Since the term "Asian American" was coined by activists in 1968 to foster a sense of community among a diverse population, those identifying as Asian American or Pacific Islanders (AAPI) have found ways to embrace, challenge, and organize around this expansive social category.
The AAPI gallerists featured here offer insights from New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago into their efforts to cultivate inclusive and impactful communities around their programs. Their approaches include working directly with nearby AAPI-owned businesses, taking risks on previously marginalized voices and perspectives, supporting artists' projects that treat exhibition spaces as social laboratories, and actively pushing back against the model minority myth and other harmful stereotypes in their day-to-day interactions.
Here, we speak to the names behind five AAPI-owned galleries about how they are creating inclusive communities around their programs.
Kavi Gupta
Kavi Gupta, Chicago
Kavi Gupta, who established his eponymous gallery in Chicago, Illinois, in 2000 and in New Buffalo, Michigan, in 2020, is a self-described idealist. Gupta's father immigrated to Chicago from India in the 1960s, and Gupta believes he owes it to the Midwest and its communities of color to find a platform for its people, culture, and history in an art world that still overlooks smaller cities and marginalized viewpoints.
Gupta is also a pragmatist. "Artists come to our gallery first because we're problem-solvers, and we don't say no," he explained, referring to the massive amount of labor and negotiation that goes into fabricating works to artists' specifications. He recalled, for instance, the making of Tomokazu Matsuyama's Nirvana Tropicana (2020), a 16-foot stainless steel sculpture that resembles an outsized bouquet of metallic vegetation, as well as finding a fabricator to produce Suchitra Mattai's Osmosis (2022), a colossus of fabric, cords, and wood encrusted in white salt.
Working in the Midwest comes with its advantages, including time and space. His geographical positioning also presents him with unique opportunities to help artists in time-sensitive situations. As a point of pride, Gupta enjoys being involved in every level of planning and organization at his gallery and assisting others whenever possible, although he is keenly aware of stereotypes that cause arts workers from marginalized backgrounds to shoulder more responsibility than is fair. "AAPI people have consistently been called hard workers," he reflected. But rest assured, he said, "there will be a time when we are allowed to move past that."