The Alice Gallery
2015-2018
co-curating an artist-run gallery
I had been in Seattle for about a year, unsuccessfully applying to group shows at small galleries around town, when I saw an open call at an artist-run gallery called The Alice. The show was called Everyone’s In, based off of Hennessy Youngman’s A Small, Small World, and it’s basic premise was: anyone could drop off their work, and it would be shown. I was intrigued. I was young, hungry, and deeply insecure. More than my interest in equity and accessibility, it was insecurity that led me to The Alice with two pieces in hand, one that I wanted to show (a highly fragile fiber piece with the word “Burden” stitched on it in big black letters), and one that I figured the gallery would want to show (a framed abstract paper work with graphite, charcoal and etched elements).
I drove to Georgetown, parked and walked the first of many walks to the building that, at that time, housed The Alice, Interstitial Gallery (with curatorial director Julia Greenway), and Bridge Productions (founded and curated by Sharon Arnold). Entering The Alice, I saw just how ambitious this show was for the space. The gallery was a small room, long and narrow, with a single skylight. Already, there were at least 50 pieces in the process of being hung, salon-style, along the walls. Julia Freeman, a co-founder of the space (alongside Julie Alexander) and an artist in Seattle, was there installing work.
I was nervous. Even though the show was titled Everyone’s In, I wondered if there was a possibility that Julia would hate my work so much that she would make a special exception for me and turn me away. That was the level of self-consciousness that I was operating under.
Thankfully, not only did Julia not turn me away, she took one look at the fiber piece, the one I wanted to show but was afraid wasn’t really ‘art’ and said, “Let’s do that one.” So we did. At some point after I left, she hung the work, and I went to the opening, which was the first opening I got to be a part of in Seattle. I got to meet the other Alices, who were, in 2016, Julie Alexander, Susano Surface, and Molly Mac. Each of them intimidated the hell out of me for different reasons. Susano for their fashion sense, Molly for her quiet confidence. I had been to a few openings in Seattle at this point, but this was the first one that introduced me to an art scene that I knew I wanted to be a part of.
Luckily, the feeling seemed mutual. Julia and I continued to talk after the opening, and she came to my studio for a visit a couple months later. This was the first official studio visit of my life. At some point, I got a call from Julia. She had talked to Julie, Molly, and Susano, and she wanted to ask if I would join The Alice as a co-curator. I still remember exactly where I was standing when I got that call. Phone held to my ear. Right by my north facing work table in my studio. I was thrilled and also shocked and thought maybe the Alices were having a collective lapse of judgement. I promptly said no and hung up.
After hanging up, I realized I had never been so scared and excited about something before, and that it was me who was having a lapse of judgement. I called Julia back and asked if it was too late to change my mind and say yes (it had been five minutes). She laughed and accepted my change of heart. I joined The Alice in 2016 alongside accomplished writer and professor Natalie Martinez.
I stayed at The Alice for almost three years (in 2017, we added Dan Paz, and in 2018, Thea Quiray Tagle, and Minh Nguyen to the team), into my second semester in graduate school, at which point, I realized I had to leave due to me being on the East Coast, working two jobs, and doing other community work on top of school. I still sometimes wonder if it would have been more beneficial for my art brain to quit grad school and come back and remain a part of The Alice, because this time with the Alices was definitively a better education on the arts than my MFA was. It’s probably one of the primary reasons I had the courage to go and get my MFA.
To this day, it is the most collaborative and equity minded project I have been a part of. At The Alice, we discussed everything to exhaustion, in long-winded meetings over meals, in text threads, in email threads, in phone calls. Everyone was listened to. Everyone was heard, even when it was messy, even when we consistently bought the wrong white paint for the gallery walls post-exhibition and what should have been a touch up job became yet another entire repainting of the gallery.
At The Alice, I learned so much about what it meant to be not just an artist, but an active and committed member of an arts ecosystem in a small city like Seattle. I learned what it meant to advocate for artists, and all the small, tedious things it took to put on shows and run a gallery. I will forever be grateful for this time, this space, and the faith that these amazing artists had in me.
I co-curated a couple shows and curated a show myself while I was one of the Alices, details of which are below, and while I am very proud of it, that show isn’t the lesson I take away from my time at the Alice. This time at The Alice taught me so much about friendship, co-working, and mutual care while showing really fucking good art. It was a privilege to be a part of the legacy of this gallery and the people who made it possible.
