Tag Archives: Technology

2025 Young Artists Retreat Speakers Confirmed

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Speakers have been confirmed for the 2025 Young Artists Retreat, occurring on Friday, October 25!

For those unable to attend in person, we will have a livestream available as well. Register for the livestream by Tuesday, Oct. 22!

LIVESTREAM AGENDA (times listed in CST):

  • 9:10 AM-10: Session Speakers
    • SunYoung Park or Joy Rhodes
  • 10:10-11 AM: Professional Development Session with Harold Smith
  • 11:10 AM-noon: Session Speakers
    • Christopher Erazo or Matthew Willie Garcia
  • 1 PM: Keynote Speaker, Amy Kligman

All sessions will be recorded and available after the livestream airs.

KEYNOTE SPEAKER

Brunette woman with shoulder length hair

Amy Kligman

Amy Kligman, artist and organizer of The Salon for Possible Futures, which is on view in the Nerman Museum, will be the Keynote Speaker for the Young Artists Retreat program. The Salon for Possible Futures is an interactive space for community gathering and collective imagining. Themes of fostering humanity and relationships, learning from the past, and building sustainability, hope, and magic are the underpinnings of The Salon’s assembled objects and imagery. Amy Kligman was the Executive Artistic Director at Charlotte Street 2015-2025. Kligman’s career and experience as an exhibiting artist and grassroots curator/arts administrator spans 20 years of studio & exhibition work, independent curating and organizing, and artist-run projects.

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT SPEAKER

Man with a beard wearing a dark shirt

Harold Smith

Harold Smith is a Kansas City-based visual artist whose internationally exhibited and collected work includes painting, collage, mixed media, performance, video, sound, and assemblage. His work focuses on the complexity of black masculinity in America. He also writes for KC Studio magazine. Smith was an educator in Kansas City for 30 years, teaching computer science and other computer classes, and later coding and game design, at Kansas City’s Manual Career & Technical Center. Before retiring from teaching in 2021, Smith taught art at Lincoln College Preparatory Middle School for two and a half years. He received a Charlotte Street Visual Arts Award and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2022. He was selected for the Art Omi International Artists Residency Program in 2023. Locally, he’s exhibited at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art and the Lawrence Arts Center.

SESSION SPEAKERS

Brunette man with short hair and mustache

Christopher Erazo

Christopher Erazo is a Chicano/Mexican American photographer and videographer based in Lawrence, Kansas. His creative yet simple style and distinctive use of VHS videography have earned his work exhibitions in Mexico City, multiple regional galleries, and the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. Through his art, Christopher celebrates Chicano culture while highlighting the beauty of all cultures, reimagining traditional works with a modern perspective, and inspiring young creators to embrace their heritage and unique voices.

 

 

Man sitting down on a wooden floor in front of a white wall

Matthew Willie Garcia

Matthew Willie Garcia is a California native now based in Kansas City, MO. Garcia’s work transcends traditional print media working in screen printing, mokuhanga, projection-mapping, animation, and large-scale installations. Inspired by a blend of science, science fiction, and their queer identity, Garcia explores these themes through color abstraction and nonrepresentational forms. Holding a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA from the University of Kansas, Garcia has earned acclaim regionally, notably exhibiting at the Nerman Contemporary Museum of Art, Des Moines Art Center and internationally in Japan and Spain. Garcia recently served as the 2024/2025 Grant Wood Fellow at the University of Iowa.

Woman next to botanical sculpture

SunYoung Park

SunYoung Park is a South Korean interdisciplinary artist exploring hybridity, memory, and cultural identity through ceramics and mixed media. Her sculptures merge clay with fabric, wood, and botanical elements, blurring boundaries between body and object. She is a 2026 Studio Mass MoCA Fellowship recipient, a Wassaic Project Fellowship recipient, and has also held residencies at the Interdisciplinary Ceramic Research Center, University of Kansas; Charlotte Street Foundation; and Clayarch Gimhae Museum. Her work has been exhibited internationally at the Jingdezhen International Ceramic Biennale, the International Contemporary Ceramic Art Triennial in Andenne, Belgium, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.

