Collection: NIAD Gallery Exhibition // Feeling Language, organized by Kate Laster

About the exhibition

This show is all about comfort text: resilience in everyday words, writing and reading. Expression can also be wordless, the use of line and color as new vocabulary, pushing a thought out onto a surface, making marks and continuously trying to communicate with the world. 

We tell stories to sustain ourselves and find each other. These messages embedded in art become an emotional telegram– a signal flare with a flame of memory trailing behind it. Feeling Language is about books, lists, slogans, language, gesture, touch and the trust given in sharing.

Twenty-five of the artists in the exhibition are from NIAD Art Center and two artists—Gigot and Anthony Morrison—are from Hospitality House’s Community Arts Program (CAP).

Among the guest artists outside of these programs are: Mitsuko Brooks, artist & archivist practicing in New York; interdisciplinary musician Abby Gregg currently working in Denver; and two artists who are both based in the Bay, designer & experimental printmaker Negash Asegde and Steph Kudisch, an artist & queer researcher.

All of these artists embody yearning, text and transmission of ideas with their work. 

About the organizer

Kate Laster was born in Anchorage (Dena'ina land) and raised all over Alaska from the arctic to the archipelago; a sense of place is key to her art practice as a diasporic jew. She received a Bachelor of Arts at Evergreen State College in 2015 and in 2019 she received a MA+MFA in History & Theory of Contemporary Art and Studio Art with an emphasis in Printmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute. She has worked with Woosh Kinaadeiyí, the SF Poster Syndicate and the Coalition on Homelessness. She recently was a full time studio assistant at Hospitality House’s Community Arts Program. Laster has been an artist-in-residence at the Vermont Studio Center, In Cahoots, Open Windows Cooperative, Cisco Home of the Brave, Kala Art Institute and at Pillow Fort Art Center.