist and arts organizer living in Kansas City, Missouri. Kligman’s practice is centered on people, space, and care. Kligman’s experience as an exhibiting artist and grassroots curator/arts administrator spans 20 years of studio work, independent curating and organizing, and artist-run projects. Her work is exhibited nationally and is featured in the permanent collection in the Nerman Museum of Art, the Hallmark Art Collection, and others. In 2011 Kligman was one of five artist-curators who established and curated Plug Projects, a Rocket Grant-supported, artist-run project space in Kansas City’s West Bottoms, that hosted a nationally recognized calendar of exhibitions and artist-centered programming. She was the executive artistic director at Charlotte Street Foundation from 2015–2024. Kligman’s Salon for Possible Futures at the Nerman Museum is one of the learning journeys for the summit.
According to the Nerman
website, the exhibition is “a built environment installation that takes on the familiar shape of a living room. It will act at once as a library, a gallery, a cabinet of curiosity, a third space, a common room, and a think tank.” Kligman also served on the Artists Thrive session planning committee.

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