We hope you’ll join us on Friday, November 14, as Kiosk Gallery presents Drink the Long Draught, a group exhibition of drawings and related works by a selection of artists, both local and outside the Kansas City region.
Exhibition Statement
Drawing is a fundamental way of communicating and exploring ideas across disciplines, and is often the first artistic activity we encounter as children. Drawing could be seen as an antecedent to writing, as we learn to communicate by mark-making.
While often considered a basic or preparatory discipline, drawing can also be a self-sustaining practice. The act of drawing connects mind to hand, idea to surface. It is not necessarily regressive or simplistic, but a return to the essentials, to the core of thought and making.
Its accessibility makes drawing a constant refuge, available even in survival mode. The physical act of engaging with a surface to create images or symbols is a revolt against the purely functional demands of daily life, a defiant gesture claiming space for self-cultivation. This exhibition celebrates the many ways this act is manifested within artistic practice.
November 14, 2025 – January 9, 2026
Artists’ Reception
Friday, November 14, 2025, 5-9 pm CST
Kiosk Gallery
1600 Genessee, Suite 133
Kansas City, MO 64102
Open Hours
By appointment
Image credits: L to R, top to bottom: Annie Diemer, Claire Downes Whitehurst, Nika Winn, Cotter Luppi, Corey Antis, Bella Ferreira, Andy Maugh, Braden Bandel, SunYoung Park, Melanie Johnson, Ian Kelley, Stefan Schulz, Baron Mattern, Courtney Tramposh
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Corey Antis
Corey Antis is an artist, educator and researcher who lives and works in Kansas City, Missouri. His studio work focuses on exploring the experience of landscape, material and time through painting, drawing and artist book sculptural practices. He has exhibited nationally and internationally and is currently an Associate Professor of Painting at the Kansas City Art Institute.
coreyantis.com
IG @corey_antis
Braden Bandel
Braden Bandel is a visual artist whose work takes the form of paintings and drawings that explore themes of liminality, sublimity, fantasy, and the landscape. He attended the Kansas City Art Institute, graduating in 2016 with a BFA in Painting, and Rhode Island School of Design, earning an MFA 2020. His work has been exhibited at venues throughout the U.S., including Gelman Gallery in Providence, RI; Island Gallery in New York, NY; Ortega y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn, NY; 1969 Gallery in New York, NY; Field Projects in New York, NY; Spring/Break Art Show, New York, NY; Vulpes Bastille in Kansas City, MO; and State XIII Project in Chicago, IL. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Artist Statement:
I am interested in painting as a container for the psychological, as well as an escape, or release valve. Drawing from gothic modes of depiction and storytelling, I construct metaphors, paradoxes, and dualisms, often with the landscape and weather as their vehicle. I have proclivities for the fantastical, the liminal, and the sublime which are abiding themes and sensations I work to evoke.
My drawings are made with sumi ink, sometimes incorporating collage as well as suminagashi paper marbling techniques. I find that ink has an interesting balance between its ability to depict light and its stubborn materiality – an almost tension which I want to commingle with my subject matter.
My sensibilities with painting and drawing are influenced by film – I am sensitive to considerations such as frame, point-of-view, speed, focus, fade, saturation, and how these elements can create an immersive scene, place the viewer, and foster narrative.
bradenbandel.com
IG @bradenbandel
Annie Diemer
Annie Diemer is a Kansas City-based painter and printmaker whose work explores the intimacy of daily life and self identity. Drawing inspiration from domestic spaces, third places, and their relationship to connection and disconnection, she considers the perception of time and memory in reprocessing images from the past through a whimsical and saccharine lens.
IG @honeystx
Bella Ferreira Bella Ferreira is a Brazilian-American artist, whose work focuses primarily on drawing and oil painting. She is currently based in NYC. Bella holds a BFA in Fine Arts Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design. Recent shows include “Tornado in my Head, Becomes the Dirt in my Wrist”, Solo Exhibition at Love Not Money, in New York (2025), “Painting Today” , Site: Brooklyn, New York (2025), “Here, There, and Everywhere”, U-Haul Gallery, Newport (2025), and “New Drawings”, International Kentler Drawing Center, New York, Curated by Samantha Friedman (2025), among others.
