Thank you to the Kansas Statewide Homeless Coalition for having me as a speaker at the 2026 Summit on Homelessness & Housing! It was a pleasure to work with Ryan W. Gates from Pano Marketing & Sally Stang from the City of Wichita's Department of Housing & Community Services to engage with conference attendees around big, ridiculous ideas for ending homelessness and constructing a healthy housing ecosystem. We built off the ideas presented in their award-winning film Hope in the Heartland and worked to envision abundant futures together beyond the immediate housing challenges across Kansas.

Session Overview
Creating New Futures for Our Communities
Can we imagine a future where homelessness doesn't happen? As many communities struggle with uncertainty and deeply ingrained challenges, it's easy to feel hopeless or that hard times are inevitable.

In this workshop, we'll identify and discuss widespread community challenges that perpetuate homelessness and what we can do to create the culture we want instead. We'll learn Futures Foresight strategy techniques to envision abundant paths forward. We'll utilize Futures techniques to generate policy ideas for systems change and workshop next steps for individuals to start down the path of achieving those goals. This workshop will reference themes presented in the Hope in the Heartland documentary, but all are welcome to attend even if you have not seen the film.

1. Changing the narrative for systemic challenges.

2. Futures Foresight techniques for new outcomes.

3. Strategies for seeding cultural change

For the past 2+ years, I have been researching behavioral economic theories and creating a loose framework for how these concepts apply specifically to artists and arts organizations.
I'm so thankful to have received an Artist Activation Grant from the City of Wichita to support the creation of a small publication (zine) to help share these ideas with the community. Yay! This toolkit I've been mulling over is finally taking shape.

In addition to my personal behavioral economics research and economic development coursework at Wichita State, the Kansas Future Fellows program through the Center for Public Partnerships and Research at the University of Kansas has introduced me to futures foresight, visioning, and strategy techniques. Futures foresight is an academic and vision-planning field that helps people overcome the limitations we have for effectively planning for and thinking about the future.

With the grant funds & lots of generously donated labor from Pano Marketing, I'm constructing a small printed zine to guide artists through capacity-building ideas they can apply to their careers in an accessible, playful, & engaging format.

Stay tuned!

It was motivating and inspiring to be able to offer a 4-session track at the 2026 Artists Thrive Kansas City "The Future is an Artist Run Space" conference on how artists can be catalysts for shaping the future of the creative sector in our region.

After an inspiring summit in 2025, I began conversations with the brilliant organizers from Mid-America Arts Alliance for what we could do to connect conference attendees with more actionable ideas. Stay tuned for what we'll put together for 2027!

Big thanks to all who joined and brewed audacious ideas for how we can turn the seemingly impossible attainable!

Overview of Futures Track Sessions:
Session 1 - Getting the Present Out of the Way: Challenges & Barriers to Planning for the Future
During this workshop, we’ll briefly introduce futures foresight principles and other decision-making frameworks that influence our understanding and usage of resources. Within this framing, we’ll inventory the barriers artists are currently facing and establish priorities for necessary change.

Session 2 - Building Scenarios and Big Ideas
What would our lives & communities look like if artists were thriving? In this session, we’ll compare the challenges identified in Session 1 against Artist Thrive rubrics and begin to construct specific scenarios of success. Attendees will challenge each other to dig deeper and aim higher with purposefully lofty goals. Being audacious is harder than it sounds.

Session 3 - Testing Our Ideas
Building on the goals identified in Session 2, attendees will work through the implications of thriving in those goals. Using the Futures Wheel foresight technique, we’ll explore potential impacts of our concepts around thriving. We’ll make concrete that which at first seems ridiculous.

Session 4 - 15% Solutions & Next Steps
What can we do right now to set ourselves on the paths we want? How can our individual decisions impact and influence our local community and our regional network of artists? In this session, we’ll identify action items that can be implemented now to set our region on the previously identified paths of thriving in the future.

I had the absolute pleasure of facilitating a couple of workshops about the importance of strategically envisioning the cultures we want to create for an abundant future in Kansas. Huge thank you to Kansas Health Foundation for having me at their 2025 Partner Summit! The relationships and ideas sparked during these 3 days will no doubt have a lasting impact.

Also, a big thank you to the Kansas Future Fellows program of the Center for Public Partnerships and Research for giving me a foundation in Futures Foresight work that I can share further in the world.

Excited to be showing new paintings at Somewhere Works, opening Friday and on view through July. Big thanks to Midtopia & Harvester Arts for the opportunity!

