Belger Crane Yard Gallery presents Milestones: Belger Arts’ Tenth Annual Resident Artist Exhibition opening Friday, June 2, 2023, at 2011 Tracy Avenue, Kansas City, MO 64108. The public is invited to view the work and meet the artists from 6 to 8 pm. The exhibition includes work by Cindy Leung, Sun Young Park, Gina Pisto, Adams Puryear, Meredith Smith, and Nicole Woodard.

This year Belger Arts celebrates a significant milestone: the tenth year of its Artists in Residence program. The program originated at Red Star Studios, a long-time Kansas City ceramics gallery and studio. After its closing the program found a permanent home in May 2013 when Belger Crane Yard Studios opened. Belger Crane Yard Studios continues to host national and international artists through the program, providing ceramic artists the opportunity to expand their body of work or create a special project that may be outside of the scope of their routine studio practice.

The group exhibition, with its range of styles, themes, and techniques, also marks a milestone for the six artists, as it is the culmination of their time in the residency program. Through porcelain, a ceramic material originating from the East and popularized by the West, Cindy Leung facilitates conversations around topics such as consumerism, colonization, and cultural hybridity. Sun Young Park combines clay and non-clay materials to create large, abstract sculptures that reflect how she processes and translates her reality and explores the duality of the material and the conceptual. Adams Puryear documents pop and internet culture, combining traditional techniques and contemporary imagery inspired by the internet’s “anti- filter.” Curio as a site within the domestic, plays a major role in Gina Pisto’s work that explores the ritual of collecting and preservation as an act of desire. Meredith Smith uses clay, figurative sketching, poetry, and various other aspects of her work to relay an array of experiences across the human condition. Nicole Woodard’s work currently focuses on exploring the vulnerability and trauma of the body from the perspective of a woman.

Entering Xanropa

Entering Xanropa is an exhibition featuring artwork that centers around a science-fantasy narrative I am developing called Xanropa- which is the name of the planet the story takes place on. My story is about how humanity leaves Earth in order to make a utopian paradise among the cosmos but they end up recreating the same troubles that caused them to abandon Earth. Inevitably, the humans leave Xanropa and our main character named XAN‑1 (a mechanism that was created by humans to help construct and maintain the planet) must assess what has been left behind by the humans. The artworks are reflections of my belief that we need to acknowledge the beauty around us just as much as we need to acknowledge the chaos around us. It is easier to give up on humanity but in the inner workings of humankind, there is profound beauty and care that we are capable of expressing.

Artist Biography

Tristan Lindo (1994 – ) was born and raised in Garden City, Kansas. Lindo has his BFA in Studio Art from Fort Hays State University (2018), and his MFA from the University of Kansas (2022). He currently works and resides in Lawrence, Kansas.

In My Room

In My Room is a collection of moments, memories, patterns, and changes I experienced while living and working out of my bedroom. This body of work began after graduating from grad school, and I found myself in between studio spaces. I started noticing how special the items in my room were/are to me and how they describe who I am and where I came from. Patterns and trinkets passed down from family members surround my room. These treasured items provide comfort, humor, and memories with loved ones living far away or no longer with us. They are always in the background of my life, never changing but witnessing how life continues.

Artist Bio

Hannah Lindo was born and raised in Garden City, Kansas, where she received her Associate’s degree in Visual Arts. In 2017, she completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Fort Hays State University. In 2022, Lindo completed her Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Kansas. Lindo will continue her artistic and teaching career at the University of Central Missouri as an Adjunct instructor in Painting and Drawing/Artist in Residence in the Fall of 2023.

This exhibition features artworks responding to Robert Frost’s poem Nothing Gold Can Stay. The fifteen artists explore dichotomies of beauty and decay, the inevitability of time, and transformation. This exhibition honors Frost’s poem and also notes the moments of delight and turbulence that are a part of being an artist. The artists involved came together to celebrate the seasons of Spring and Summer before they leave us again.

