Artist Opportunities
KC Flatfile & Digitalfile Exhibition
The first Kansas City Flatfile exhibition was held at the Artspace in 2001 in conjunction with the Pierogi Flatfiles exhibition featuring flatfiles from Joe Amrhein’s Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn, N.Y. The Kansas City Flatfile has since become a biennial invitational exhibition featuring a wide range of work by emerging and established artists from the Kansas City area.
The exhibitions include flat work in various media, and all of the work is contained in individual portfolios enclosed in flatfile cabinets. Visitors are invited to browse the files and handle the work, which offers a unique and personal viewing experience. In addition, the exhibition has expanded to include a digital file component, with screening stations featuring a variety of time-based work that viewers can select and watch at their leisure
Throughout the exhibitions, guest curators are invited to curate temporary salon-style presentations from the flatfiles and queues from the digitalfile. The Kansas City Flatfile and Digitalfile has a studio-like characteristic for the participating artists and the public and encourage a natural exchange of ideas and practices through a hands-on approach. It provides an opportunity for a wide range of Kansas City artists to show their work to an equally diverse audience, which often includes arts professionals and collectors in the Kansas City area and beyond.
KCAI Biennial Exhibition
The Kansas City Art Institute is home to faculty that are passionate about teaching because they are artists devoted to their craft and the continued growth of their artistic practice. The campus at large is a creative community made up of full-time faculty, adjunct faculty, and staff who work together contributing to a diverse landscape of talent and creativity. The KCAI Biennial Exhibition provides opportunities to faculty and staff to highlight the full spectrum of artists employed by KCAI.
Visiting Critique & Curator Program
Initiated in 2000 through support from the Missouri Arts Council, the Visiting Critic and Curator Program (VCCP) is designed to engage Kansas City artists in a dialogue with nationally recognized curators and critics. Hosted on a periodically by the Artspace, VCCP invites submissions through an open call to artists as well as submissions from Kansas City artists and MFA and BFA candidates in their final year.
VCCP invites a nationally recognized critic or curator––alternating between critic and curator for each program––to select a group of Kansas City artists for individual studio visits and discussions in Kansas City. The program opens up a dialogue between a Kansas City artist and a critic or curator from outside of the region and exposes the visiting critic or curator to the dynamic contemporary arts scene in Kansas City. The Artspace organizes a public lecture by the visiting critic or curator as the culmination of the program.
Previous visiting critics and curators include Michael Pittari, former editor of Art Papers in Atlanta; Amada Cruz, director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.; Kathryn Hixon, editor of New Art Examiner, formerly published in Chicago; Anne Pasternak, director of Creative Time in New York; James Elaine, curator of Hammer Projects at the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; and Stuart Horodner, director of the Atlanta Center for Contemporary Art, Dean Daderko, curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and David Everitt Howe (left), a Brooklyn-based independent critic and curator.