About the Exhibition
Elevate at 21c presents temporary exhibitions of works by artists living and working in the communities surrounding Kansas City. Elevate provides hotel guests with unique access to the work of notable regional artists while featuring their work in the context of 21c’s contemporary art space.
Katrina Revenaugh is a photographer, printmaker and painter. She hails from the Midwest, spending her teen years in rural Southern Illinois where her love of nature and flowers flourished. Much later in life, she developed a deep appreciation for graffiti and street art while living near Venice Beach, California and attending Otis College of Art & Design. Her fascination with both led her to create an extensive library of images that she continues to build upon. Over the years, she has traveled to 24 cities across 11 countries documenting in gardens and alleys creating the foundation for her work. Extracting color and imagery from her photographs she combines them with botanicals and insects she’s photographed into an alternative printmaking process where nature is imbued with the color from graffiti walls. She currently resides in Kansas City and is represented by Weinberger Fine Art.
Lauren Phillips is a queer, neurodivergent visual artist based in Kansas City. She frequently works with wood cutout acrylic paintings and has experience with other mediums like murals, mirrors, neon, mosaic tile, and digital illustration. Touch Me / Don’t Touch Me (2021-2022) is a series of wood cutout acrylic paintings, a neon sign, and an acrylic mirror. These pieces combine the visual culture of romance with eerie elements to create simultaneous feelings of power and vulnerability, allure and danger, and pleasure and panic. The pieces generate an all too familiar back and forth internal dispute, causing the viewer to scan supposedly safe environments for threatening clues and question themselves and what they are seeing. Ultimately, the work gives power to the more vulnerable, as the title of the show, and the brightest piece, assertively gives and takes its consent. Her work has been featured in solo and juried shows at Plug Gallery, Weinberger Fine Art, Beco Gallery, and Interurban Arthouse, among others. In 2022, she was awarded an Inspiration Grant from ArtsKC and, in 2020, a Crossroads Artboard from the Charlotte Street Foundation. Her work has been commissioned by International Planned Parenthood Federation, VML, and Ripple Glass. Her work has been published in Frankie Magazine, Create! Magazine, Curious Magazine, and on The Jealous Curator.
