FORUM MAGAZINE’S EXTENDED INTERVIEW with 2024 Charlotte Street Visual Artist Award Winners Kevin Demery, Juan Diego Gaucin, and Aleah Washington
(Photos courtesy of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art)
The winners of the 2024 Charlotte Street Visual Artist Awards are painter Juan Diego Gaucin, textile artist Aleah Washington, and multimedia installation artist Kevin Demery. This year Charlotte Street partnered with the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art to feature the three artists in the exhibition 2024 Charlotte Street Visual Artist Awards, which is free to the public and on view Nov. 9, 2024, through Aug. 10, 2025. This exhibition is the fourth installment of the Nelson’s “KC Art Now” initiative, a series of exhibitions and events featuring the work of local contemporary artists. Forum editor Andrew Johnson sat down with Gaucin, Washington, and Demery the week before the exhibition’s opening to talk about their individual artistic practices, their perspectives as working artists in Kansas City, and their experience showing their work in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.
FORUM: I'm so glad to have you all together to talk about this exhibition. This conversation could easily be three separate interviews with each of you to talk about your own work since it is so different from each other, not only in subject matter but also in medium, approach, and process. So I first want to ask each of you: How did you arrive at your current practice resulting in the work for this exhibition?
WASHINGTON: My practice started with colored pencil drawings and paintings, and during undergrad at KCAI I was exploring painting and sculpture. Once COVID happened, we were still paying full tuition for studio space, and I felt that I was going to graduate unsatisfied with the skills that I’d learned. That's when I started exploring fabric art more. By studying quilting, I learned how to use fabric in a maximalist way through improvisational piecing. Constantly rearranging various textures helped me find the beauty in different layouts. A lot of my fabric art still mimics the way that I paint or explore color. When I started working with fabric, I enjoyed doing a routine mindlessly for so long that I’m suddenly like, wow, this still kind of reminds me of a painting. So I think I was drawn to studying something traditional like painting, then taking something that's also traditional like fabric, and kind of shaking it up in ways not always used in these traditions.
DEMERY: Back when I was in school, assemblage was really my jam, even though I was also a painter. I came upon my current work while at a Bemis Center residency years ago. I started making wind chimes out there. But the wind chimes also came about through a long-standing relationship with my own childhood. I came from a family of artists, particularly my uncle. When I was seven years old I saw my uncle’s painting titled, A Lesson Before Dying. I remember that it had the effect that I usually look for in art, which is that it evoked a sense of depth, an understanding of something, without having to give me a prescriptive or didactic explanation. So after seeing A Lesson Before Dying and the way black men were portrayed in this particular collage he created, immediately as a seven-year-old, I felt I understood that to some degree there's this ever-looming presence and threat of death. So there's a 360-degree relationship happening, without my full understanding, starting at age seven up until now. I've always been grappling with those themes of miseducation, mass incarceration, murder, these things that plague black communities in America. And the anagram puzzles, the hand sculptures, the wind chimes that I put into this show, it's all dealing with those themes.
WASHINGTON: To be so aware at seven is just amazing. But then also, thinking about not having that luxury to be unaware, too, is tough. It's like a weight that you're carrying from so young, because it can't be hidden from you.
DEMERY: Yeah, and that's what I think really showed me what we do as artists. I understood it through that lens. I don't think you could have explained it to me at that age. But just the poetics of it, the presentation of the work, immediately evoked for me an understanding of the anxieties I might feel, and the relationship of when I was a child. I think that's why I'm really passionate about connecting with young people as an educator. They are very aware of the world they're living in, but do they know how to process it? And do they have outlets for processing it?
FORUM: And in your work, the objects themselves – children’s puzzles and windchimes – are familiar enough to anyone, so there's an element of accessibility. But then the language you choose complicates it, so you're both drawn in by the accessibility, but then immediately challenged by what the language is doing.
DEMERY: Yeah.
