adminThe Kitchen is a well-known non-profit art gallery with white boxes and black boxes since the area was used for theater performances previously to the owners of the Kitchen renting the building. Here they care about the art community with artists getting noticed-that are interdisciplinary and cannot show their pieces just like a set of paintings- and people to walk in to see and hear the art works. They focused originally on media artist, music, theater, and videos while they stopped showing visual arts. Now as said before the Kitchen combines visual with music or videos in an interdisciplinary showing, where the black box and white box can be connected.
Lumi Tan has been working at the Kitchen for the past 10 years where she learned how to curate interdisciplinary pieces and specifically non-visual art works. Before the Kitchen she had never worked with performance arts but in large museums that had commercial galleries in France. Through the interdisciplinary pieces of work she was able to learn a different approach to curating that she wouldn’t have learned in any other gallery, the uniqueness that the Kitchen allows one to have. Additionally, she was able to catch up on the legacies that helped shape and develop NYC while creating new ones as she curates new shows through the years.
https://onscreen.thekitchen.org/kenneth-tam
I find it fascinating how the curating process can be different when analysis various types of art works. I partially figured that when curating for galleries commercially or otherwise they would have all the same processes, but Lumi Tan explained differently. For the kitchen specifically, artists are chosen that would really be understood under the lights set up at the kitchen unlike at other galleries. Additionally, the galleries are curated so the pieces can integrate the audience and viewers, so they feel like they are within the piece or pieces. This aspect of curating for the kitchen I find extremely helpful, considering when looking at visual pieces sometimes, you are looking from the outside in, trying to understand what is going on and why the artist had created this scene as their artwork. Whereas in the kitchen it seems that everything is put together so the piece is understood and are no longer looking from the outside in, but are included, no longer excluded.
As a result, the audiences that come to the gallery to see all of the pieces are loyal and stick with the kitchen through there many showings. The audience and viewers make the kitchen what it is today, the community that sticks together, almost like a family, the artist, audience, and crew members (directors and curators, the staff of the Kitchen) all come together as one to produce one amazing show after another.