Print Public 2021-2022

Join us for the closing reception and artist talks at the Kala Gallery on March 26, 2-4pm

Masks (N95/KN95/Double Mask) and proof of vaccination are required to visit in-person events at the Kala Gallery.

Kala Gallery is excited to present Print Public, featuring new work by 2021-2022 Print Public Residency artists: Cristine Blanco & Emma Logan, Lara Kaur, Related Tactics: Michele Carlson, Weston Teruya, & Nathan Watson, and Christine Wong Yap.

From its founding days, Kala was envisioned as a place where people gather to exchange creative ideas and share technology and tools. Expanding on this idea, Print Public takes this exchange from the Kala studios out to the community. Specifically, Print Public provides an opportunity for artists to create temporary public art along the San Pablo Avenue corridor and throughout Berkeley in partnership with the City of Berkeley, meeting people where they are, on the street, at bus stops, markets, shops, and in the neighborhood, connecting artists and the community.

Through Print Public, Kala aims to provide a platform for artists to work on interdisciplinary projects with digital or print media while animating public space, reaching new communities, building local partnerships, and deepening neighborhood ties. Print Public was made possible in part with support from the National Endowment of the Arts Our Town program.

Special thanks to the City of Berkeley Civic Arts Program and the Department of Health, Housing, and Community Services for partnering with Kala on the municipal artist-in-residence component of Print Public.

Municipal Artist-in-Residence with the City of Berkeley
Lara Kaur
Christine Wong Yap

2021-2022 Print Public – San Pablo Avenue
Cristine Blanco & Emma Logan
Related Tactics: Michele Carlson, Weston Teruya & Nathan Watson

More about the artists and their projects:

2021-2022 Print Public – Municipal Artist-in-Residence with the City of Berkeley

Lara Kaur is a photographer and social worker based in Oakland, CA. Lara’s work focuses on community narratives and holds space for individuals to be seen and recognized as they see themselves. She believes photography offers us a universal form of connection, healing, resistance, and historical memory. Lara is an educator and community advocate dedicated to centering community in all aspects of her work. Lara also firmly believes in equitable education and access to opportunities for young folks of color. Through her ongoing work with youth, she’s centered photography and creative expression to support youth in exploring identity, resiliency, self-advocacy, and self-compassion.

Lara Kaur is working with The City of Berkeley’s Healthy Berkeley Program. For more information on the Healthy Berkeley Program please visit www.healthyberkeley.com. For the exhibition Lara presents her audio visual project Community Wellness Is… documenting what community wellness looks like, driven by and for the community including narratives & reflections from across the Berkeley community.

Christine Wong Yap is a project-based artist who uses printmaking, drawing, social practice, and public art to explore psychological wellbeing. Her projects invite participants to engage in self-reflection and social connection, and explore belonging and interdependence. She holds a BFA and MFA in Printmaking from the California College of the Arts. She is currently the lead artist in Art, Culture, and Belonging in S.F. Chinatown with the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco.

Christine Wong Yap is working with The City of Berkeley’s Wellness Recovery Team. The Wellness Recovery Team promotes a culture of recovery at the Berkeley Mental Health Division and surrounding community. In the context of mental health, recovery is defined as a process of change through which an individual improves their health and wellness and lives a self-directed life. The program uses approaches that honor the lived experience of those in recovery, focusing on personal wellness tools and empowering them to advocate for themselves in the mental health system.

2021-2022 Print Public – San Pablo Avenue

Cristine Blanco and Emma Logan

Cristine Blanco and Emma Logan are Bay Area artists who met during their MFA at Mills College and found overlapping interests in the issues of food scarcity and land access. Both explore themes of food, community, and labor in their work and intentionally cultivate viewer participation for a stronger shared experience.

Born and raised in the Bay Area, Cristine Blanco is an interdisciplinary artist who explores cultural identity through food and the home environment, issues of public land and ocean access, and socioeconomic inequalities caused by climate change. Calling attention to the odd and uncomfortable, she creates a sensory vernacular by making paintings, sculpture, video and installation.

Emma Logan is an artist and educator based in Sonoma County, CA. With a heavy research and process driven practice Emma uses organic mediums like clay, wool, and paper to make sculpture and installation work. The tactile nature of these chosen mediums is an important link to her areas of focus: geographic identity, land use, agriculture, and our varied and sometimes complicated relationships with food. Equally as important for the artist is engagement with the viewer through touch, sound, smell, and taste.

Together they are working on the interactive seed map project for West Berkeley communities.

Related Tactics is an artistic collaboration between artists and cultural workers Michele Carlson, Weston Teruya, and Nathan Watson. Formed in 2015, Related Tactics projects are made at the intersection of race and culture. Their projects explore the connections between art, movements for social justice, and the public through trans-disciplinary exchanges, collective making, and dialog. Related Tactics is also a conceptual space and platform where we employ curatorial strategies as artistic gestures to create opportunities within our communities and construct space for collective voice.

For the Print Public exhibition, they present Collected Landscapes, set of 51 vintage postcard prints (one from each State and Washington D.C.) that featured colonial and white supremacist monuments that have been digitally altered to erase those markers, leaving only the ghostly trace of the former presence within view, and the (Inflating Agitation) series, as part of theirMemories Breathe and Every Monument Deflates body of work, featuring an inflatable/deflatable monument base temporarily installed in specific sites that speak to often invisible moments in local community histories, particularly those linked to labor & social justice movements.