GAUCIN: After hearing both of you speak, I think I understand now what Stephanie [Knappe] meant when she said there is a lot of correspondence between our work. So as for me, my five paintings are a continuation of my thesis work from KU. I arrived at it out of a need to explore my own thoughts, background, and experiences as a Mexican immigrant, working from my own feelings about it. I use painting for those explorations because I like to paint, so there's kind of like this double process that's happening where the painting part can exist on its own, separate from the content. Especially with large paintings, it gives you so much room to explore, to get lost in one figure, or a space, or in a corner of the canvas, and that’s when the subject matter starts to come forward. Kind of like what Kevin was saying, there were a lot of things I didn't really understand as a child experiencing them. Now as an adult, they're coming out in the artwork, almost like I'm understanding it backwards because I didn't have the capacity to understand it then. The experience of immigration was traumatizing, even though I never felt traumatized by it or never really understood the depth of it. Especially now with our political climate, it has felt relevant to address it in the work. But there's also an aspect of it that's just purely like, I like painting, I like color, I like abstraction. It's a space where I can play. For me, color has a connection with life. Even when I was young playing video games, the phosphorescence of TV screens, I associated the glowing light with things being alive and in motion. So part of me wants to imitate that same kind of internal light coming from the subject matter in my paintings.
FORUM: You are making those connections back to childhood, saying it is like understanding in reverse. That kind of approach is very different compared to approaching the work with clarity or certainty over what you intend to do or say. Does this approach help avoid making work that's didactic or prescriptive?
GAUCIN: I don't know about you guys, but I feel like even if I wasn't intentionally working with certain subject matter, the subject matter would come out in the work one way or another.
WASHINGTON: Yeah, a lot of my subject matter in this show is revolving around maps. Redlining maps in particular. I moved from Dallas to Kansas City, and as an 18 year old exploring a new place, it was always eerie because certain areas felt like home, especially east of Troost. Like, I'm eight hours away from home, but something is weird. Once I started learning that maps were made by government systems and then used as layouts for all major cities in the United States, it just blew my mind to learn they just bought up farmland, pushed people off of their land like Native Americans, and took everything. So I was realizing that you're never safe in a space, because it's already set up for something to push you out of it. In Dallas I grew up in one house. But by the time I went to college, my parents moved, and it was so hard for me to process, like I can never go home again. So I immediately just started drawing my neighborhood from memory, specific locations I would go to, like the grocery store, schools, parks, all those specific landmarks from my life. But these locations change because they get bought out or demolished or updated. It's something that makes me very aware of a space that I'm in. So, yes, maps definitely work their way into the way I quilt and see a city.
FORUM: There’s also a similarity in the titles you chose, having to do with movement. Aleah’s title is Slowly Drifting. Juan Diego’s is For A Better Life, which evokes the reason somebody migrates. And Kevin’s is A Lesson Before Dying, perhaps relating to the temporal movement toward death. I'm noticing motion and movement as something that is shared in common here.
DEMERY: Motion and movement are so relevant to me because of the wind chimes. I get asked all of the time, Why would you turn this image of a black child’s execution into a wind chime, when it's evoking, histories of lynching and capital punishment? Yes, death is being replicated, but then there's also a moment of life that can be activated. A wind chime is an autonomous instrument. It can be activated at any time when a current takes place or you accidentally knock into it. There's recognition of the spirit, right? So for me, I think of movement, the poetics of movement, the politicized movement of the body, the restrictions of a lynching or an electric chair. Yet a breeze can activate the chimes. In this show, the fan’s current is so gentle that sometimes it catches really fast and you start to hear them really loud, or sometimes it's just completely still because it's not getting enough circulation.
FORUM: It makes me think of one of Juan Diego’s paintings in the show, the one with the river crossing and the border agents on the horses. It’s two dimensional, but some of the motion captured in the painting is disorienting, not only the movement of the migrants crossing the river, but also the border agents and even the horses, their gestures and their movements.
