I’m excited to tell y’all about Read the Room, an art show I co-curated with Tim Brown, Thayer N G Bray, and Jason Lips that opens in a week and a half at Charlotte Street here in Kansas City! To explain what it’s about, here’s our curatorial statement:

Read the Room consists of more than 20 local and regional artists who work within or in dialogue with the worlds of alternative comics, zines, and cartooning.

The exhibition asks you to consider comics as an expansive and evolving mode of visual storytelling. Through the accessible language of comics, each artist authors their own understanding of the world as well as imagining new ones.

Read the Room invites you to spend time with these narrative works, appreciating them both as works of visual and literary art. Please, do read the room.

Artists include Kelsey Borch, Joshua W. Cotter, Momoko Usami, Nick Potter, Jenny Jo Hrabe, Jamie Bates, John F. Malta, Siobhán Gallagher, and Barbara Lane Tharsas. I’m grateful to my co-curators for opening my eyes to seeing comics in other media such as ceramics.

A preliminary postcard mockup. Clockwise from left, artworks are Untitled by Jenny Jo Hrabe, a crop of a page from 1000 Doors by Kelsey Borch, and Traversing Twilight by Momoko Usami & Joshua W. Cotter.

The co-curators will also have works in the exhibition. I’ve created a big vinyl mural for it, here’s a sketch of what it’ll look like:

The opening will be 6 to 9pm on Friday, May 24th at Charlotte Street Gallery, 3333 Wyoming St, Kansas City, MO. I hope to see y’all there, but if you can’t make it to the opening, the show will remain up thru July 13th. Check out the post about Read the Room on the Charlotte Street Foundation website for more details about the show and related events.