--
from which we rise
show curated by Satpreet Kahlon @ The Alice Gallery, Seattle, WA
May 13 - June 19, 2017
A collection of 15 pieces made by 15 different artists from 7 families - exploring the legacy of fiber, matriarchal tradition, and craft through intergenerational connectedness.
Exhibitors:
Nazha Barakat
Nicole Barakat (Sydney, Australia)
Sónia Barreiro (Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Pat Courtney-Gold
Lubna Din (London, UK)
Shafqat Din
Ka'ila Farrell-Smith (Portland, OR)
Tsang Miu Guen
Kulwinder Kahlon (Victorville, CA)
Manjit Kaur (Amritsar, Punjab, India)
Caroline Mak (Brooklyn, NY)
Beverly O’Mara
Markel Uriu (Seattle, WA)
Reverand Miyeko Kawata Uriu
Writer in residence: afrose fatima ahmed
For this intergenerational exhibition, Alice curator Satpreet Kahlon asked seven contemporary artists to create new work that explores the artists’ family legacies, as they are tied to fiber and craft. To assemble a more complete picture of familial history, each artist selected a piece of traditional fiber-based work done by a matriarch in their family and created a new work in response to that piece.
What results is a 15-person group show that pairs and recontextualizes new, contemporary works with older works that are often labeled as craft, and therefore devalued when viewed through a traditional, patriarchal white lens. By tracing family lineage and cultural survival through textiles, from which we rise hopes to distrupt and call into question the gendered, racialized, and often arbitrary distinctions between art and craft that are rooted in the colonial gaze.
By giving the artists in the show a chance to dictate and narrate their own connections to their cultural legacy, the show hopes to shift the traditional power balance that exists between curator and artist, and broaden the often narrow, tokenizing and one-dimensional, narrative about non-Eurocentric intergenerational exchange that takes place in traditional white box spaces.
Curator's Statement
before I knew hardly anything at all, I knew I wanted to remember. it is the reason that I started to write and the reason that I began making art, so it is only natural that the act of remembrance plays such a big role in my first curatorial project.
from which we rise is born of a desire to remember those who are so often forgotten, value that which is so often devalued, and honor the quiet labor of the hands that did whatever they had to do in order for us, their descendants, to exist, with pride, in a space that has historically not belonged to us.
for this show, I asked seven artists who were already working with the themes of lineage and fiber in some capacity to choose a work done by a matriarch in their family line, and to then create a new piece in response to their selection.
the care and tenderness that each artist put into this prompt is evident in the resulting work. Nicole Barakat (Sydney, Australia), stitched the patterns of the edges of her grandmother’s crochet pieces with her own hair, which she has been collecting for years. Markel Uriu (Seattle) responded to both a wooden bird that her paternal grandmother made in a Japanese internment camp in the united states, as well as a molded paper piece that was made by her mother, who is also an artist. The resulting piece is a testament to Markel’s desire to honor and know the differing sides of her family lineage.
each one of the pieces in this show is a part of a deeply personal, but universal, history of love, loss, and lineage. by hanging each piece with its family pair, from which we rise hopes to give viewers a more nuanced view of histories that are so often tokenized and erased.
in addition, pairing the new and old pieces recontextualizes works that are often labeled as craft, and therefore devalued when viewed through a traditional, patriarchal white lens. by giving space to and honoring the legacy of textiles in the role of cultural survival and family legacy, this show hopes to disrupt and call into question the gendered, racialized, and often arbitrary distinctions between art and craft that are rooted in the colonial gaze.
this show is so important to me for so many reasons. it is my curatorial debut, yes, but more importantly, it is a natural extension of my lifelong desire to hold the past tenderly to my heart, and to always remember: the value of my ancestors, the too often silent wisdom of my matriarchs, and the delicate, resilient beauty of everyone’s stories — each one worthy of commemoration.
-Satpreet Kahlon
left: Tsang Miu Guen, right: Caroline Makleft: unknown ancestor's basket, right: Ka'ila Farrell-Smithleft: Shafqat Din, right: Lubna Dinleft: Reverand Miyeko Kawata Uriu, center: Beverly O'Mara, right: Mark Uriuleft: unknown ancestor, right: Sónia Barreiroleft: Kulwinder Kahlon (my mother), right: Manjit Kaur (my maternal grandmother)left: Nazha Barakat, right: Nicole Barakatpoet-in-residence, afrose fatima ahmed, writing a poem on-site in response to each pairing