GAUCIN: The very sense of movement seems to complicate the polarized narrative of the border, in terms of what's even happening there. That painting is an interesting example because in that situation, the whole reason they were using horses was to control the movement of the people, to block them in, restrict them, using ropes and lassos to herd them like cattle. That's what was also so problematic and dehumanizing about it because they used herding techniques instead of any actual law enforcement approaches. So that's one thing I love about large-scale painting. That there's so much room to explore. With the horses, you might never consider what the horse is thinking. But eventually I had to paint the horses, and I spent so much time on each one. Eventually I started wondering what the horses were thinking. Like, are they completely complicit? Does this horse want to run these people over? Is there like a mix of good horses and bad horses? I never would have expected to be thinking of this when I started to paint. But with all that space, you know, your mind has lots of room to roam.
WASHINGTON: And even thinking about the horses being frightened, or being in an open space, or getting scared and bucking. What if the horse’s mistake is because of the poor leadership of the rider? I never thought about the horses before.
GAUCIN: Yeah, I wasn't expecting that either.
FORUM: And it's in those gestures and movements that you're capturing it. It evokes the questions. I'm suddenly wondering about the horses’ perspectives and questioning their level of complicity. Then it goes back to these men on their backs. It's easy to think of them all as trained Border Patrol agents who are enacting this terrible thing. Which they are, but also, they're having distinct experiences as individual humans. And yet they're participating.
GAUCIN: That was really difficult subject matter to work with. It would be so easy to paint them as monsters and devils, to literally slap some horns on them. Sure, there might be some good Border Patrol agents in there somewhere, but I don't know if adding that into the work is really a worthwhile message, playing to the middle ground. That's one of the things that annoys me about the news. They're so desperate to be in the middle that they create all these false equivalencies, left and right. And so I thought a lot about that. I can't paint them as evil and be super-polarized in one direction. But I also don't want to be trying to straddle the fence and pretend that these two sides are equal. They're obviously not.
FORUM: Right. And by portraying the complexity of it, it hopefully pushes your average American viewer to actually wrestle with their own perspective.
GAUCIN: At the very least, I would like them to see the humanity of the migrants. At the very simplest, that's what I would want them to take away from it. I've noticed that for a lot of people, problems don't exist until they happen to them. So if you can imagine myself in this situation, maybe you can empathize a little more.
WASHINGTON: Even the way you laid out the painting. I think I saw it before it was even done. The fact that it feels like, as a viewer, you're closest to the crowd before you even get to the horses. So in a sense, the initial perspective that you get is you're a part of the crowd. You're a part of the chaos that is erupting. And you're in the midst of seeing these horses coming towards you and you're just put immediately in that situation.
GAUCIN: I was fortunate to have a lot of time to work on that one. I got to stew and marinate. I started that painting a couple months after I got the residency at Charlotte Street, so I worked on it for a good eight months or more. I really got to really sit with it and think about it. It would be nice to always have that kind of time because I feel like painting just takes time to really zero in on things. And the technique aspect of it also is very time consuming.
FORUM: As the new editor of this magazine I’ve spent a lot of time reading the archives from 25, 30, 50 years ago, and I’m so intrigued by the many changes in Kansas City, as well as some things that haven’t changed or challenges that persist. One significant change is in the Nelson’s approach to showing living artists. William Rockhill Nelson’s original bequest required the museum to use his funds to acquire work only from artists who had been dead for at least 30 years. Fast forward, now this exhibition features three local artists who have clearly not been dead for 30 years, not to mention being artists of color. What’s been your experience interacting with a museum with such institutional history and practices? Have you learned something new from interacting with an institution like this? And are there perhaps moments where you’ve seen the museum also learning from this experience?
WASHINGTON: Just hearing museum requirements for artists who have been dead for over 30 years, it makes me think, Wow, I'm still only 25! For most of its history they wouldn't even think to look my way. So it’s refreshing that we can step into the space and automatically get the respect our art deserves. And they are handling my fabric art with gloves, so I’ve learned more about how to care and handle work that needs to be maintained for a long period of time. It also reminds me that this space wasn't initially made for me, or at least not made for me yet. It's awesome to be seen as the living artist, to be respected as the living artist as much as they are respecting the physical objects.