More images to come - here's the exhibition statement:

Go Ahead and
Kate Van Steenhuyse
Somewhere Works, 2025

My paintings are mini playgrounds to practice discovery. I have always been fascinated by the relationships and systems (road maps, constellations, root systems, particle accelerator reactions, biodiversity, etc) which, layer upon overlapping layer, create our world. How do we make sense of this vastness enough to have any agency within it? Over the years, through my artistic exploration and professional endeavors, this interest has expanded from painting to nonprofit development and management, program and policy design, study of behavioral economics, arts-driven community development, and futures foresight strategies and facilitation.

Painting continuously teaches me to approach working with systems through playful curiosity. Our brains are wired to draw conclusions and decide what is what. Uncertainty is usually uncomfortable. It can also be so much fun.

My paintings tease viewers with opportunities to not have a conclusion, but rather to be present with an experience. How often can we just be immersed in the process of trying (and hopefully failing) to make sense? Agency is created when we embrace possibility and potential within uncertainty. If we can prolong judgment and sense-making within the paintings, we can also apply that approach to bigger, more complex ideas of systems change and societal impact.

Join me for the Artist Thrive Summit in Kansas City in May! I'm excited to present the following workshop which builds off my experiences with the Kansas Future Fellows program—come join the fun!

Artists Build Abundant Futures Workshop
Wednesday, May 7th 2025
Artist Thrive Summit
Social science research tells us that where people live is the primary determining factor into how behaviors become normalized in culture. Artists and the arts are catalytic forces in shaping the culture of our local communities and beyond. As many communities and artists struggle with uncertainty, the pitfall of a scarcity mindset is easy to slip into. However, as dreamers and inventors, artists are uniquely poised to be the drivers for creating abundant futures. We can shape the degree to which our communities are places where artists (and therefore communities at large) thrive.

During this workshop we’ll briefly discuss behavioral economic ideas and decision making frameworks that influence our assumptions about money and resources. Then, we’ll work with strategic foresight exercises to create scenarios for the future of our abundant and thriving artist-friendly communities. After fleshing out visions for ideal futures, we'll workshop the necessary levers that must be engaged now to set ourselves on abundant paths to future realities. Lastly, we'll discuss concrete next steps each individual can take to start down the path of achieving those goals.

REGISTER HERE FOR ARTIST THRIVE

I'm pleased to be selected to be part of the University of Kansas's Center for Public Partnerships & Research Future Fellows program. The Fellows are a diverse group of Kansans committed to learning, using, and sharing Futures Foresight strategies to assist in building models and strategies for an abundant and prosperous Kansas.

See more here.

Slow Simmer
New and Updated Paintings by Kate Van Steenhuyse
Harvester Arts, June 2-25, 2023


My paintings and drawings emphasize the process of reacting. Typically this process unfolds over a few months, but for the works in Slow Simmer, these pieces have been in process or revisited after years of first being started. Painting is a negotiation of ideas and decisions taking physical shape: sometimes proud, lovely, or awkward and most often decidedly not heroic. The finished works serve as riddles meant for contemplation, not as vehicles for a singular message or conclusion. At this moment in my life, I am only able to focus on painting in small snippets of time often separated by months away from the studio.


Slow Simmer is a collection of explorations in how the familiar can be pushed to still surprise. I like to keep the viewer, and myself while working in the studio, constantly questioning, thoughtfully present, and even possibly a bit uncomfortable. The goal is to suspend the viewer in a state of active looking to create a prolonged experience where we get to—for a fleeting moment—set aside the notion of knowing and exist simply in a state of being.


Slow Simmer represents the attempt to hold this value and this approach to process in concert with long stretches of time. How can we manipulate the familiar to continue to find surprise and wonder?

Opening this Friday, November 22nd at the Hutchinson Art Center:
Let's Get Lost
new works by Kate Van Steenhuyse

Friday, November 22, 20195:00 PM
Sunday, December 22, 20195:00 PM

Because of a slight wobble in the Earth’s rotation, the position of the North Star changes on a cycle each twenty-six thousand years. Within a millennium, Polaris will no longer be our North Star. How should a transition on the celestial scale be marked and celebrated here on Earth? And shouldn’t we be planning for this celebration now? Jump!Star, named for pioneering astronomer Annie Jump Cannon (1863-1941), is the celebration. And it is happening in the Kansas Flint Hills in 2019. Jump!Star is a project of Symphony in the Flint Hills with financial support from the National Endowment for the Arts and conceived of and directed by artist George Ferrandi. Symphony in the Flint Hills is collaborating with Harvester Arts and Chamber Music at the Barn to bring rural and urban people together for arts programming throughout the Flint Hills region, starting NOW.

Don't miss out on all the projects we have going at Harvester Arts - which I really consider an extended part of my artistic practice.

Still kicking yourself for missing my talk? I posted it on my blog so you're in luck!

Lindsey Herkommer reviews the exhibition on KMUW

Check out the blog for fun stuff!