ShawneeDispatch.com

Some recognizable Shawnee landmarks are part of a story of community told through the works of a local artist.

Maria Calderon of Shawnee is showing her works, inspired by the Kansas City landscape and her Peruvian heritage, in an exhibition at the Paragraph Gallery, 21 E. 12th St., Kansas City, Mo. The works, on display through Nov. 6, include textile murals and a sculpture in addition to narrative paintings, two of which depict scenes in Shawnee.

The exhibition, called Kansa Citta Pueblita, is sponsored by the Charlotte Street Foundation’s Urban Culture Project.

Calderon said Kansa is for the tribe from which Kansas takes its name; Citta is Italian for city; and Pueblita is Spanish for small town, so it loosely translates to Kansas City to Small Town.

She said she has found that the images of home she included in the exhibition strike a chord with people.

“It’s interesting because people who don’t even know anything about Kansas City, when they see it, they have a feeling of home,” she said. “…When you put your energy into reflecting upon something you care so much about and people you know, then it transfers to people who have no direct contact with or understanding of it.”

The paintings reflect a summertime cityscape featuring Kansas City-area buildings, patterns taken from Peruvian weavings and pencil sketches of people, whether indigenous Peruvian characters or people she knows. Calderon said she draws from her studies of folk art history and the works of Grandma Moses and Thomas Hart Benton.

“The concept with all these paintings is bringing together a lot of folk traditions,” she said. “I really like the idea of a narrative where you can tell a whole story about a community in one image. Your eye follows through, and there’s several perspectives.”

One painting features her parents’ home in Shawnee and the Shawnee Auto Sales building at Shawnee Mission Parkway and Goddard. Another features Shawnee Community Services at 67th Street and Nieman Road and the Johnson County Christian Church at 71st Street and Nieman.

She decided to include Shawnee Community Services because while the building itself isn’t exactly architecturally significant, it serves as a crossroads for many people. She said she wanted people to be attracted to it and respect its image.

The church’s inclusion came in large part because of its marquis, which recently read “Circumstances change; God doesn’t.” She liked the message and how it related to the theme of transition in her paintings.

Calderon started seriously painting in her second year of college after she was diagnosed with Lupus, a chronic, autoimmune, inflammatory disease that can affect various parts of the body, especially the skin, joints, blood and kidneys. The disease forced her to take a break from school, so she found she had a lot of time on her hands.

“I started drawing a lot,” she said. “It was therapeutic for me to kind of assert myself in another way, because I was really active in my childhood — I did a lot of sports growing up. (Artwork) was the most active thing I could do that was satisfying.”

When she was able to return to school at North Park University in Chicago, she completed a fine arts degree in 2006. Her first official show was in 2004 in Italy, when she had a painting included in a show while at the University of Georgia’s study abroad program.

Since then, she has shown her work in Chicago and in Kansas City, but this year has been her biggest year with four shows.

A year and a half ago, Calderon decided to dedicate herself to her art full-time. She left her retail job and moved back to her parents’ home in Shawnee, though she still works as a part-time yoga instructor.

She now plans to expand the Kansa Citta Pueblita show. She is using the exhibition to start doing different shows around the United States. She has two solo shows scheduled in Chicago and is working to schedule another in Los Angeles. She’d also like to show in New York.

“This show is the beginning of the same show that will get bigger and bigger and change more and more,” she said. “This is basically the spine of the exhibit… I just want it to keep growing.”

As the exhibit collection grows, Calderon said she hopes to maintain the positive and warm feelings created by the original pieces.

“The best feedback that I had was from multiple people saying it was a comforting experience for them, and it felt like home,” she said.

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