GAUCIN: Yes, they are definitely having their own learning curve working with living artists. They put on their gloves and inspect everything when it comes off of the big moving truck, because they’re used to working with million dollar insured works of art. But it’s funny, when I varnished these paintings I did it outside, and it was on a day when a windstorm came out of nowhere. The paintings fell over. They ended up with small specks of dust, and one of them had a dead mosquito stuck to it. Once I shipped to the museum I got an email saying, Do we have your permission to use tweezers to pull this mosquito off? I was like, just yank it off! So yeah, they were a bit over the top with treating it like a precious object. I understand why they do it. But maybe in time it will keep getting better.
DEMERY: One illuminating thing for me was a conversation with Stephanie during the installation. There was this moment where I wasn't needed for the puzzle installation. I had already given them the green light on what I wanted. So Stephanie and I were talking about how the staff records or documents the installation process so that the notes will exist for their colleagues in the future.We started chatting, and it turned out that they've read notes that were directives for them, written by colleagues from 25 years ago. Some of their records go even further back, to the 1930s. So they're in this continuum, being part of this tradition of archiving. It was a moment of recognition for me, seeing them already acknowledging the future. We're going to be long dead at one point and this place is still going to be here, so it becomes this magical thing, how we're contributing to that continuum, that quilt of history. I think we're so used to discussing the dangers of capitalism and all the scary things about what an institution can and cannot be for the welfare of the human being. But also this was a beautiful reminder of why we create as humans in the first place. And why we go in there and see what our human ancestors left behind, who was left out, and critiquing whether this is actually reflecting who we are.
WASHINGTON: And someday there’s going to be a museum install team reading directives about how to handle mosquitos. It’s a gift to the future.
FORUM: This is the fourth exhibition with the Nelson's KC Arts Now initiative focusing on local living artists. The first three were focused on African American, Asian American, and Latin American artists. But unlike the first three exhibitions which were all group shows tied around those three groups of people, this one is the first out of this KC Arts Now series that is three distinct shows. I'm curious about your thoughts as artists, the difference in this approach, versus what someone might experience with one of these other group shows.
DEMERY: I think they’re different experiences, and it makes me think about what it means for us to encounter work and how it's displayed. I thought the last exhibition was phenomenal,the one that was dealing with Latinx identities. For me, when you see work in a group show it's always just a snapshot of each artist. In a lot of cases for group shows, the artist does have a strong hand in the curatorial process. So for this, it was really meaningful to shape how our work needs to be displayed and make choices with the museum. I think that's a great step in the right direction. I hope that the award show is not the only time the museum does that. I think that this format would be wonderful outside of the Charlotte Street show. I think that's an important thing to do.
WASHINGTON: I think it was interesting to work with the installation team because the space we're in is considered their experimental installation area. From the way they structured the walls to the way they built my platform, or the casing for Kevin’s fans and lights, it was very different from what the museum traditionally does because they’re not often working with the artists. The install team seemed even happier because they said things like, “We never get to use all of our skills.” Which was kind of shocking because you're in this huge museum with all these traveling shows. They explained that it’s rare to work with living, breathing artists and figure out how to create a space and understand how we want the work to be seen. Even though Stephanie was the curator, it felt like the ball was forever in my court, even during install.
GAUCIN: I second that. They were phenomenal. And Stephanie was really good about being like, this is your show, do it however you want, and we're here to help. That sort of thing. I think I got a little bit annoyed with them and they got a little bit annoyed with me because I was not picky at all. I was like, they're just paintings, they need to go on the wall. And they're like, “61 inches? 60 inches?” And I'm like, it looks the same. Just throw it up there. I almost felt like they were wanting me to be really picky and say, I want this here, I want this there.
FORUM: So you had the chance to think about how you want your work viewed and experienced, and yours was just simple. Aleah is over here painting the walls certain colors, and Kevin is constructing elaborate lights and fan systems, because that's how you want their work to be experienced, and the resources are there to do it.
GAUCIN: I probably underutilized them because they were offering so much help. But I couldn't really think of anything. I mean, paintings don't really need a whole lot. So I think they were bored with my installation.
WASHINGTON: I never heard them say they were bored, but they did say that your installation was the fastest. I heard you were done in two hours.
