Craig Auge (Kansas City, MO) is an artist and designer known for his functional art pieces that blend aesthetics with practicality.

Maximalist tendencies and minimalist desires are strategically negotiated through improvisation and chance operations. Predominantly employing collage and ephemeral salvage assemblage, Auge aims to activate the materials of memory, exploring the nexus of queer anxiety and joy.

Auge also operates an independent, roaming and online curatorial project called Lodger. 

Wolfe Brack is a self–taught visual artist and curator, born and based in Kansas City, MO. Brack comes from a line of artists and briefly attended the Kansas City Art Institute. 

Brack’s work deals with the minute, the unnoticed, and the humorousness that is often overlooked. He draws inspiration from natural forms, incorporating live organisms ranging from tiny plants, to the human body, into his work. He’s been fascinated by the concept of organized chaos, the way random bits come together to produce a seemingly serene and orderly appearing whole.

Brack is now the Artistic Director for the InterUrban ArtHouse, an arts nonprofit in Overland Park, KS.

Joe Bussell (Kansas City, KS) is known for his abstract mixed-media works that explore texture and form.

The development of Joe’s visual language took on new heights while living in London, Boston, Los Angeles and various cities in the Midwest. Most vividly, he worked in an AIDS hospice for five years. The experiences at the hospice are forever seared into his always expanding queer abstract language.

In the process of making 2-D or 3-D art, I add what makes sense and subtract what doesn’t. That is a process that can take years or realized in a day. What I add or what I keep represents my history, dreams, memories, and personal aesthetic. I want the finished piece to finish the psychological loop and tell a complete story.

Marcus Cain (Kansas City, MO) is a painter and curator whose abstract works often explore human perception and emotional landscapes.

Cain employs an architecture of organizing lines that weave color, divide space, and suggest shifting densities of light and shadow, movement and other aspects of the elemental world. These incremental strokes are applied by dipping pieces of wood into paint and striking the painting’s surface with approximate repeated gestures. Through this application, pattern gives way to a tangle of layers, discrepancies, disruptions, lopsided symmetries, misalignments, gaps and glitches within a set of conditions that may not easily reconcile as form.

Cain is represented by Sherry Leedy Contemporary in Kansas City, MO.

Justin Canja (Kansas City, MO) is a self-taught artist whose practice is based in expressionism and storytelling.

Using experimental mediums, discarded items and found materials, he boldly champions the complexities of his identity and invites others to do the same. Unbound by traditional artistic techniques, Justin uses the freedoms of his art to open dialogue involving his culture, Neurodiversity and the human condition.

Canja explores difficult topics, such as identity, sexuality, race, religion, conflict – and uncomfortable truths – not with a heavy hand, but with a playful touch.

Mary Ann Coonrod (Overland Park, KS) pursued her artistic education at the Kansas City Art Institute, earning a BFA in painting.

After college, Coonrod developed an interest in photography and spent years working as a photo retoucher, digital imager, and creative assistant. Her work has been featured in numerous juried, group, and solo exhibitions, showcasing her talents in photography, collage, drawing, and painting.

Over the past decade, she has focused on creating abstract works using colored pencil, watercolor, mixed media, and acrylic painting, continuing to evolve her artistic practice.

Horatio Hung-Yan Law (Portland, OR), originally from Hong Kong, is an artist whose art stems from his Queer Asian American identity and his experience as an immigrant. His projects explore identity, memory, and history — the invisible foundation of a community.

The work Law selected for Inside/Outside Voices: Queer Abstraction comes from his Urban Studies project that documents the artist’s daily encounters with different urban settings he passes through on his walks. Law attempts to capture and frame the scenes in ways that are otherwise overlooked. These photos are formally composed to bring out the mysteries and beautiful chance-designs that are present abundantly in our surroundings. Some of these presences are so ephemeral and immaterial that he can only capture them in the abstract.

Christopher Leitch (Merriam, KS) is a multidisciplinary artist, art historian, and curator, recognized for his contributions to the local art scene and his explorations in textile art.

His writing, drawings, and constructions are created using random materials and indeterminate processes, with no predetermined outcome. This sense of uncertainty is both liberating and invigorating, driving his creative exploration.

Leitch’s journals, textiles, drawings and sculptures have been exhibited across the US and around the world. He earned an MA in Art History from Goddard College in Vermont and a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute.

Robb Putnam (Oakland, CA) crafts expressive sculptures of animals using fabric and mixed media, exploring themes of vulnerability and resilience.

Putnam explores the murky spaces where empathy, fear, intimacy, humor, repulsion, and the conflicting desires to connect or recoil intersect. His work exposes a complex and contradictory human presence, reflecting a shared sense of vulnerability.

Evoking the playful, whimsical characters found in children’s books, his creations are something different—physically and psychologically vulnerable figures that resemble monstrously overgrown stuffed toys, wounded stray dogs, or imaginary friends. These misfit creatures possess a demeanor that both invites and repels.

Char Schwall (Kansas City, MO) is a fiber artist, a painter, internationally recognized early childhood arts educator. Her work focuses on mixed-media artworks that investigate themes of memory and personal history.

She has participated in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally

Her creative practice is an exploration of the gender implications of different media and materials; her aesthetic investigates concepts of surface, gendered space, fluidity, and overall softness. Schwall’s most recent body of work uses sewing, appliqué, crochet to investigate the complex, and sometimes controversial, relationship between the feminine and the fluid.

Schwall is represented by the Bruno David Gallery in St. Louis. 

Fred Trease’s (Kansas City, KS) education is rooted in both biology and sociology, with the majority of his career dedicated to environmental public health. Whether making double exposures with a Brownie camera as a child, photographing chromosomes and cells in college, or documenting environmental conditions professionally, photography has always been an integral part of his life. Whenever he seeks to understand something more deeply, the camera becomes his tool for exploration.

At its core, Trease’s work is about discovering new ways to view familiar things—using the camera and other digital tools to shift the paradigm of everyday life.