City Center Square and Charlotte Street Foundation Hosts PANORAMIC POSTCARDS

City Center Square and Urban Culture Project are pleased to announce the upcoming debut of "Panoramic Postcards," a window installation by Lawrence/Kansas City-based artist Judith G. Levy. To remain on view for approximately one year, the installation was commissioned by City Center Square for its south-facing window on 12th Street, just west of Main, through an open call to artists facilitated by Urban Culture Project. The installation relates to the United States Post Office located within City Center Square, specifically taking the idea of the picture postcard as inspiration. Levy was awarded $1000 to complete the work.

Judith G. Levy's installation features four large-scale digital images resembling old panoramic postcards, which are mounted on Sintra and suspended within the window space. The images are composed from elements extracted from an array of historic picture postcards, recombined and reconfigured to "evoke a new look at the past and arouse some questions about the present." For example, Albertson Square, Hopeland, Mo., suggests that as American cities grew and gathered populations in new and exciting ways, they also struggled to create accessible recreational areas within these cities for working class populations.

Like much of Levy's work, these deceptively picturesque images blur fact and fiction toward investigating broader social and cultural issues and revealing larger truths. Her Frederick Douglass Park, Valor, Virginia, for example, draws together portions of vintage postcards from places including Kansas City (Shelter House and flower garden at Swope Park), Old Slave Market in St. Augustine; Washington Monument from Kansas City (in Washington Square Park, near Crown Center); the city of Philadelphia; Newport, Rhode Island, Santa Barbara County, CA; and Los Angeles, CA -to create a conversation about race and the history of slavery in this country as they relate to ideas of valor, heroicism, monument, and memorial.

As part of this project, Levy will distribute free sender-friendly-size panoramic postcards several times over the course of the installation, including on Monday, October 18, from 11am to 5pm, and on Wednesday, October 20, 11am-5pm.

Judith G. Levy describes her work as "about history and remembrance... I make installations, video, two-dimensional work, and performance pieces that explore the explicit and elusive nature of private and public memory." She has presented solo exhibitions of her work at venues including The Indianapolis Museum of Art, Big Car Gallery, and Indiana University, all in Indianapolis, as well as at Soo Visual Arts Center in Minneapolis and NavtaSchulz Gallery in Chicago. She has completed public art installations in Indianapolis and Chicago and been featured in group exhibitions at presenting institutions including PlugIn Institute for Contemporary Art, Winnipeg, Canada; Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis; and The Plains Art Museum, Fargo, North Dakota. Levy received her BA in Drawing and Painting from Hunter College in New York, and her Master of Social Work from Adelphi University, Garden City, New York.

Urban Culture Project is an initiative of the Charlotte Street Foundation, an organization dedicated to making Kansas City a place where artists and art thrive. Urban Culture Project creates new opportunities for artists of all disciplines and contributes to urban revitalization by transforming spaces in downtown Kansas City into new venues for multi-disciplinary contemporary arts programming. For more information, visit www.charlottestreet.org.

 

To post a comment, you must register and login.