Artist Statement:
Through a dedication to play and process, Bella Ferreira creates talking heads that are built in an arbitrary visual language free from any logic or science. The language in the process mimics random formations in nature that are parallel to the lawless language found in multicultural spaces. Her visual vocabulary embraces meditative, repetitive marks. Marks are charged with different degrees of importance when layered in order to create their presence and spatial nature. The work becomes self-sustaining, microbial-like, and can exponentially be played between these juxtaposing marks to build its physicality. Bella’s work jumps back and forth within its own worldly scale, allowing each work to live as possible microscopic or macroscopic windows of each other.
bellaferreira.xyz
IG @bella_.ferreira
Melanie Johnson
Melanie Johnson is an artist and an educator. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, Melanie earned a BFA from Missouri State University and an MFA from the Henry Radford School of Art at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is currently Professor of Painting and Drawing at University of Central Missouri. She lives in Prairie Village, Kansas.
Melanie has exhibited widely including solo exhibitions at MANIFEST Gallery and Drawing Center (Cincinnati, OH), University of Kentucky (Lexington, KY), Bloomsburg University (Bloomsburg, PA), the University of Alabama, Huntsville, and Colorado State University (Fort Collins, CO). Group exhibitions include the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (Kansas City, MO), Automat Gallery (Philadelphia, PA), and First Street Gallery (NYC), among others. She is currently an Artist in Residence at Studios Inc, in Kansas City..
Artist Statement:
My drawings explore the sensory and emotional connections embedded in my relationships with animals, plants, and the natural landscape. These bonds—rooted in early experiences of empathy and caregiving—extend into my growing attention to gardens as both mundane suburban spaces and wild, self-determining ecosystems. Gardening, like drawing, becomes an act of care and observation: a way to participate in cycles of growth, decay, and renewal, and to locate meaning within them.
Returning to the physical and psychological landscapes connected to the life cycles of animals and plants, I am increasingly aware of the parallels between ecological rhythms and human behavior. In a time marked by uncertainty and political anxiety, I see the garden as a site of resistance—a space that insists on longer timescales, slow attention, and the intentional cultivation of joy. Through the act of tending, I practice presence and faith in continuance, even within fragility.
My drawings function simultaneously as narrative vessels and as physical records of process. The layering of marks, erasures, and accumulations forms a surface palimpsest that echoes the temporal density of the garden: each mark a seed, each revision a trace of care. Through this tactile engagement, I position myself as both storyteller and participant, drawing connections between the intimacy of the hand, the cycles of the living world, and the possibility of renewal through attention.
IG @melanie.l.johnson
Ian Kelley
Ian Kelley is a painter, metal bender, and occasional canvas builder from St. Louis, who is presently working in Kansas City. He earned his BFA at the Kansas City Art Institute in 2022. His work has been featured in selected group exhibitions in Kansas City and Fayetteville. Kelley’s work has also been featured in the KCAI gallery. His work observes the trivialities of life and mundanity of American livelihood; working these themes into slashing impressions of portraiture. His work magnifies and animates personal and observed objects that obscure from a sense of direction. Kelley’s work frequently navigates storytelling through modular painting and sculpture.
Artist Statement:
In my work, I look to find the mental intolerance of surviving in Midwest America. Drawing from notions of monotonous blue collar culture, I look at the relationships between possessions and portraiture. Depictions of cars, tattered and polished; clothing and dishes being stretched or ashed in, and the dissolving of spaces that I occupy. The subjects in my work become anomalies or sentient as they look for sympathy to overlook their wear and tear. I often look to reference the motions of what exhausts the figures in my work by describing them with scratchy and hastened modes of painting. For that reason, the paintings carry an amount of horror and existential focus of the body.
IG @ian_kly
Cotter Luppi
Cotter Luppi was born in New York City and has a BFA and MFA in Sculpture. After he completed his MFA and moved back to New York City, drawing became his primary creative focus. His unique process of embossed drawings, using color pencil on heavy-weight paper, have a sculptural quality that has been described in reviews to “ripple and hover off the walls.” Cotter’s drawings range in scale as well as medium, and he works with color pencil, graphite, as well as brush and ink on handmade paper.
Cotter Luppi has a BFA from Alfred University School of Art & Design with an MFA from Wichita State University, and he attended Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. He is a 2017 recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Award in Drawing. Critical acclaim and reviews of his work have appeared in: Art in America; ARTnews; artnet; TimeOut New York; in addition to several articles in The New York Times.
cotterluppi.com
IG @cotterluppi
Baron Mattern
Baron Mattern was born in Lafayette, Indiana. He moved to Kansas City to pursue a degree in painting from the Kansas City Art Institute. Baron’s diverse interests enable a positive logic within the craft of zine-making and notebook drawing. Baron grew up spending long days at the Tippecanoe County Public Library where the immediate closeness of manga, museum catalogs, and Nintendo Power magazines helped to inform a growing interest in associative thinking. The study of atypical learning styles inspires Baron to find ways that drawing can be seen as a tool for personal understanding.
