Englewood Arts hosts national and international artists through its Residency program, providing opportunities for artists to expand their work and engage in professional development. Englewood Arts accepts the following disciplines: Glass, Ceramics, Fiber, Drawing, Painting, Woodworking, Sculpture, Mixed Media and Multi-disciplinary practices. Here artists have the freedom to explore and create.
2023-2024 ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE
Lasse Elsenburg, a Dutch-born Designer and Maker, first trained in England as a fine furniture maker. With this craftmanship as a solid basis and focusing on beauty and aesthetics, he designed the 'Ice-cabinet'. This cabinet was awarded second prize at The Young Furniture Makers Awards in London. To further develop himself he continued his studies at the University of Gothenburg (Sweden). Enrolling in a material and making-based furniture design programme he started focusing on the artistic qualities of functional objects to address social issues. This led to his exam work the ‘Træna chair’, a chair designed for the rural island community of Træna in northern Norway. The chair is an expression of this rural place, its remoteness, and the resilience of its community.
With enthusiasm, Lasse connects conceptual and hands-on work. His designs beautifully combine traditional woodworking and contemporary design and appeal to our senses and imagination. He loves to spend his spare time being at or daydreaming about his family’s little summer house in Sweden. He has been renovating the log cabin that was originally built in 1800, located on about three acres of land. It is both a source of inspiration and a place for experimentation. Lasse is mindful of the natural and social impact of his work and has a growing interest in architecture and community-based projects and in movements such as Degrowth and Slow Living.
Lasse Elsenburg
Payton Koranek is a Texas-born ceramic artist residing in Independence, Missouri, where she is attending a year-long residency at Englewood Arts. She graduated from Texas A&M University- Corpus Christi in 2022 with an MFA in Studio Art. Koranek has exhibited nationally and internationally, including pieces displayed in Rome and Thailand. She recently returned from a month-long artist residency in Rome. Her work explores the societal context of the female identity and often incorporates iconographic elements to explore the nuance of nature and humanity.
Payton Koranek
Karen E. Griffin is a creative, proactive, transformative textile and performing artist possessing the innovative capability to formulate fabrics and seams into stories. Her visionary process evokes and informs viewers by exploring tangible and verbal art forms. Her art quilts, abstracts, and panels are constructed of paper, adinkra symbols, and African or cotton fabric on canvas or wood panels.
She enjoys researching and studying African American heritage, patterns, and symbols. This practice plays an important role in designing and displaying her collection. She enjoys teaching and donating her time to inspire others by exploring her art forms. She creates breathtaking and colorful collections of art quilts and panels through art and storytelling.
Her textiles were featured in the following group exhibitions: Soul & Spirit: Celebrating Black Joy, Art Reach, Ms. Behaving, Red, Black and Green on Canvas, Change is God-Take Root Among the Stars: Black Abstract in the Midwest, Her Art/ Their Art, Johnson County Library art exhibit, Run, Run Quiet, Missouri Artists Council, Rhythm & Reveal, Abstract: HE’ART for All, “Essences of A Black Woman” Winter Exhibition in Baltimore, MD, Kansas City Flatfile & Digitalfile, and ART WORK.
Karen Griffin
Anna Marten is a Kansas City-based painter who specializes in sign-making and illustration. Motivated to reconcile whimsical with practical, she strives to reimagine traditional processes. Her professional practice has incorporated art and hand-painted lettering into the everyday functions of Kansas City businesses for the better part of a decade, and you may spot her around town carving hills on roller skates. In 2019, she painted two murals in Arkansas for the state’s first Trader Joe’s. This is a skill she continues to hone through hopeful exploration.
Anna Marten
Phillip “Swede” Hickok is a glass artist born in Gothenburg, Sweden. He arrived in the states when he was nine years old and found his passion for glass blowing after high school while attending the National School of Glass at Orrefors in Sweden. He recently graduated from the Royal Danish Academy with a Bachelor of Craft in Glass Design. He has exhibited both internationally and nationally, has been a resident artist at several distinct residencies, and has also completed internships in France, Denmark, and Hawaii. Swede is back in the states and is currently a resident artist at Englewood Arts in Independence, Missouri. While using glass installations to create contemporary forms, his most recent works focus on fungi and their potential abilities to clean the environment.
Phillip “Swede” Hickok
DeAnna Skedel has been an artist and professor in Kansas City since 2002. Her eclectic, wide-ranging studio practice has been akin to the practice of reading tea leaves: an act of both divination and meditation. DeAnna first began showing at the Ohio Craft Museum while still in undergrad. Graduate school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago brought about some time working in theater. Sculpture and good friends presented opportunities at such venues as the US/UKContemporary Cast Iron SculptureProject and Overflow/Fluids (LA Art Girls) at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California. She has been a Kansas City Avenue of Arts recipient, part of the Urban Culture Project, included in the book The Sixth Surface: Steven Holl lights the Nelson-Atkins Museum, and a member of the Kansas City chapter of the social justice organization, Avodah. Skedel has been honored by her peers at Metropolitan Community College-Blue River with the Missouri Governor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and is honored by students who call her “some crazy combination of Mr. Miyagi and Bob Ross” and, is happy her children seem to not find her too embarrassing.
DeAnna Skedel
Kevin Hopkins [b. 2000, Beaufort, South Carolina] is a painter based in Kansas City, Missouri. Kevin earned his BFA in Painting from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2023. During his undergraduate study, he was recognized internationally as a 2020, 2021, and 2022 Elizabeth Greenshield Foundation Grantee and nationally as a 2021 AXA Art Prize finalist. Currently, Hopkins’ work celebrates community and collaboration by asking himself and others to embrace conjured personas to navigate imagined spaces and recast scenes from television shows and movies.
Kevin Hopkins
Olivia Thompson is a seamstress, weaver, craftsperson, and lover based in Kansas City, Missouri. Her practice revolves around care and consideration of materials and construction. She credits her affinity for fiber arts to her grandmother, whose quilts established the connection between comfort and textile objects and translated craft into a love language. Often working with second-hand materials, Olivia utilizes an abundance of colors, patterns, textures, and finishes to construct beautiful, well-made garments and textiles designed to be treasured and cared for through lifetimes. She is a recent graduate of the Kansas City Art Institute where she received the Susan Lordi Marker Award of Excellence in Fiber and the Barbara L. Kuhlman Scholarship. Her work has been displayed in the Yeiser Arts Center’s Fantastic Fibers.
Olivia Thompson
Lasse Elsenburg
Karen Griffin
Phillip “Swede” Hickok
Kevin Hopkins
Payton Koranek
Anna Marten
DeAnna Skedel
Olivia Thompson
