This post originally appeared in The Weekly SHOUT, our Sunday newsletter. Subscribe & receive more missives like this one.

Lots of new names around these parts! We're thrilled to welcome Savanna Nichols as our spring 2026 intern. Savanna is in her senior year in the studio art program at Wichita State, where she also works for The Sunflower. We published her first illustration in The SHOUT today. We also have two first-time bylines this week, from the Lawrence-based artist Christine Olejniczak and Wichita-based writer Amy Geiszler-Jones.

Speaking of The Sunflower, big thanks to reporter Jonas Lord for writing a feature story about The SHOUT.

Harvester Arts has partnered with the Neighboring Movement to offer artist studios in south-central Wichita, the arts organization announced on Friday. The studios are located in a property at 1009 S. Broadway St. owned by the Neighboring Movement, a nonprofit community organization based nearby. Kristin Beal, Harvester’s executive director, told me the studios range from 243 to 412 square feet, and rent is $1 per square foot per month (i.e. monthly rent on the smallest studio is $243 per month). The leases are for one year, and artists may share studios. Email info@harvesterarts.org to learn more.

I had the rare opportunity to see work by our visual arts editor Genevieve Waller in person last weekend. Genevieve, who was raised in Wichita but now lives in Denver, is represented in the 128th Midwest Art Exhibition at the Birger Sandzén Memorial Gallery in Lindsborg, Kansas. Her exhibition “Noblesse Oblige” combines fiber sculptures made from household sponges with a series of photograms that evoke nuclear science.

Genevieve and I connected a couple of years before The SHOUT launched over our mutual interest in starting an arts publication in Kansas. She has been a critical part of our operation from the start — not least because she brings her experience as the founding editor of the magazine DARIA.

The annual Midwest Art Exhibition is the longest-running annual art show in Kansas, and this iteration is wonderfully varied. Printmaker Marco Hernandez’s exhibition is similar to his recent show at Bethel, which Shelly Walston reviewed for The SHOUT. Wichita painter Tim Stone’s landscapes are at turns ethereal, banal or ominous. And this is the first museum or gallery exhibition for Salina wood carver Glenn Knak, who has been making figural carvings since the 1980s.

I joke that when I meet someone in the arts in Wichita, I will be sure to see them again at least once every two weeks for the rest of our collective lives. I might need to expand that claim to the metro area after meeting artists Geraldine Craig and Nelson Smith during a First Friday reception at Reuben Saunders Gallery this month. The pair run the Mother’s Milk artist residency on their “reimagined dairy farm” on the outskirts of Newton, Kansas. One of the current shows at RSG features work by a handful of former Mother's Milk residents. (Two will be in town to talk about their work during an artist talk this Wednesday at RSG, 3215 E. Douglas Ave. in Wichita.)

I ran into Geraldine and Nelson again the following afternoon at the Sandzén, and then again this past Friday at the Wichita Art Museum, where we listened to Newton artist Eden Quispe talk about her solo exhibition, the latest in the Naftzger Family Regional Creatives exhibition series. 

Each of Quispe’s densely textured fiber work would make for an excellent game of “I spy,” and after her talk I noticed museum visitors lingering for an unusually long time in front of each piece. One WAM employee told me that when the show opened at 10 a.m. on Friday, staff gathered in the first-floor gallery to get a closer work — and “that doesn’t always happen.” 

Quispe threads her fiber works with her own multicultural experiences, from growing up in Wichita’s North End to raising children in rural Kansas with her husband, who is from Peru. Other pieces focus on her experience of motherhood.

Though Quispe has exhibited across the U.S., I believe “Narrative Threads” is her largest exhibition in Kansas to date. It's on view at WAM through August 16, and admission to the exhibition is free.

Quick hits:

• In her artist talk, Eden Quispe spoke about our increasingly multiracial and multiethnic society as a force for good. That reminded me of a recent interview with Dorothy Roberts, whose memoir “The Mixed Marriage Project: A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family” sounds complex and fascinating. [Was her family a social experiment? | Andrea González-Ramírez for The Cut — gift link]
• I also thought about “Kansas Never Plays Itself,” a video essay by Rolf Potts, who grew up nearby and attended Wichita North High School.
• The Tallgrass Artist Residency announced its 2026 artists last week. They include former Kansas Poet Laureate Huascar Medina and Kansas City-based artist and SHOUT contributor Xiao Faria DaCunha. 
• Hank Azaria’s Springsteen tribute band will play on the closing night of Riverfest this year, organizers announced last week. I hadn’t heard about the project by actor and the voice artist behind multiple “The Simpsons” characters, but it looks like a profoundly good time (if you’re a fan of The Boss, anyway). Here’s Azaria and his EZ Street Band covering “Thunder Road.” You can check out the lineup and purchase VIP concert tickets on the Wichita Festivals website.
• I started my Sunday morning with a bracing profile of British artist Tracey Emin. [Regrets? Number one: smoking. Number two: taking it up the wrong hole’ | Charlotte Higgins for The Guardian]

— Emily Christensen is a co-founder and the managing editor of The SHOUT.

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