GAUCIN: It was just slightly over two hours. And then I spent the rest of the day wandering around and looking through the museum.
WASHINGTON: Nice. That's amazing.
FORUM: Kevin is from the Bay Area, Aleah is from Dallas, and Juan Diego is from Mexico. I’m curious about your experience in Kansas City and what it's like being a working artist in this city.
DEMERY: Kansas City is such a vibrant arts community. I'm from the Bay Area, I lived in Chicago, and I’ve spent a lot of time in Berlin and Cologne, exploring their art scenes. All art ecosystems have their own importance, but Kansas City is a special place. There's more of a democratized experience, and those who care about art are in community with one another, from all different stratas of life and activity. I see the Nelson working towards showing that. I think the more this happens in the museum, the more important it's going to be for the artists who come after us. The places that don't reflect the ecosystems and the communities that they live in eventually render themselves obsolete.
WASHINGTON: This is such a rich city for an artist. Coming here from the south, no one knew me, so I could just experiment, try new things, and learn a whole new skill set with the confidence that no one was going to judge me for it. The city felt small enough that I could really focus on my studies, but big enough that if I wanted to explore things like First Friday, I didn’t have to go too far to be immersed in the community. And it helped having such strong professors at KCAI encouraging different paths. You know, after I switched majors and added a year due to COVID, I felt really done with school. I was ready to throw in the towel and I didn't want to think about grad school. But grad school is really promoted in the art world. If you want to become a strong artist, you need a title to back you with an MFA. So I definitely found comfort when professors encouraged me to apply to residencies instead. I went to Michigan first and spent a summer there, then came back and immediately started my residency at Charlotte Street. It let me leap from a student to actually building a body of work, applying to local galleries, working with local curators, and being in group shows. I was able to find my own route as an artist. And the art scene here is big enough that it’s not just one set space, so if you have a tough experience within a gallery because they are misogynistic, or they don't want you to be experimental, or they make it tough to show your work, I can say, well, I've shown here and I've learned my lesson. Now I know what I don't want to experience. It allows you to understand how different galleries or art spaces work. It made me more comfortable in voicing how I want to direct my work in those places, especially if they weren't made for women or for black people. I think it just made me more protective over my work. So I think Kansas City is interesting because there are so many avenues that you can go with art, so many small opportunities that can lead to a domino effect, or lead you to the right people for your next steps. And even if you're taking a season to rest and not create, you can still go to a friend’s show and be involved in what is happening, and not have that pressure to always be showing work. You're already involved by being there and experiencing it with others.
GAUCIN: My experience with Kansas City has been very different because with my science degree, my original plan was to make money with chemistry where I’d gone to school in Pittsburg, Kansas. That way I wouldn't have to worry about galleries and patrons, and I could just make the artwork I wanted on my own while working some chemistry job. That didn't pan out because the industry in this region is a certain way. I didn't fit into that industry. I was never hired. I applied all over the place in the rural areas. I never applied to Kansas City because I was also poor, living in a small town right after undergrad, and I didn't have the money to move. So in my experience, grad school for art is what actually pulled me out of poverty and enabled me to have mobility. Grad school and then teaching is how I got to Kansas City. I would never have been able to get here without that opportunity. So it's interesting that art provided a livelihood instead of chemistry. They always talk about STEM offering a good career, a good salary. Go with STEM! But what good is all of that if you can never land a job because the environment is kind of hostile? So now I'm finally stabilized through art and teaching, which is really nice. I never would have expected that. And it's actually become the reverse, so if I want to dabble in science, I'll do it in the basement, like I'm a mad scientist. I love that. It flipped around for me. So I've had to kind of crawl my way up. A lot of people haven't had the experience of being in a small rural town where there are no jobs and you don't even have the money to move out. You only have the money to sustain yourself. So overcoming that obstacle, everything else kind of flowed afterwards. But it took a long time to overcome that obstacle. I feel so blessed to be manifesting opportunity and abundance now. I still don't really know Kansas City that well. I've only shown one or two places here. So it has felt difficult to get into Kansas City because I feel like I've come in through the back door. Even though you would expect grad school to be the front door, it still seems kind of like the back door. I'm still figuring out what it means to be in Kansas City as an artist and to be part of the scene. Charlotte Street has been huge in that regard. I don't think I would have been able to have entered the art scene without something letting me in like that.
