Brian Slattery Photos
On Wednesday evening, dozens gathered in KNOWN, the co-work space in the Palladium Building at 139 Orange St. It was part of KNOWN’s Wind-Down Wednesdays, a chance for people to exchange ideas and just relax. But the art on the walls — like Daniel Ramos’s Monk at the Ojo de Agua — wasn’t there as a coincidence; this particular Wednesday evening was a chance to celebrate the opening of “Assemblage,” a show put together by Kim Weston of Wábi Gallery. As it turned out, the gathering of humans at KNOWN was mirrored by the exhibition itself, which Weston conceived of as its own gathering of artists, and the ideas and spirit they share.
“Assemblage is a visual collection of artists’ fine works rich in culture, spiritual movement, ancestry, storytelling and the abstract views of color, shape and form,” an accompanying note to the show explains. “These visionaries derived from New Haven, New York, Chicago, Mexico, and Ghana. Assemblage is a family of creatives joined together by artist and friend Kim Weston. This premiere exhibition examines the spiritual and utopian connections we share.”
Weston with Susan Clinard's sculptures.
The show represents something of a soft launch for Wábi Gallery, an enterprise Weston intends to use to foster careers in art by selling the work of established artists and offering art education and training to emerging artists. Weston purchased a space to be a home for Wábi at 126 Court St., around the corner, a year and a half ago, but has been “hitting stumbling blocks” in getting loans and grants to finish it the way she wants it, she said.
Meanwhile, she graduated from the KNOWNpreneurs program, a free 16-week mentorship and training cohort for BIPOC-owned businesses, run out of KNOWN. Juan Salas-Romer, KNOWN’s founder and executive director, Weston said, “wants to help those businesses excel and scale, and … that’s exactly what my business has been able to do.” She credits Salas-Romer for continuing to mentor her, and for connecting her to “this beautiful community” of like-minded people.
She got a co-work table at KNOWN, ended up renting an office there, and “I started hanging out here. And Juan said, ‘hey, why don’t you put art on the walls since you’re a gallery?”
The invitation made Weston realize that she didn’t have to wait to finish building out the Court Street space in order to start her Wábi gallery work. By mounting a show at KNOWN, she could “get things moving the way I really want them to move. I thought, ‘get the name out there, let people know who you are … building up who you are. So that became a nice pivot. And that’s what you have to do as a business, and that’s what you have to do as an artist.”
Hanging art at a place like KNOWN has advantages over a typical gallery installation, as KNOWN gets steady traffic from people using the space to work as well as attend events. “The events are where people get really excited about seeing the art, because it’s unexpected,” Weston said. “It’s different than putting artwork up in a café. People are coming here from New York, from Boston. New Haveners are coming here. People who stay downstairs” in a space rented out as an AirBnB. “It’s an array of people coming through the space. The traffic that comes through is really diverse. Even after I open the gallery around the corner, I will have more people coming through this space than I will have coming through the gallery on a day-to-day basis.”
“It’s a great opportunity for the artists,” Weston, an artist herself, said. “Every artist says, ‘how do I get my work out?’ ”
Oi Fortin's The Sun Also Rises and Noe Jimenez's Untitled.
“This exhibition is just about our spiritual themes that come together, and how we share those common things,” Weston said. “How we share color, shape, and form. How we share the vision of what’s happening now in culture and society, without clashing. How we see that through our own gaze without judgment.” The majority of the artists are BIPOC or women. “It’s so important for me to get the BIPOC voice out there, because for a long time, galleries have been only open for White men.” The diversity matters, for creators of art and for audiences; “it’s like food, being able to taste food from different culture. It’s something new, a different experience, and it doesn’t matter what culture you’re from. That’s being human, and that’s a wonderful thing.”
In organizing the show, Weston was drawn to the artists’ individual pieces. “The pieces were more about how the colors and the shapes work together. They look like assemblage, like pieces that were put together.”
So Kwadwo Adae’s piece is made up of small circles “that work together, and it took him time to put his piece together… It’s about gathering,” Weston said. “You look at Susan Clinard’s pieces — they’re made from manufactured pieces. She molded the face, and then she found a found object and put it together.” In Oi Fortin’s work, “she’s printmaking, and she’s layering paper and colors on top of each other. I think about us as artists, and that’s what we do. We are layering culture, ideas, constant thoughts. You’re bringing all of that together all the time.” Bringing all the pieces together is “a gathering of that energy, and a gathering of all those great minds, and there’s something so human about that, that’s beyond art.”
Kwadwo Adae, #31.
One of Weston’s own piece on the walls of KNOWN is “my very first piece that started my whole body of work, and the journey of spirit photography that I do. I had to dig deep and pull apart who I am to find what makes me want to do photography, to shoot at powwows, and figure out who I am as a Native woman and who I am as a Black woman — who I am as a spiritual woman, a spiritual being. Why do I care about my ancestors and whether they walk with me, physically or spiritually?”
Meanwhile, Weston continues to push forward in building out her Court Street space. “I would like see it up next year,” she said — by the Open Source Festival next year, but “the sooner the better.”
“New Haven needs a Wábi Gallery,” she continued. “It needs a gallery that’s pushing for artists to sell their work, not just showcasing work.… It needs a gallery that’s going to say, ‘hey, this work needs to be sold, it needs to be collected, it needs to be put in institutions — not just galleries or museums. We need someone to fight for artists to get them paid real wages, not $25 or $35 an hour, but $125, $150 an hour, and more. We deserve that. They deserve that.”
Visit their respective websites to learn more about Wábi Gallery and KNOWN.