January Gallery Exhibit

Anna Kaufman and Amelia Santiago

January 13 - February 4, 2024

Former AVA artists-in-residence Amelia Santiago and Anna Kaufman will be featured in a joint exhibit showcasing the work they each completed during their 6-month residency stay in 2023.

The show will open January 13 during Astoria's Artwalk from noon to 8:00pm and run through February 4.

Santiago’s work celebrates the historic landscape of Astoria, exploring painting iconic houses using a traditional approach of portraiture. With this new body of work, collectively titled “Home and Heart”, Santiago experimented with mediums and worked to express her feelings of being a part of this artistic and creative community. “This was a new endeavor for me as my previous work has always been figurative. But in my seven years here I find my sketchbook filled with more painted ladies and less faces.”

This body of work was created with gouache and ink using both resist and a reductive process.

Kaufman will present a selection of a larger ongoing project, “I Want To Tell You About My Body”, a fragment of a graphic poem which is autobiographical in nature. The series explores our existence in the context of the world around us—as relational beings.

As an environmental scientist, Kaufman studies the local ecosystems, and her art often reflects the environment of the Pacific Northwest: the complex interactions between rivers, oceans, forests, and their faunal inhabitants.

“This has been my meditation on the life we breathe into each other,” explains Kaufman in her artist statement, “In this era of turbulence—a changing climate, senseless wars, political strife —it is a reflection on the cycles of birth, decay, death, transformation, and togetherness.”

Astoria Visual Arts artist-in-residence program has provided 34 artists with free studio space since 2015.

Anna Kaufman

Amelia Santiago