DEMERY: I think I see a lot of people from the Kansas City art scene who seem eager to get out of it. And I'm always like, what? That's wild to me. I'm like, this is such an amazing place. But I understand because there's also this need for versatility in relationship with the unknown. Right? When I had job offers to leave and move to New York, I chose to stay in Kansas City. This is a place where I can build. I think it's the tradition of artists to be outside of what’s expected. Not to disrespect our colleagues in New York, but it felt like moving would’ve been a resumé thing for me. My heroes were in New York in, like, 1975, back when you could get a warehouse space for $200. That's not the case anymore. So I was like, how are artists responding? We have such a great ecosystem here in Kansas City. I would like to see more studios for artists. I thought that was very strange just when I first came here. I mean, we have Studios Inc and Charlotte Street, which I think are among the residencies with terms that last longer than a year. A year is a pretty common cap. That’s great, but when I'm looking at the system we have here, there needs to be more studio space. When I moved here, that was one of the most difficult things to find if you weren't in one of those residencies. It's very strange for such a thriving arts community. To me, I think it signals a small problem of how we look at established, mid-career, and emerging artists. When you're not nourishing the emerging with basic things like studios, you're not creating space for people to rise to those other ranks. And that's the thing I think we struggle with here.
WASHINGTON: And not just more studios, but more affordable studio spaces are also necessary. Even when I was finishing up at Charlotte Street, I was trying to find a space that had enough room and that wasn't just a small, enclosed room, and it was tough.
GAUCIN: What did you end up doing?
WASHINGTON: I went to the West Bottoms, the building next to Holsum Studios. Another resident from when Andrew and Kevin and I were first at Charlotte Street, Mikey Yates, moved into a shared space with Alex Skorija. I went to open studios there, and Mikey had heard that I was looking for a space. Mikey and Alex we like, There’s two of us, but we could fit three! They scooted over, squeezed me in, and we split rent three ways. It’s great. And the West Bottoms is interesting because there’s a thriving art scene right now, but it’s also being gentrified.
GAUCIN: Lots of real estate investment seems to be happening.
WASHINGTON: Yeah, and lots of construction disregarding the artists who are making this place what it is. There’s that thing again, where you’re paying for a space and using it, and then someone comes in with their ideal image of what the place can be, but it doesn’t seem to include you, and they interrupt what you have going on.
FORUM: It seems to be repeating the pattern once again, like what happened in the Crossroads, where the artists brought the energy and made it what it is, and then came the investments and gentrification making it unaffordable for those who made it what it is.
GAUCIN: When I think about Kansas City as an arts ecosystem, I think some credit also goes to Charlotte Street, for example in their partnership with the museum, to enable that kind of flexibility and responsiveness for artists. For me at least, having the residency kind of allowed one thing to lead to the other. I can't imagine being in the museum without first having arrived at Charlotte Street. So their part in the ecosystem is very significant because they're not directly representing anybody there, but Charlotte Street gives the museum such great access to the arts community as a whole, which is definitely progress and definitely movement in the right direction.
DEMERY: When they first announced the awards, I remember thinking, wow, all three of us were in residence together at Charlotte Street. That's not a common thing with the award, from what I understand.
WASHINGTON: I think this is the first year in which three current residents got the award. Usually it's maybe one resident or possibly two. So they were saying that this year was special because it was all three of us.
GAUCIN: I'm really glad Charlotte Street worked it into their jury system to where they are separate from the process with the jurors. I know for some people who didn't get the award, they were kind of like, oh, that seems kind of suspicious.
DEMERY: In what way?
GAUCIN: About it being all Charlotte Street residents who got the award. Kind of like the deck was stacked in our favor. And it just isn’t the case with how the process works.
