Screen Seen

Screen // Seen was built around a simple problem: digital artists in this region had almost no professional exhibition infrastructure. There was no recurring venue, no institutional pathway, no bridge between making screen-based work in the Midwest and being shown as a serious artist. So I designed one in partnership with Courtney Wasson, the director at KCAC and Jori Cheville, curator at MOA+L.

We collaborated and came up with a monthly exhibition series hosted at the Kansas City Artists Coalition, in partnership with the Museum of Art + Light, the first series of its kind in Kansas City.

The Work:
The format is deliberately structural: one artist per month occupies public screens at KCAC, giving each a true solo presentation rather than a group-show slot — a curatorial choice rooted in my conviction that digital artists deserve to be treated as distinct voices, not grouped by trend. Each cycle culminates in a museum presentation at the Museum of Art + Light in Manhattan, Kansas, which means the series isn't just an exhibition — it's a pipeline from regional screens to institutional walls.

Results:
The clearest measure of a new exhibition model is whether it earns a future and Screen // Seen did so almost immediately: a second cycle is confirmed, with its first open call completed and the 2027 cohort selected within weeks of the series launching.

The series gives the region something it has never had — a standing, professional venue for digital art with a museum endpoint — and gives the two partner institutions a repeatable model for programming a medium neither had infrastructure for alone.

For the first open call selection we chose 6 artists.

For the month of July we are exhibiting a local Kansas City Artist.

Ian O'Neill “I Thought There’d Be Flying Cars By Now”

Single Channel Video 3:30.

You can view this work here: https://www.kansascityartistscoalition.org/exhibitions