Vulpes Bastille staff (pictured left to right): Elinore Noyes, marketing & communications director; Jason Comotto, operations director; Audrey Schuler, gallery director, and Caranne Camarena, owner and executive director. (photo by Jim Barcus)
A bounty of artist-run galleries enriches Kansas City’s art community
Dorry Gates, Myra Morgan, Jan Weiner, David Levik, Byron Cohen, Lenny Berkowitz, Sean Kelly, John O’Brien, Tom Deatherage. These once prominent dealers who helped shaped the Kansas City art landscape are now part of Kansas City art history.
If the 1990s were the heyday of commercial galleries in Kansas City, when this energetic group plied their trade at spaces from the Crossroads to City Market and at outposts in Westport and the West Plaza, the present decade may be remembered for an explosion of artist-run galleries from the West Bottoms to Waldo.
Building on the example set by flagship artist-run spaces such as Charlotte Street and Plug, the vibe is edgy and experimental at a multitude of new spaces which have become an essential platform of exposure for a diversity of artists unimaginable 30 years ago.
Serving as incubators and showcases, artist-run spaces attract and foster the development of artists at varying levels of skill and experience. Artists present work, refine their voices and connect with a community of fellow artists and patrons. Here’s a roundup of many artist-run spaces in Kansas City:
Vulpes Bastille
1737 Locust St., vulpesbastille.com
Housed in a 100-year-old renovated dance hall, Vulpes Bastille upholds the arts district roots of the East Crossroads. The venue contains a main gallery, secondary gallery and affordable artist studios that offer a community feel for working artists of all career levels. Vulpes Bastille is run by the volunteer team of owner and executive director Caranne Camarena, Audrey Schuler, Elinore Noyes and Jason Comotto.
In April, the gallery presented a student show guest-curated by Tanith K, owner and curator of Gallery Athanor, thetanith.com, an in-home gallery located in east Brookside.
In May, writer and artist Andrew Johnson exhibited “In The Presence of an Absence” at Vulpes Bastille. In a previous exhibition, he displayed work in the cavernous main gallery; this time, he chose the smaller secondary gallery for its intimate feel. Johnson created an intriguing multimedia installation filled with objects and imagery associated with his great-grandfather Florencio Garcia. The life of Garcia in New Mexico a century ago presented a mystery to Johnson that he and the audience could explore beyond the limitations of words.
Soft lighting and a confined space enhanced the loops of delicate sound and video. Assembled artifacts, imagery and words weren’t wholly revelatory. They concealed as much as they revealed. Johnson smartly crafted an experience that felt familiar yet mysterious, personal yet profound. Non-familial objects and documentation referenced the residue of confrontational “American history, politics, assimilation propaganda, and autobiography.”
If the set pieces had been staged in a larger gallery, physical and psychic distance would rob the installation of its potency. Johnson’s choice of space enhanced the investigation of his own “scrambled” family history.
100,000,000
Located in the alley between 222 and 332 W. 75th St., www.100million.space
Artists David Alpert, Noelle Choy, Adams Puryear, Merry Sun, Cooper Siegel and Yuxiao Mu collaborated to open their Waldo art space and retail shop, 100,000,000. Its debut February 2025 exhibition “Dinner, Look” featured work by Detroit-based artist Kiwi Nguyen and a Lunar New Year dinner banquet. May’s exhibition “10” presented work by 10 artists from the junior class in the Kansas City Art Institute sculpture department.
100,000,000 demonstrates how art students and working artists remove barriers to fill a void and initiate means to exhibit work.
The six founding artists “sensed a gap in art spaces in Kansas City for more experimental, fluid places to experience artwork. We aren’t trying to model ourselves off a commercial gallery, or necessarily be legible to collectors, but instead want to hold onto the joy of making with others,” said Choy.
Exhibitions and programming highlight artists from Kansas City and beyond “whose work and research excite us,” said Choy. “What we have in common is wanting something more challenging, absurd, and alive within contemporary art.”
Community means accessibility and uplifting peers, where 100,000,000 provides artists the “opportunity to host workshops, programming, screenings, and weird ideas that don’t really fit elsewhere,” said Choy. “As working artists we want to support artists by showing their work, paying them, and celebrating them.”
Upcoming programming includes Moll Caffey’s July artist residency followed by an August solo exhibition. Yuxiao Mu curates a photography exhibition in September.