Brunette woman with shoulder length hair

Joy Rhodes

Joy Rhodes is Professor and Department Chair of Fashion Merchandising and Design at JCCC. Prior to her career in higher education, she worked many years in the industry, as a merchandising manager for an apparel licensing company overseeing all aspects of product development from concept through to production and working for technology solution providers that developed software specifically for the fashion industry both on the retail and product development sides of the business. She earned her BA in Apparel Design and Production from Colorado State University in Fort Collins, CO and her MBA from Baker University in Baldwin City, KS. She also completed an extended semester program at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City.

Leo Villareal Microcosm Illuminated!

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We are so excited to have the Leo Villareal sculpture Microcosm re-illuminated!

Microcosm (2007) by Leo Villareal is a site-specific permanent installation. It consists of thousands of white LEDs, custom software, electrical wiring and hardware. It was re-illuminated in April 2025 after a years-long effort to completely restore the work.

Leo Villareal, Microcosm

Fusing art and technology, Leo Villareal’s Microcosm is part of the cantilevered entrance of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art. The artwork’s 60,000 light-emitting diodes (LEDs) shift and swirl to create countless patterns dictated by a computer program created by the artist: “I create the conditions and see what interesting things happen,” Villareal says. “There is never the exact same repetition of patterns.”

This extraordinary union of art and architecture came together before the museum even opened the doors in 2007. Villareal and his team worked with Kyu Sung Woo Architects and J.E. Dunn Construction during the construction of the building to install the work.

“The LED is a remarkable piece of technology, allowing limitless possibilities in light sculptures,” Villareal said. He writes code, based on an old game program (John Conway’s Game of Life), and uses formulae to vary the parameters for the light. Even under the prescribed conditions, the movement constantly changes. “Even though you might recognize a sequence of lights, there is always a variation in its velocity or the number of times it is repeated.”

 

Villareal is inspired by rules, chaos theory and nature, where small particles build together and then break apart like ocean waves crashing against land. Similarly in his installations, light fractals cluster together, then diminish and eventually disappear. “Light has a primal effect. I hope the work captures people’s attention, then as they look at it longer, they see more and more in it. People will have different experiences with the piece. They will see it very legibly from the road, and as they approach the front of the museum, they will see it at different scales. I want the piece to give the museum a sense of life and animation. I want it to give the sense that something exciting is going on inside the building.”

In addition to the Nerman Museum’s piece, Villareal has a permanent installation in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and has installed temporary pieces worldwide including on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and on 15 bridges spanning the Thames in London. His sculpture, Fountain (KCI) 2023, is prominently featured at the Kansas City Airport.

Leo Villareal received a BA from Yale University in 1990, and an MPS from Tisch School of the Arts, New York University in 1994.

Zielinski sculpture on campus fully installed once more!

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You may have noticed that in the last year the Andrzej Zieliński sculpture on campus, ὀμφαλός (Omphalos) Syndrome (2017), was incomplete – the wooden slab at the top and center of the sculpture was missing. This was due to an ongoing restoration effort to install the wooden portion such that it will be highly resistant to wind (this is something we need to be mindful of in Kansas!) The museum’s preparatory team re-installed the wooden portion of the work with a new system securing it to the stone base so that it will now stand the test of time – and 50mph winds!

Check it out next time you are over on that side of campus, near the sports fields and just outside the Career and Technical Education Center (CTEC) building.

The title here ὀμφαλός (Omphalos) Syndrome references the belief (perhaps misguided) that a place of geopolitical power is the most important place in the world. Among the Ancient Greeks, it was believed that the city of Delphi held this central significance. According to myth, Zeus placed the sacred omphalos stone at Delphi, designating it as the center of the Earth. In this sculpture, the wooden slap is placed perpendicular to the large stone base that is perched atop a tangle of bright green metal zigzag lines. Technology is a common theme in Zielinski’s work, and here the arrangement of the parts of the sculpture could suggest a laptop with the screen open and the green maze of lines representing the electrical signals conveying information to and from the device. Is Zielinski suggesting that our devices have become portals to the most significant ‘place’ in our current moment – the online world?

For more information about Zielinski and his inspirations, check out the exhibition page from his 2015 solo exhibition at the Nerman Museum:  Andrzej Zielinski · Open Sourced | Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art