DEMERY: I mean, it's interesting what you bring up, because it makes me think about the politics of space. You're right insofar as Charlotte Street provides so many opportunities that we all three benefited from. The idea of having this beautiful studio space, giving us the time to create. Like you said, we had to get there first. So it helped us in a lot of ways. So I think there's a reason why there's that kind of skepticism, but not in terms of a stacking, right? But it helped us create and be ready for this kind of opportunity.
GAUCIN: I think that will always be an issue. Some people just don't know what they don't know, especially about the process and everything that goes into being at the right place at the right time, those sorts of things. They just see the results at the end. No one saw the hundred hours in the studio making the work. They just see the end result.
FORUM: During my studio visit with Juan Diego, I saw that blank canvas. And I heard you saying, “How am I going to get this done?” And each of you when I visited were in similar states preparing for this show. You were mostly finished, you knew what you’re doing, but you were at your edge to get this thing done. And it seemed, in your own ways, that each of you embraced it as a challenge, like taking this “Oh shit” moment as an opportunity to level up.
GAUCIN: Yeah. I think that's what people miss. They don't see the job that they actually work to earn a living, and the studio practice being extra on top of that. They don’t see all the sleepless nights, the three cups of coffee just to get through the next day.
WASHINGTON: I agree. This year was tough. I had two jobs the whole year. Receiving a residency after undergrad was definitely motivation to keep making work, having the luxury to be in the studio at any open moment. It helps to be in a community with other studio residents where you might see a couple of people at random hours, on a random day, and to be reminded that everyone is going through the same challenges and doing the work. But I still have a nine to five job, and all these other commitments in order to have a home and to pay the bills. So I am just grateful for the residency because it kept me going.
DEMERY: For me, on top of teaching at KCAI this year I was also on tenure track search committees. And I did another show in Germany on top of this, so two days after shipping to the Nelson I shipped off for Cologne. After making five of those windchimes, I was just tired. I'm sure you both had the same experience. I just collapsed. So I resonate deeply with that, remembering running into you all at Charlotte Street in between other work and understanding that we're all just trying to have this experience of being artists. It takes a lot of work. Every time I walk into a studio or gallery, I'm always seeing other artists and thinking, how did they do that? You know what I mean? So when you get to the end result with your own work, and then seeing someone else's, how do you not respect that process?
GAUCIN: I think it's all about loving the work and the process, being in touch with yourself enough to where you actually want to come in after a full day and do more work. I think a lot of artists don't really love art that much, or don't really love their art that much. At the end of the day they’re good just going home and resting. But some are so passionate about the work that it is a little less work, and more of like a refuge. I remember talking to some of the Charlotte Street residents about how the better part of our day was the studio at the end of the day.
FORUM: What’s great about artists in community is that the learning never really ends. Like you said, Kevin, you can work on your own art, and then still walk in and see someone else’s work and think, How did they do that? So there’s the feeling of awe and mystery. But there’s also the practical curiosity. No, really, how did they do that? What was the process? And so the curiosity continues as well.
DEMERY: That’s why education is so central to the work. I love going to the studio, but being able to be a colleague of someone who was learning from me at one point is great. People sometimes call teaching a thankless job, because you really are just giving from the minute you walk in the door to the minute you leave. It is something you have to actually be invested in. Like Juan Diego said, some artists don't really want to go to the studio. It’s like that with teaching. For some, it doesn't mean that much to them. Aleah was one of my students, so being able to see Aleah right here with me, this is the best. That was the best part of getting the Charlotte Street award for me. You can ask Amy Kligman or the committee when they told us who else got it. I was more excited about Aleah than I was about me, because that was really important to me. I think that that's the kind of stuff that is important about the arts community. I think we forget that art is an act of giving. If we can embody that a little bit more, hopefully some of those other feelings can go away. You know what I mean? Like, we're just out here giving. The fact that you can give someone the experience of stepping into another world. That's a gift, right?
Forum is an ad-free bimonthly print magazine elevating the critical study and encouragement of the arts in the Greater Kansas City region. Learn more at kansascityartistscoalition.org/forum