The Smalter Gallery
1802 W. 39th St., 816-200-2554, smalterart.com
Lee Smalter, who grew up in Connecticut, felt compelled to own and operate an art gallery. She answered an advertisement for a space in Kansas City’s West 39th Street neighborhood next to Prospero’s Books. Extensive renovation in 2018-2019 led to the gallery’s debut before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Despite citywide uncertainty and isolation at the time, the public embraced Smalter’s gallery, situated in the dense residential and small business community. Since inception, the gallery has served as a space dedicated to displaying work by emerging and established artists. By design, Smalter established a space that’s non-elitist and inviting for both artists and the public, especially passersby who may not be avid arts patrons.
Holsum Gallery
1200 W. 12th St., West Bottoms, instagram.com/holsumgallery
Veteran Kansas City artist Garry Noland of Holsum Gallery has operated his third-floor studio and project space in the former Holsum Food Products building for six years. He has exhibited work by Cherline Philogene, Kansas City Art Institute students and Chantel Guzman-Cupil, among others.
The building itself, known as Holsum Studios, houses multiple floors of artist-run studios and galleries. Operating since January 2020, the building is a hub for creativity and camaraderie among four-dozen or so artists. Its concentration of studios provides plentiful exploration for arts enthusiasts during its annual Open Studios.
3WEST KC
1106 Santa Fe St., instagram.com/3west_kc
In August 2024, Johnson County Community College fine arts professor and sculptor Mark Cowardin launched 3West KC gallery in a corner of his spacious studio. A walkway connects the building that houses 3West and other artist-run spaces, including abstract painter Alex Skorija’s Charmed KC Gallery, to the building where Holsum Gallery and other artist spaces are located. Event coordination between artists enables guests to view multiple exhibitions in close proximity. Cowardin is dedicating the first two years of 3West shows to solo exhibitions by his former JCCC students.
“I pay attention to who is doing what, and I want to show the amazing work that these folks are doing. 3West has become an extension of my teaching practice,” said Cowardin.
Upcoming fall shows include sculpture/installation work by Chelsy Walker with a closing reception at the end of September, Alex Anderson’s exhibition in October-early November, and a year-end solo exhibition of paintings by Alyssa Sipe.
ION Gallery
1200 W. 12th St., West Bottoms, ion-gallery.com
Elise Gagliardi started ION Gallery in November 2024 with the help of collector Dwight Smith, Sam Haan and Cesar Lopez, who run the United Colors gallery (currently on hiatus). Located inside the historic Holsum building, Gagliardi chose the space for its proximity to other artist-run studios and galleries. ION’s current exhibition “Large Margin: Jackson Daughety” runs through Aug. 15, 2025.
“As artists and galleries are looking for more affordable studio spaces, this was an excellent opportunity to invest in a community-driven space where we can pool our resources to reach wider audiences and have a place to show high-level emerging artists,” said Gagliardi. “My ultimate goal is to develop an educated base of collectors who are supporting regional visual artists with an emphasis in film and new media. With a background in photography myself, I want to find ways to engage the photo community in ways most galleries in town aren’t.”
The Waiting Room
1106 Santa Fe St., Basement, waitingroomgallery.com
Artists SK Reed and David Lieffring secured a 5,000-square-foot space in the Holsum building’s basement and converted it into five artist studios and gallery spaces. The unfinished lower-level arts venue quietly projects a sense of discovery, lo-fi energy and untapped potential, where an artist/maker space might double as an underground dance club.
For its second showcase, May 3-June 29, The Waiting Room hosted “SOAKIE’S WAS HOME,” a thought-provoking exhibition by Nasir Anthony Montalvo. Development of the Power and Light District forced closure of Soakie’s, a Black gay bar that operated from 1993 to 2004 in downtown Kansas City. Montalvo gathered and curated materials about Soakie’s from elders Gary Carrington, Starla Carr and Tisha Taylor as part of the Black Queer Archive. The multimedia installation displayed televisions, photographs and ephemera about the bygone establishment. Montalvo presented Soakie’s as an anchor to the past and a prompt to ponder “Black queer futurity.” The hallway gallery displayed work by the Kansas City Art Institute’s Black Student Union and Pride Art Coalition members.
The Waiting Room is the current incarnation of the former Beco Gallery housed within Beco Flowers in the Crossroads Arts District. Beco’s owners, Rebecca Ederer and Collette Keenan, relocated the flower shop in 2022. At Beco Gallery, Reed curated 10 off-site exhibitions when the art space lost its 23-year-old home.
As its website states, The Waiting Room speaks to the “temporariness of art spaces in our current climate… The name feels full of other meanings, a reference to moments of transition, of hope or anxiety, a kind of longing without clarity.”
