Rocket Grants provide direct funding to artists in the Kansas City region who are creating exceptional, under-the-radar, and artist-centered projects in public spaces. Artists, curators, collectives, and collaborative groups residing within an 80-mile radius of the Kansas City metropolitan area are eligible to apply.

Rocket Grants award up to $6,000 to individuals or artist groups for projects that exist outside established venues such as museums, galleries, theaters or arts districts. Artists are encouraged to address the community at large, or choose a smaller, targeted audience. The long-term goals of the Rocket Grants program are to encourage emerging and non-traditional artistic practices in the Kansas City region; to contribute to a thriving arts community; and to build bridges between geographic and cultural communities.

2026-2027 Rocket Grants Awardees

From Log to Stool: Green Woodworking, Traditional Craft, and Community Building
Grace Ambrose, with her background in woodworking and teaching at craft schools and woodshops around the country, is organizing two free two-day workshops called: From Log to Stool: Green Woodworking, Traditional Craft, and Community Building. Participants can make their own stools through a practice called green woodworking, a traditional means of woodworking that aims at creating sustainable furniture. These workshops will take place at venues such as city parks or community gardens, where participants will each be given a small kit of hand tools to process the parts as opposed to using machines, offering both accessibility and intentionality.

Foward, Together
Lourdes Kalusha-Aguirre presents Forward, Together, a film screening and discussion event at venues in the Lawrence and Kansas City areas. This is a story of the Lawrence-El Papaturro friendship committee, a group that is part of a “grassroots transnational peace and justice network known as U.S.-El Salvador Sister Cities.” Through an anthology narrative style, the film follows both Salvadoran and U.S. American born protagonists and illustrates not only the confrontations of their struggles across time and geography, but also their stories in finding solidarity in unlikely places. Proposing to offer ordinary citizens a model for being a part of international solidarity movements, Kalusha-Aguirre hopes to provide them with ways to make meaningful change in their communities.

Melanated Measures: Launch: Greenwood Centeni
Melissa Ferrer-Civil, Kanas City’s first poet laureate, and Calvin Arsenia, internationally renowned harpist singer/songwriter, pair together to celebrate the centennial year of the Greenwood Social Hall, a historically Black religious institution and cultural pillar in the Black Community. Through their event series, A Nation In Exile (ANIE), they’ve partnered with Greenwood Social Halls’ Launch of events to resurrect with new programming in Black August 2027 called Melanated Measures. This will invite writers to Kansas City and pair them with local musicians to share their works, followed by sounds from Kadesh Flow and Calvin Arsenia. Other parts of the series include workshops, a dance clinic, and an exhibit featuring black artists from Kansas City and around the country.

The Reckoning
Kim Riley combines theater, visual art, history, and civic dialogue, in the The Reckoning, an immersive play that follows William Adams, a successful Black corporate executive who discovers the stories of transcending the realities of racism in America he grew up with no longer explain the world around him. This play transforms the audience into participants, beginning with a gallery installation called The Myth of Immunity, exploring the promise and limits of respectability and achievement, and follows with a performance at the Buck O’Neil Education and Research Center.

If Life’s A Drag, Kansas City’s Been Living
Jared Horman painted the mural at Passions KC in Westport featuring 18 local drag artists earlier this year, and to celebrate their stories, he’s created his next project: If Life’s a Drag, Kansas City’s Been Living. To share each of the artists’ stories and other local artists, this project builds a public website and launches it with a live storytelling event, alongside a call to action to preserve KC’s rich LGBTQ+ history. The website would preserve written histories, share archival photographs, and include an ephemera to tell each story.

The Front Page Project
Bryan Stalder transforms the cover of Northeast News with The Front Page Project, an accessible public gallery aimed at turning print media into a platform for community storytelling, portfolio development, and local artistic expression. As a widely distributed newspaper in one of Kansas City’s most culturally diverse, working-class neighborhoods, Northeast News issues will be able to highlight featured artists through this initiative, removing financial barriers, providing mentorship and exposure for local artists, and prompting for an end-of-the-year public exhibition to bring each artist’s works together in a physical gallery space.

Pocket Cinema Project
Sean Kenealy presents Pocket Cinema Project, a micro-budget filmmaking initiative that offers an accessible filmmaking experience. This project starts with a series of free workshops led by Kansas City filmmakers, writers, and artists, and culminates in a free public film festival featuring a selection of the participant films, along with artist talks and community events. Kenealy hopes to create space for new voices, unconventional approaches, and stories that can be made when barriers to filmmaking are intentionally lowered.

Reflected
Marian McClellan introduces Reflected, a Playback Theater training program offered inside women’s shelters in Kansas City. “Playback Theater” is an interactive approach to improvisational theater, where audience members share a story and a trained ensemble enacts it. Through this approach, residents of the shelters can build community by choosing to tell their stories, see it reflected with care, and hold others’ stories in return. These workshops will culminate in a closing mini-showcase, where the participating residents, along with Improv Springboard players, will perform for an audience of their choosing.

Site Four
The Waiting Room and Harrison Street DIY collaborate in Site Four, an event to reignite Site Projects. This is a one-day outdoor exhibition and collaboration between artist-run galleries and alternative art spaces in Kansas City that will take place at the Harrison Street DIY Skate Park in October 2026. Artists are invited to activate public spaces in the city’s urban core while also creating a network of independent, artist-run spaces. As an important community-building initiative and creative achievement, this project also aims to celebrate the park and serve as a fundraiser for the park to be built again in a new location.