Artist Statement:
When attitudes in the world become desperate and when truth clogs, it’s critical that we develop methods for feeding a type of truth to ourselves. For Baron, drawing is a medium which speaks universally to the personal necessity of direct explanation. Drawing can be done in prison, at school, at the gas station, in the library, or anywhere paper is found. The ethos of image making, for Baron, has less to do with being seen and more to do with growing a language of self-understanding-self. Outside the quietness of personal practice, the world reduces and splinters itself into myriad rational and irrational conditions. Drawing often feels like the most available means to organized joy when the demon-haunted-world convinces itself of inevitable ends. The heft of notebook-stacks and the ubiquity of drawing materials represent a sense of forward, unending telos for the drawer. The potential for images to animate and inspire outcomes in the mind is too strange a process to ignore.
IG @real_judgepinecone
Andy Maugh
Andy Maugh received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2002. He lives and works in Kansas City. His work has been shown in multiple group shows throughout Kansas City including the Epsten Gallery At Village Shalom, The Kansas City Artists Coalition, The Telephonebooth Gallery and Vulpes Bastille. He is a Security Supervisor at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art where he has worked since 2001. He enjoys hiking, cooking and taking on large and small home improvement projects.
Artist Statement:
These watercolor drawings emerge from a process of automatic mark-making, in which biomorphic forms emerge intuitively rather than through preplanned design. The resulting shapes both reference and inform my wood sculptures.
I approach these works as open fields of interpretation. While I create them through an instinctive, internal logic, their meanings are not fixed. Viewers often recognize figures, landscapes, or narratives within the abstractions, and I consider these responses an essential extension of the artwork. The drawings are completed not only by my hand, but also by the engagement of those who view them.
andymaugh.com
IG @maugh_maugh
SunYoung Park
SunYoung Park is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores hybridity, memory, and cultural identity through ceramics and mixed media. Her sculptures merge clay with fabric, wood, and botanical elements, blurring the boundaries between body and object.
Park is a 2026 Studio Mass MoCA Fellowship Recipient and a Wassaic Project Fellowship Recipient. She has also held residencies at Belger Arts Center, Charlotte Street Foundation, and Clayarch Gimhae Museum. Her work has been exhibited internationally at the Jingdezhen International Ceramic Biennale, the International Contemporary Ceramic Art Triennial in Andenne (Belgium), the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. She is currently based at the Interdisciplinary Ceramic Research Center at the University of Kansas.
park-sunyoung.com
IG @syyris
Stefan Schulz
Stefan Schulz is a Kansas City based figurative painter. His work combines the mundane and domestic with the fantastical, by placing figures with dramatic costumes or gestures into observed, urban interiors and landscapes. This combination presents a synthesis of individual fantasies and a shared communal space, to indicate the lush interconnections and secrets within everyday life.
Stefan has shown at multiple galleries, including Kiosk Gallery, PLUG Gallery, and the Emily and Todd Voth Artspace in Kansas City, as well as, most recently, the Research House for Asian Art in Chicago.
stefanschulzartwork.com
IG @rainingdesires
Courtney Tramposh
Courtney Tramposh received her BFA from the University of Kansas, and her MFA from Hunter College in New York. In 2007, she was awarded a scholarship to further her graduate studies in Venice, Italy. She has been a resident artist at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Vermont Studio Center, Real Time and Space in Oakland, CA. Her work has been included in exhibitions throughout the US and abroad, in spaces such as Paragraph Gallery, KS, Clementine, Debs and Co.,The Proposition, Jane Lombard Gallery in NYC, The ReInstitute in Millerton, NY, the EMerge Art Fair, Washington, DC, and Red Box Studio in Beijing, China. In 2011, Tramposh curated the sculpture exhibition “Anomalistic Urge” at Vaudeville Park, Brooklyn. And in 2012, she was invited to produce a large-scale solo exhibition for the Chashama program’s Harlem exhibition space. From 2011 – 2014 Tramposh also taught children set-design and acting in conjunction with the Paper Bag Players children’s theater company, and the New York Public Libraries. Tramposh lived and worked in Brooklyn, NY for 21 years, recently moving back to Kansas City where she now lives and works.
