What We Hold @ KALA Art Institute
Joanna Cortez, Priya Suresh Kambli, Klea McKenna, Ainslee Alem Robson, and Mei Chen Tseng.
Hours: Tue-Fri, 12 - 5 pm & Sat, 12 - 4 pm
Coffee Ceremony with Ainslee Alem Robson: Saturday, October 3, 2-4pm
Kala Gallery is excited to present What We Hold, New Works by 2025-2026 Kala Fellowship artists Joanna Cortez, Priya Suresh Kambli, Klea McKenna, Ainslee Alem Robson, and Mei Chen Tseng. The exhibition offers a glimpse into the artists’ practices and the ideas that have informed their time at Kala.
Working across printmaking, photography, film, sculpture, textiles, and installation, these five artists draw from family archives, cultural traditions, mythology, ritual, folklore, and inherited objects. Their practices resist linear narratives, weaving together memory and imagination, ancestry and futurity, loss and belonging.
Joanna Cortez draws on imagery and motifs from US, Mexican, Palestinian, and other cultural traditions to challenge narratives that reduce living cultures to histories of violence, labor, or disappearance. Her practice becomes a form of record keeping and storytelling, creating space for heritage and resilience to remain part of an ongoing conversation.
Klea McKenna considers what it means to communicate across time. Drawing on mythology, archaeology, folklore, and futurism, she approaches her audience as potential descendants rather than simply contemporary viewers. Her work The Remedy brings together shaped intaglio prints and fabric forms to tell a story rooted in ancestral experience, exploring embodiment, motherhood, trauma, pleasure, and healing.
Ainslee Alem Robson’s installation Yeskèn: Unsettled Grounds takes its name from the Amharic word for the time it takes coffee grounds to settle at the bottom of the jebena, the clay pot used in Ethiopian coffee ceremony. For her, this unhurried collective pause becomes a methodology for traversing layers of memory and time. Family photographs and film footage, oral histories, sound, and moving images converge as vessels for memory and intergenerational storytelling.
Mei Chen Tseng’s practice moves between Taiwan and Italy, bringing together traditional and contemporary forms of printmaking with literature, language, spirituality, and philosophical systems such as the I Ching. Her work reflects on the shifting landscapes of identity and the tensions between tradition and innovation, using the material and conceptual possibilities of print to connect cultural histories with contemporary experience.
Priya Suresh Kambli’s work centers on the fragmentation and reconstruction of identity within the migrant experience. Working with her mother’s objects of worship and family archive, she adapts Indian ritual practices within the American landscape. Through photography, she seeks to create what she calls “an archive of belonging” – one that addresses absence and loss while connecting herself and her ancestors to her adopted land.
Together these artists explore how stories and cultural knowledge are carried across generations and geographies, and how they might be preserved, transformed, and carried forward.
Kala Fellowships Residencies are awarded annually to a group of innovative artists. The 2025-2026 Fellowship selection panel includes Ronny Quevedo, 2015 Fellowship Artist; Carin Adams, Senior Curator of Art, Oakland Museum of California; and Mayumi Hamanaka, Kala’s Co-Executive Director.
Special thanks to the supporters of Kala’s Fellowship Program, including the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, Meyer Sound, Cafe Colucci, and many generous individual donors.