Studio Above has a new artists joining the group: Vanessa Lacy! Vanessa is a well known Kansas City artists with many talents and we are thrilled to have her. The other long term artists at Studio Above are Nancy Clay, William Rose, Noelle Stoffel, David Uhlig, and Jackie Warren. These artists work in various mediums and invite the public to come view their work.

My art for me is a sort of language, far more descriptive than written language. Reflecting on meaning, I feel my individuality, my existence and my place in the world is represented in the works. The process of painting for me is an investigation, questioning beauty, and the functionality and purpose in the beautiful forms and subjects I focus on. Abstracted, hybrid forms that were originally life at the microscopic level, I refer to them as atomic flowers. To me, they contain this incredible energy. They are small in and of themselves, but they are powerful, and this is where the everything comes into play. It’s the relationships in between them, what is around them, what patterns they are creating and how I am representing them as subjects. I invent my own world with these forms and create my own visual language, and then the experience one can have with them is something entirely different than they can have with anything else.

Kelly Porter is from Dallas, TX. She received her BFA from Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, MO in 1997, where she studied printmaking and philosophy. Upon receiving a full scholarship, she continued her education at the State University of New York in Buffalo, NY, where she received an MFA in 1999. Porter returned to Kansas City for a teaching position at the Kansas City Art Institute and began showing her work in galleries across the country. Kelly Porter’s work has been described by critics as “unique, composed and calming, with layered and labor intensive surfaces.”

As a full-time professional artist, Porter has simultaneously produced work for multiple solo exhibitions, as well as creating and running the successful textile and wall covering company, Porter Teleo.

Her honors include being named as one of the “21 Under 30 Top Artists to Watch” in 2004 by Southwest-Art Magazine, “Top Visual Artist” in 2006 by Kansas City Magazine, a “Merit Award for Best Product Design” from Interior Design Magazine, 2008, and a number of editorials in Architectural Digest, Elle Décor, Vogue, Town and Country, Women’s Wear Daily, Veranda, Metro- politan Home, House Beautiful, Spaces Kansas City and IN Kansas City Magazine for her surface design work for Porter Teleo.

Kelly Porter’s personal contemporary artwork can be seen in private and corporate collections nationwide, including: Poetry and Rare Books Collection of New York, NY, Utilicorp, KC, MO, Sprint Corporate Collection, Overland Park, KS, Brandmeyer En- terprises, LLC, Leawood, KS, Shook Hardy and Bacon, KC, MO, Houlihan’s Restaurant Corp, Chicago, IL, American Century, KC, MO, and other public spaces including New York Fashion Week VIP Lounge, the Greenville Symphony Auditorium and the New York Palace Hotel Lobby. She has received numerous accolades in the art and design community and was recently honored as a guest speaker at the Creative Leadership Symposium through Hallmark, KC, MO.

Porter lives and works in Kansas City. She has been represented by Blue Gallery in the Kansas City Crossroads Arts Districts since 2000.

Artist Statement
My work has been shaped by my background growing up in a rural community in Iowa. Industrial farming is a common practice in Iowa. It wasn’t a world that I was quite a part of until I began working as a mower at an industrial hog farm during the summers when I was in college. Growing up in Iowa, I was taught from a young age about agricultural practices and where our food comes from. There was a general knowledge of industrial farming in rural communities even without working on a farm. I worked on an industrial hog farm for four years mowing their operations. My work depicts my experience working around industrial hog confinements for four summers in Iowa. I navigate this industry in my work through my memories, through the things I saw and experienced. I focus on the things that impacted me. This collection of work depicts the workings of industrial hog farming and the complications of operating a large-scale farm. Much of this is not seen by many. Through my work, I shine a light on the realities of an industry that are usually invisible.

Bio
Sadie Goll was born and raised in eastern Iowa. She studied printmaking at the University of Iowa and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2019. She completed her Master of Fine Arts at the University of Kansas in 2022. Throughout her undergraduate and graduate career, her work has been focused on industrial hog farming and her experiences with the industry as she grew up in Iowa. She works in a variety of printmaking techniques such as lithography, intaglio, relief, and monotype.

My artwork explores my passion for native plants of the tallgrass prairie and acts of cultivation, in the context of ecological crisis. My mixed media studio paintings comprise playful, emergent, and responsive layers of printed and painted botanical forms, combining multiple material processes, to suggest the many simultaneous systems and relationships active in the natural world. It is my hope that my paintings, with their shifting language and saturated color, can create dynamic worlds where wildflowers come in and out of focus. In these works, vitality and entanglement are prioritized over traditional compositional resolution, in an attempt to bewilder the viewer and decenter the human perspective of the natural world.

I often spend my nights awake, anxiously thinking over the current and coming ecological challenges, reading and listening for new paths forward. My days follow a joyful curiosity about these wonderful indigenous flowers. My artwork dwells in this paradoxical intensity as both a requiem for the lost prairie and an incantation for hope.

I also create public-facing artwork in the Flowers for Marlborough Project. This project confronts and attempts to impact urban blight in the Marlborough neighborhood of Kansas City, MO by interjecting large-scale paintings of native plants on neglected and abandoned properties. In addition, I have conducted free workshops and host native plant seedling give aways to the community.

Julie Farstad was born and raised in Elmira, New York. She earned her BFA in Painting at the University of Notre Dame and her MFA in Painting at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Farstad is a Professor of Painting and Social Practice at the Kansas City Art Institute. She lives and works in the Marlborough neighborhood of Kansas City, Missouri with her husband and two sons.

Berman’s abstract images follow their own alluvial logic from the inside out; as fragments build, plates collide, and colors accrete. Time and space prove the strength found in softness and the solidity contained in transparency. Collectively, the works in this exhibition depict a pause in time, a reflection of unconformity.

Laura Crehuet Berman is a Spanish-American artist who creates images that layer time, space, form and color together. The natural world inspires her, and there is a focus on play, improvisation, and relational dynamics in her work. Berman has created site-specific exhibitions and exhibited her print work in over 150 exhibitions at galleries and museums around the country and internationally. Her prints are widely collected and she has made commissioned work for a number of institutions and public collections.