National Curators Engage Kansas City Artists in Public Critiques

Charlotte Street presents The Guest Critic, a three-part programming series that will bring nationally recognized curators to Kansas City for a public artist critique. The 2025 series will feature: TK Smith (Curator, Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University, Atlanta, GA), Jovanna Venegas (Curator, SculptureCenter, New York, NY), and Taylor Bythewood-Porter (Curator, Museum of Riverside, Riverside, CA).

The Guest Critic is a critique series, which pairs national curators with Kansas City artists who have either exhibited work in a contemporary space outside of Kansas City, or completed a national or international residency. The program will take place in the Charlotte Street Stern Theater, where works will be staged for a public critique with our guest curators, and the artists will be selected by program facilitators Yashi Davalos and Kimi Kitada. At the end of the curator’s critique, the audience will have an opportunity to engage in critiques and Q&A.

PROGRAM DATES:

Wednesday, April 2

6:00—7:30 PM

The Guest Critic: TK Smith

Saturday, June 7

1:00–2:30 PM

The Guest Critic:

Jovanna Venegas

Thursday, September 4

6:00–7:30 PM

The Guest Critic:

Taylor Bythewood-Porter

CURATOR BIOS

TK Smith is a curator, writer, and cultural historian. His interdisciplinary research engages materiality to analyze art, identity, and culture. As a public scholar, he serves as a conduit between artists, ideas, and communities to produce thoughtful exhibitions, publications, and programs. He currently works as Curator, Arts of Africa and the African Diaspora, at the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University. Smith’s writing has been published in exhibition catalogues, academic journals, and periodicals, including Art Papers where he is a contributing editor. In 2022, he was awarded an Andy Warhol Writers Grant and in 2024 he was awarded a Leo and Dorothea Rabkin Prize. He has been a visiting lecturer at numerous academic and cultural institutions, including Cornell University, where he taught undergraduate courses on cultural criticism. Smith is a doctoral candidate in the History of American Civilization program at the University of Delaware, where he is completing his dissertation Granite, Power, and Piss: The Transformation of a Confederate Symbol.

Jovanna Venegas currently serves as curator of SculptureCenter in New York, where she has organized projects and exhibitions with Alexa West and ASMA. From 2017 to 2023, she was at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, ending her tenure as associate curator of contemporary art. During her time there, she curated exhibitions with Fernando Palma Rodríguez (2023) and Liz Hernández (2021) and co-organized New Work: Wu Tsang (2021); Shifting the Silence (2022); the 2022 SECA Art Award; and Sitting on Chrome: Mario Ayala, rafa esparza, and Guadalupe Rosales (2023-2024). Additionally, she served as curatorial advisor for the Whitney Biennial 2022 on the U.S./Mexico border region. Venegas holds a BA in art history from the University of California at Los Angeles and an MA in curatorial practice from the School of Visual Arts, New York.

Taylor Bythewood-Porter is a curator and writer. She is the current Curator of History at the Museum of Riverside (MoR). In 2023, she received the American Association for State and Local History Award of Excellence for her exhibition Rights and Rituals: The Making of African American Debutante Culture (2021) at the California African American Museum (CAAM). Prior to her appointment at MoR and doing independent projects, Bythewood-Porter was an Assistant Curator at CAAM and co-curated Tatyana Fazlalizadeh: Speaking to Falling Seeds (2023), Cross Colours: Black Fashion in the 20th Century (2020), The Liberator: Chronicling Black Los Angeles, 1900–1914 (2019), Making Mammy: A Caricature of Black Womanhood, 1840–1940 (2019), California Bound: Slavery on the New Frontier, 1848–1865 (2018), and Los Angeles Freedom Rally, 1963 (2018). She also contributed to How Sweet the Sound: The History of Gospel Music in Los Angeles (2018), Circles and Circuits 1: History and Art of the Chinese Caribbean Diaspora (2017), and Lezley Saar: Salon des Refúse (2017). She holds a Master of Arts in art business with a concentration in contemporary art from Sotheby’s Institute of Art at Claremont Graduate University and a Bachelor of Arts in Communications with a focus on public relations and journalism and a minor in art history from Monmouth University.