Noelle Choy in her West Bottoms studio (photo by Jim Barcus)
The 2025 Charlotte Street Visual Artist Award winner embodies freedom in strange, colorful and chaotic sculptures, installations and performance art
Noelle Choy has won a Charlotte Street 2025 Visual Artist Award. One of three visual artists to win the award, Choy has lived in Kansas City for the last three years and made her presence felt in the local art community with her compelling installations, performance art and collaborations, as well as through teaching and running an art space. Her work investigates the limits of artmaking with unusual materials and actions but also has a deeply personal connection to her family and her deceased mother.
Born in Silver Spring, Maryland, Choy did her undergraduate studies at Virginia Commonwealth University and then went to graduate school at Cranbook Academy for the Arts in Detroit. After grad school, she worked as an artist in Brooklyn, before receiving an Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design Teaching Fellowship and moving to Kansas City to teach at the Kansas City Art Institute.
Choy’s work combines sculpture, installation and performance art in a unique style. No material is off limits; she combines traditional media and methods including paint, woodworking, casting and photography with found household objects, recycled materials, and commercial products. She has a particular fondness for transparent materials like clear plastic. The sculptures are undoubtedly strange, colorful and chaotic, but put together in very specific and compelling ways. The final product has the look of a theater prop, seeming unreal, like a caricature of a real object.
A recent example of such work could be seen in Choy’s collaboration with Adams Puryear in an exhibition called “Control Center” at Bad Seed, where the gallery was transformed into an imaginary doomsday bunker. Made of paint, found objects and ceramic guard dogs, the show evoked paranoid (or perhaps not so paranoid) fantasies about the end of the world. The artists collaborated to create posters about all the possible ways the world could end, such as nuclear war, alien invasion, meteors and so on. TVs played video of the world’s richest men — Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg — all redubbed to say deranged things about the end of the world and the doomsday bunkers they were building. To complete the exhibition, Choy and Puryear held a street festival, donning cult-like robes and parading a large snake sculpture.
An older work that Choy feels was formative is “Domniete Yourslef,” a large sculpture of a dragon’s head painted completely white, with a pull-up bar installed in its mouth. For the performance, Choy did pull ups on the bar, while sliding in and out of the dragon’s mouth and down its red fabric tongue. A New Age self-help text, found among the possessions of her deceased mother, was read as she did the performance.
“Art should be about something enormous, like loss or love,” says Choy. Much of her work relates to her mother, who died when Choy was in her early 20s. While it might not be obvious on the surface or at a casual glance, this focus helps Choy find direction for her work. In “Domniete Yourslef,” the dragon represents her mother, and the process of sliding in and out of it is meant as a symbolic reenactment, a rebirth.
Choy works in many other mediums too. She’s working on a zine about the TV show “Grey’s Anatomy,” documenting all of the times the character Christina Yang breaks down and cries. She finds these moments compelling, and she isn’t alone; the zine incorporates anonymous internet comments on these moments of vulnerability. Indeed, the zine itself is an act of vulnerability, as Choy doesn’t distinguish between something that might be seen as “lowbrow fandom” like a TV show zine, and her gallery-based work.
Choy stays busy. She teaches at KCAI, where she is in charge of a sophomore studio of painting majors and also teaches electives on subjects like color theory, performance art and esoteric topics like invisible art. She says most of her students are interested in painting, but she encourages them to try as many things as they can, and that her favorite part of teaching is “seeing students realize they can do so much more than they thought they could.”
Choy also helps run “One Hundred Million,” a local art space. Upcoming events include a student’s senior thesis exhibition and “The Rock Show,” which invites the public to bring a rock, any rock, and put it on display in the space.
As part of winning the Charlotte Street Visual Artist Award, Choy received a $10,000 unrestricted cash grant to further her art, bringing the total amount of money distributed by Charlotte Street’s prestigious award to $871,500. As part of the award, Choy will be part of an exhibition including the other recipients, Hùng Lê and Merry Sun, at the Spencer Museum of Art this August.
The award comes at a precarious time for art and art funding. Charlotte Street, the leading arts non-profit in Kansas City, recently received a $25,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, only to have it rescinded in the wake of the Trump administration’s “DOGE” cuts to the NEA, as the government agency shifts to “reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the President.”
Choy’s work is worthy of celebration, as is the prestigious award she has received. In a world that is becoming increasingly close-minded, the freedom of Choy’s art is refreshing.
For more information about Choy, visit noellechoy.com.
