Eight Years of Inscape AiR: Resistance and Belonging out of the Historic Immigration Building | Opening Reception
Friends, family, and neighbors, join us for the opening reception of Eight Years of Inscape AiR at ARTS at King Street Station!
First Thursday Opening + Artist Reception: June 5, 2025 | 5-8pm
Exhibition Dates: June 5-August 9, 2025 | Wed-Sat 11am-5pm
Artists: Carina A. del Rosario | Ching-In Chen + Cassie Mira | Jo Cosme | Sophia Fang | Sabella Flagg | Pete Fleming | Alice Gosti/MALACARNE (with dancers Marceline Nyakirindo, Sofiya Kostareva, Margaret Luxamon Hotchkiss, Prasti Purdum, and Margaux Gex) | Barry Johnson | Haein Kang | Emily Tanner-McLean | Lila Thomas
Curated by Tara Tamaribuchi
Eight Years of Inscape AiR: Resistance and Belonging at the Historic Immigration Building brings together alumni of the Inscape Artist-in-Residence program that took place from 2016 to 2024 at Inscape Arts, the art studio building that was Seattle’s immigration and detention building for 80 years. The residency, organized by volunteer building artists, focused on providing studios to immigrant and diasporic community artists, and artists interested in engaging with the building’s history and the Chinatown-International District neighborhood.
Experiences of displacement and diaspora with community building and mutual aid converge at this site. While the tenant artists in the building have been at risk of displacement in a neighborhood at-risk of gentrification, the building itself holds the history of harm to immigrant communities which continues at the Northwest Detention Center but with a new aggressive reality of raids, imprisonment, and deportation.
We disrupt these subjections of displacement and dehumanization to offer senses of belonging, self-determination, home, and resistance. Some of us reflect on selfhood, image production, and visibility through the diasporic experience of immigration, borders, and colonization, and into the recent shift towards deglobalization. Some of the work is a process of grief and acceptance of marginalization and displacement, that organically moves toward creating a new sense of home and belonging where we thrive and resist.
We are inspired by the long history of the resistance and mutual aid in the building that extends into the surrounding neighborhoods. We honor this legacy of resilience that has instilled cultural pride and innovation through artmaking, dreaming, and spellcasting. Together these works intend to continue this thread from our ancestors, to build a shared space of protection, safety, and solidarity for all to explore and inhabit.
More on the show at: https://www.seattle.gov/arts/experience/arts-events?trumbaEmbed=view%3Devent%26eventid%3D183154561
Location + parking: https://seattle.gov/arts/experience/galleries/arts-at-king-street-station-gallery#gettinghere
Friends of Inscape thanks the City of Seattle Office of Arts and Culture for presenting this exhibition at Arts at King Street Station and supporting the artists. We also are grateful to the The Wing Luke Museum for taking part in jurying the residency. We appreciate the support of City of Seattle community members and 4Culture, and fiscal sponsorship from the Northwest Film Forum.