Jen Everett | from “Redoubled / Something We Carry” project, collected vernacular photographs
Ralph Hepola with his tuba
Laura Bigger | “Blue Ellipse” from “Black Hole / Celestial Bodies” series, monoprint (intaglio and relief with copper leaf on handmade denim paper)
Grant Kniffen | “We Told Him Not to Wear the Yellow Shirt” (detail), acrylic on hardboard
Meet our Missouri featured artists for April
Artists are the backbone of our creative state. Get to know some of the best right here!
Each month, we’re designating four individual artists from all around Missouri as Featured Artists. They create and perform in every sort of genre, from sculpture to storytelling.
Meet our April Featured Artists! Plus, here are highlights of our earlier groups of artists: December 2020, January 2021, February 2021, March 2021. Find more of all 20 artists’ works on their own websites; just check the links we’ve placed on their artwork, portraits, and bios.
Jen Everett | from “Redoubled / Something We Carry” project, collected vernacular photographs
interdisciplinary artist | St. Louis
Even under the camera’s relentless gaze, there are parts of us that remain inaccessible, unknowable, and mysterious.
I make photographs, installations, and time-based media that engage the relationship between rupture, Black interiority, and knowledge production. I am interested in gathering and re-configuring. I frequently work with found and inherited materials to amplify the ways everyday Black folks have used the quotidian as a way to transmit knowledge, enact care, and to cultivate beauty and joy in the face of immense structural limitation. In my work I use collection and arrangement, repetition and distortion to amplify the way these gestures are reflected within Black cultural production. My work refuses the spectacular in favor of the quiet and interior complexities of Blackness.
artist, printmaker | Kirksville
Much of my work stems from an empathic attitude toward other—especially non-human—living beings and a belief in sustainable, cyclical systems.
I’m an artist and an assistant professor of art at Truman State University where I teach printmaking, drawing, and liberal studies courses. My work explores the relationships that exist among humans, animals, and ecosystems, particularly in terms of the food chain, raw materials, and the human tendency to exert control over natural systems. My art considers existential quandaries such as what it means to be a human today, how we can live in the world responsibly, and what our obligation is to do so. As a multimedia artist, I question anthropocentric viewpoints and interpret the manmade environment primarily through print, drawing, and installation.
painter | Dardenne Prairie
Whether I am working more representational or more abstracted, the story will always come through.
I taught art and coached football and track for 27 years on the high school level. My early work was in many different two- and three-dimensional mediums. I now focus on painting with acrylics. My art explores American themes combining a stylized representational style fused with 20th-Century Modernist and other historical sensibilities. The formal characteristics that have always attracted me to a work, representational or abstract, are solid forms, strong color, bold contrast, and dynamic composition. I engage viewers through the narrative and hope they “hang around” to enjoy the more formal artistic concerns within my composition. A patron once told me she enjoyed my work because “every time I look at it, I see something new!”
musician | Springfield
JAZZIZ Magazine has called me “a musician who plays the language of contemporary jazz on the tuba.” I play the same types of ideas as trumpeters, saxophonists, and pianists.
One of the main goals in the arts world is to create something new. That’s what everyone including me is trying to do. I believe that creating something new, even in a “niche” of the arts world, is truly an accomplishment. I’ve always improvised on the tuba, but as a teen I won a position in the U.S. Army Band of Washington, D.C., followed by a music degree at Northwestern University, the Basel Symphony Orchestra in Switzerland, then freelancing in New York City and Minneapolis/St. Paul. I’ve played on 41 recordings and 34 video productions. Two years ago, my creative life entered this new era of exclusively improvising on the tuba.
James Douglas Cox
metal artist
Republic
Natalie Wiseman
visual artist
Joplin
Kevin Umaña
painter, ceramics sculptor
Kansas City
Nartana Premachandra
dancer, writer, storyteller
St. Louis
Wanda K. Tyner
glass artist
Lee’s Summit
F.C. Shultz
author, poet, reader
Webb City
Lindsay Dunnagan
visual artist
Kirksville
Brian Owens
soul musician/vocalist
St. Louis
Anand Prahlad
literary author, musician/songwriter, filmmaker, teaching artist
Columbia
Brenda Beck Fisher
painter, watercolorist, interpreter of the beauty in the world
Hannibal
Anne Garney
landscape painter, fauve, expressionist
Kansas City
Jeffrey Noonan
musician: performer, teacher, scholar
St. Louis
Whitney Manney
fashion and textile designer
Kansas City
Justin Hamm
poet, photographer, citizen of the American Middle West
Mexico
Robin Van Hoozer
artist, painter, maker of unusual things
St. Joseph
Bobby Norfolk
storyteller, author, teaching artist
St. Louis
What is the program’s goal?
The Featured Artists program promotes and supports individual artists and demonstrates the variety of creative Missouri talent.
How does the program work?
We feature four artists each month. We highlight and promote each month’s artists via the homepage of the Missouri Arts Council website, the Featured Artists page on the website, monthly email, social media, and links to the artists’ websites. Artists receive a $300 stipend/license fee to feature their work online. Artists are paid directly by the Mid-America Arts Alliance.
Who is eligible?
Individual Missouri-resident artists of any medium with online work that they have ownership to license. (Groups are not eligible.) Mediums may include (but are not limited to) visual art, literature, music, video, dance, theater, storytelling, and traditional arts.
May artists participate if they don’t have a website?
No; an effective website is an essential part of this program. Without it, there is nothing to promote, neither your work NOR a place to send people to benefit you. An artist’s website is an important tool to promote your creative work. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter etc. can supplement with social engagement, but do not effectively allow an artist’s work to be as easily accessed as does a website.
How do artists apply?
Propose your work for consideration via this online form. Support your application with links to your website and other online platforms where your work is located. No work may be sent as an attachment. Work that cannot be accessed online may not be considered. Artists retain full ownership and rights to their work. Artists will allow with their consideration a limited use right to feature their work on the Missouri Art Council website and other platforms. There is no fee to apply.
How are Featured Artists selected?
The Missouri Arts Council staff selects artists with diverse demographics and locations throughout the state who are producing quality original work in a variety of art mediums and genres.
How will artists know if they are selected?
Artists will be contacted directly if they have been selected. If you are not contacted, do not despair! All applicants will continue to be considered as the program continues monthly.
How often should artists apply?
Artists need apply for this program only once. Applications will be kept on file for future consideration.
How long will this program last?
We will continue this program through June 30, 2021. If funding allows, this program may continue.