Artists Noting Gold:

Dora Agbas
Lauren Bass
Jess Belangee-Englert
Sadie Goll
Sammie Jane Hardewig
Emma Hixson
Tiana Nanayo Kuʻuleialoha Honda
Hannah Lindo
Tristan Lindo
Gen Louise
Kalie Love
Taylor Miller
Quinn Pagona
Nathan Pickerell
SK Reed

I look to the skies and watch the birds, storms rolling in, changing weather, and brilliant sunsets. We have lived on the Kansas prairie for four years and I am moved and changed by it, my work is much influenced. The subtle starkness is magnificent as I watch undulating streams of snow geese move like ribbons, calling far overhead. The Spring Peepers are singing, a first hint of Spring. Geese and ducks are returning as are many migrating birds. Ranchers are burning prairies, and see the horizon glow hot pink as the sun sets. The ground goes from charred black to neon green in a week, amazing. Often the talk is about water, whether is there enough or rarely is there too much. 

What damage are we doing to the earth, our waters, our living beings, and ourselves? What legacy do we leave for those who come after? First peoples teach that what we do now affects the next seven generations. What does uranium mining do to the Diné people who drink the same water? The repercussions seem endless, Native people are losing their ancestral lands in coastal areas due to global warming. Chief Oren Lyons, Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan, Onondaga Nation speaks of ice, and I quote: “The ice is melting, the winds are coming, the fires are burning, the climate is changing. It is coming and it is coming very fast”. At some point the constant striving for greater production, more fracking, and more chemicals on our farms, and in our factory farming has to stop, it has to change. What legacy will we leave for our children and their children? Hopi and other prophecies have predicted that we would come to a fork in the road. I believe that we are there now, do we turn toward healing and change, or continue down this slippery path? I have faith that there are new ways to do things. And yet I mourn vanishing species; what will we do without bees and other pollinators?

The title of my exhibition refers to a beautiful song from the indigenous Tewa people called “Mother Earth, Father Sky”. I am respectfully borrowing the title, it is not my work, I have been deeply moved and inspired by it for nearly all of my life, and it echoes my feelings. These works are my prayers for goodness and healing.

I work with plaster and other mediums in my newest body of work, they are mounted on deep birch boards. I have carved into it, shaped it, made impressions, and added paint, and mixed media. I am over the moon inspired by the landscape in southern Missouri and northern Arkansas. 

I have family roots in this region, among the Ouachita and Ozark mountains. Have you hiked in them, see the crags and hollers, floated the rivers? I am drawn to water; thawing waterfalls, moving over rocks with sunlight reflecting from it, and the sounds, oh the sounds. 

And in honoring Father Sky, I am sharing cyanotypes with imagery of migrating birds and butterflies. Recent batiks reflect flowers, the Milky Way, and the stars. I look up and I look down. I am quiet and feel so fortunate to have had these transcendent experiences. Enjoy, and find quiet and peace while contemplating my work.

1. https://centerforneweconomics.org/publications/the-ice-is-melting/

Bio

Valerie Doran Bashaw, of rural Kansas, is a professional fiber/mixed media artist and fine arts educator. Always learning and experimenting, her media choices include plaster on board, cyanotypes, intricately dyed and stitched fabric stretched over deep frames, batik, shibori, surface design, combined and refined. 

Imagery is subtle, though colors can be intense. She is happiest watching birds, landscape, storms move in, with a strong interest in weather patterns, geology and geography. Attracted to the dance between accidental and intentional, spontaneity versus control, yin and yang. Creation is fueled by intuition and the drive to make art. 

Valerie is an educator, working with students of all ages and abilities. Education includes a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and a MFA from the University of Michigan. She has taught for Metropolitan Community Colleges, Park University, University of Central Missouri, Ghost Ranch Conference and Education Center, Kansas City Young Audiences, Accessible Arts, Bishop Spencer Place, the Barstow School and other venues. She continues to show her work exhibitions in the greater Kansas City area and her work is in many collections; including University of Kansas Medical Center, physicians offices, businesses and private homes from Mexico to Michigan and beyond. 

She has been active in various arts organizations including the Best of Missouri Hands, Missouri Fiber Artists and is on the Board of Directors for Sharing a Vision for Generations, raising money to award scholarships for Lakota women to study Lakota Studies at Oglala Lakota College in South Dakota. She recently co-authored a grant to benefit her rural community. Fingers crossed that funding will be awarded! 

Her works embrace the aesthetic of quiet, meditative work, meant to encourage reflection. A way to retreat from the hectic, over-stimulated world. Find the dreamtime, take a deep breath, retreat into contemplation and silence.