A City With A View

This animation is part of 'A City With A View', a public art project consisting of a simulacrum of a stereoscopic public telescope, comparable to the ones found at tourist sites all over the country. The piece played 24 hours a day for six months along Central Avenue (Kansas City, MO) and invited viewers to connect with the mischievous “Child Within” and identify with the little people climbing, jumping, sleeping, and greeting, as seen through the viewer.

  • Maria Velasco
    Director
  • Maria Velasco
    Producer
  • Maria Velasco
    Key Cast
  • Isa Kretschmer
    Animation
  • John White
    Videography
  • Project Type:
    Animation, Experimental, Other
  • Runtime:
    11 minutes 56 seconds
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Venice Full Shot Film Festival 2022
    online
    Award Winner
  • New Wave Short Film Festival 2022
    Munich
    Germany
    Official Selection
  • Bestlov Film Festival 2022

    Finalist
  • Hollywood International Golden Age Festival 2022
    New York
    United States
    Semi- Finalist
  • Roma International Short Film Festival 2022
    Roma
    Italy
    August 7, 2022
    Finalist
Director Biography - Maria Velasco

María Velasco is a Spanish-born artist who has been living and working in the US since 1991. Her interdisciplinary work consists of site-specific environments, urban interventions, sculptural objects, and temporary public art commissions. Her work deals with issues of displacement, migration, gender identity, vulnerability, and the structures of authority that govern our lives. She has shown her work nationally and internationally in university and private museums, and contemporary art venues such as The Soap Factory in Minneapolis, MN; the Contemporary Arts Forum in Santa Barbara, CA; the ARC gallery in Chicago, IL; the Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence, KS; H&R Block Artspace, the Kansas City Artists Coalition, Avenue of the Arts in Kansas City, MO; the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art in Saint Joseph, MO; the Paula Cooper gallery and the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, both in New York City.

Internationally, she has exhibited in Salón Tentaciones (Madrid, Spain), Museo Del Barro (Asunción, Paraguay), Paradise Gardens Biennial VI, (Darmstadt, Germany), Mexico, Argentina and Morocco. Her work appears in prestigious publications including Art In America and Sculpture Magazine, and has been reviewed by The Kansas City Star, Art Focus Oklahoma; The Village Voice, and the Chicago Reader. She was Artist-in-Residence at Sculpture Space (2007) and International Artist-in-Residence at Proyecto 'Ace, in Buenos Aires, Argentina (2012). In the summer of 2019, she attended Marble House Project residency in Dorset, VT, and a family-friendly residency at Elsewhere Studios, in Paonia, CO.

Her professional contributions include leading independent curatorial projects, discussion panels, and workshops nationally and abroad. She has been a juror for the National Endowment for the Arts (Washington DC) in 2002 and 2005 and has served in the Board of Directors for MidAmerica College Art Association (MACCA), and in various committees at College Art Association (CAA). She has received numerous awards and grants; most notably, a Rocket Grant Award-a program of the Kansas City Charlotte Street Foundation and the University of Kansas Spencer Museum of Art (funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts); Lighton International Artist Exchange Program Grant; Kansas Arts Commission Collaborative Grant; Avenue of the Arts Foundation Grant; Kansas Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship for Interdisciplinary Art, and Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation Emerging Artists Grant. Velasco was the first student in Visual Art to obtain a scholarship through the Madrid-California Education Abroad program at the Universidad Complutense of Madrid, Spain.

María Velasco received her Bachelor Degree in Painting from the Universidad Complutense of Madrid in 1989, and her Master of Fine Arts in New Genre from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1993. She is a Professor of Visual Art in the Expanded Media Department at the University of Kansas, and teaches courses in Installation Art, Social Practice, Expanded Media, Professionalism in the Arts, Contemporary Theory and Criticism, and Drawing. She currently lives in Lawrence, KS with her thirteen-year-old son, Alex, who loves to draw, read, compose music, and play viola.

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Director Statement

A City With A View is a simulacrum of a stereoscopic public telescope, comparable to the ones found at tourist sites all over the country. The piece played 24 hours a day for six months along Central Avenue, and invited viewers to connect with the mischievous “Child Within” and identify with the little people seen through the viewer climbing, jumping, sleeping, and greeting viewers.