ALICE IN CHINATOWN

Chinatown Soup is pleased to present Alice in Chinatown, an exhibition of street photography by Karla Kuyaca that is on view from January 24-26, 2020 in celebration of Chinese New Year. Please join us for an evening of dragons and lion dancing on Saturday, January 25 from 6-9pm with special neighborhood guests.

Karla Kuyaca purchased a prewar Leica and began photo-journaling while living in the Lower East Side of New York City during the 1960’s. Her first solo show of photographs hung at City Lights Bookstore upon the invitation of Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1968.

Around that time, she also became an originator of “found object” jewelry and was encouraged by her local avant-garde contemporaries, including Andy Warhol, Ivan Karp, Allan Stone, and Leo Castelli, to develop and exhibit her work.

After ceasing darkroom black-and-white printing, Karla set an intention to discover how far she could push her creative imagination in the new era of digital ink-jet. Of this moment she says, “I am soul-satisfied that I can prove myself in this medium without the use of any photo manipulation, filters, or effects.”

In addition, Karla Kuyaca is a sophisticated oil painter and published poet whose works have been featured at galleries and institutions across the country (notably at the Institute of American Indian Arts Museum) and are amongst the permanent collection of the City of San Francisco.

Currently, she is based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she built an adobe home with help from friends of local Pueblos. Alice in Chinatown captures Karla’s latest adventures in photography. Her ongoing series of often reflective shots into the intriguing shop windows of Chinatown USA are testament to the artist’s enduring creative curiosity and cross-cultural ethos.