Artist Statement:
Courtney Tramposh’s artistic process involves the repurposing and re-presenting of scavenged and handmade objects, cobbling items together into formal arrangements, then either representationally painting them, or enshrining them like totems or artifacts in their own right. She works in a cumulative manner, maintaining a constant practice of drawing, painting, and gathering/building objects in an unhierarchical, automatic fashion. Then she sifts through these works/objects, pulls out certain repeated images, symbols, and marks, and incorporates these into slower, more deliberate paintings.
This self-referential, circular process enables Tramposh to arrive at the subject matter within each work. Through the convoluted filter of her own mind and handiwork, this process has generated an esoteric vocabulary which she draws upon repeatedly. A few examples of recurrent themes or images in her works are: ancient vessels and architecture, geological time-markers such as the striations in a geode or the structure of minerals and rocks, gravity, light and shadow, combining real and imagined imagery, abstraction and representation into the same sphere, visual and color phenomenology, religious totemry. She believes in the simple phenomenology of individual objects – that each holds a charge, or at least an archetypal reference – and that in combining these unlike objects together is akin to casting a spell or writing a recipe.
Within the last few years, Tramposh developed a daily practice of plein-air painting around her Brooklyn neighborhood: sunsets from the rooftop, foliage, tree studies and landscapes in the local parks and graveyards, figurative motion studies of passersby, architectural studies. This process was born out of a necessity to continue gathering source imagery, inspiration, and a connection to the world while living under an increasingly restricted lifestyle (quarantine). She keeps a visual diary of these times – considering these works to be both a record of her personal mind-state and a unique record of the broader socio/political climate.
IG @ctposh
Claire Downes Whitehurst
Claire Downes Whitehurst is a painter, printmaker, and ceramicist. She received her BFA in Painting from the University of Mississippi, a Post Baccalaureate from Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and her MFA in Painting from the University of Iowa. Drawing from the landscape and atmosphere of the Deep American South, her work explores queer space, religious iconography, and botanical architecture through form, color, and composition. Her practice plays with the relationship between image and object.
In 2018, she was awarded the Stanley Fellowship for International Research at the University of Iowa, which supported her work in the Dordogne region of southern France, where she studied polychromatic cave paintings and stone engravings. Her research focused on the relationship between surface and image and the compositional complexities of abstract narrative.
Whitehurst has exhibited nationally and internationally and has published two books of drawings and poetry. She was shortlisted for the Hopper Prize and was recently nominated by the Mississippi Institute for Arts and Letters. Her work has been featured in New American Paintings, Oxford American, ArtMaze Magazine, and Graphite Journal in collaboration with the Hammer Museum, among others. She will have her first solo museum exhibition at the Walter Anderson Museum of Art in Ocean Springs, Mississippi in 2028. She lives and works in Philadelphia.
Artist Statement:
My work moves between image, object, and embodied experience. I use color as both material and metaphor; a sensory-driven language shot through with synesthesia. Color becomes a vessel, conveying sensation, memory, and meaning. The floral image is repeated across mediums articulating passageways between the human body, the political body, and the plant body – each form governed by its own system of growth, tension, and repair.
I draw from the languages of religious ornamentation, biological systems, and architectural embellishment, where color historically has been found as a medium for spiritual direction and collective thought. In the botanical world, color exists as chemical reality, functioning outside human symbolism, deeply tied to a plant’s survival. As a queer woman raised in the American South attuned to how ornament and beauty often serve as both refuge and as site of coded language, I use botanical and historical relationships to color in my own work.
Color is never neutral. It is always charged, at once erotic, spiritual, and political. My images move through masked layers where color accumulates to create textured patterns. The work is a map, tracing connections between the somatic and the sacred, between personal experience and collective embodiment.
clairewhitehurst.com
IG @claire_downes
Nika Winn
Nika Winn is a Kansas City based artist, illustrator, and educator from Jacksonville, Florida. She graduated with her BFA in Painting and Art History from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2013.
Artist Statement:
In my work I utilize automatic drawing by allowing my subconscious to guide the narratives. For these drawings I created images dominated by a singular figure, folded and bent to overwhelm a small visual plane. As the sketches of the primary figures took form, they became vessels for exploring grief and anxiety, while taking on characteristics of Greek mythology. One figure became Persephone-like as she melted back into the earth, while the other became a minotaur seeking resolution. As the images themselves personify the abstraction of feeling, the mark making of the ink and graphite create tedious tension through the repetitive spots and layered scratches.
nikawinn.com
IG @kneekuh_
KIOSK 