Exhibitions

The Kala Gallery is a light filled 2,200 square foot exhibition space. The gallery presents approximately six exhibitions each year in a wide range of media by both emerging and recognized artists. Two of the exhibitions feature new works by Kala Fellowship artists and Artist-in-Residence working in print, digital media, video, installation, photography and book arts. The remainder of Kala’s annual programming focuses on curated exhibitions assembled around a unifying theme, process or media.

CURRENT EXHIBITIONS

Dig and Rise  featuring new works by 2022-2023 Kala Fellowship and Media Arts Fellowship artists

Angelica Trimble-Yanu: Strata at Milvia Windows

UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS

October 12, 2023 – February 9, 2024
The Embodied Press: queer abstraction and the artists’ book
Curated by Anthea Black

The artists’ book is a perfect form to experience the pleasures and politics of the handmade. Saturated ink spreading across a page. Layer upon layer. Looking that quickly opens up a range of senses. The Embodied Press features artist’s books and publications by queer and transgender artists, from graphic novels and collage-works to bold experiments with letterpress, screenprinting, video, performance, and risograph. Works from the 1970s to today overlap several successive chapters of LGBTQ+ and queer-feminist political action to expand our readings of contemporary queer culture. Artists in The Embodied Press make important visual and material choices in their use of printing techniques, sequencing, and manipulation or absence of text; they revel in visual abstraction as an antidote to the daily pressure of navigating our identities. What happens when a book “frustrates legibility” or becomes difficult to read? It must be felt. Held. Absorbed and activated. Each work poses questions about difference, intersectionality and power to show that sexual, gender and racial difference cannot be easily understood or legitimized through public visibility alone. These ideas find great resonance in the artists’ book field as it radically expands the ways books can be produced, read, and understood as a form of culture.

CURATORIAL SERVICES
Kala Art Institute is able to develop small, in-house curated exhibitions for businesses, public facilities, and special interest groups on a case-by-case basis, taking into account available staff resources and the timing of each request. Recent projects have included Kala’s ongoing Milvia/Addison windows display in downtown Berkeley, small exhibitions in city government offices, and a large group exhibition of prints and paintings presented at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, an academic think tank on the UC Berkeley campus.

If you have an interest in these services, please contact Mayumi Hamanaka, Artistic Director, at (510) 841-7000 ext. 201 or mayumi@kala.org.