Gallery Aferro

Nothing Lasts Forever
Gallery Aferro 2003-2023

Dear friends,

Gallery Aferro will be closing down after a truly spectacular twenty-year run as a DIY artist space.

It is fundamentally impossible to fully summarize, let alone describe, all the projects, programs, collaborations or initiatives wrought since we began. This seems fitting: Aferro was experimental, expansive, and multivoice in tendency; animated by belief in radical generosity, risks, trust, and exchanges of ideas. These continue to be subversive gestures, in a culture that remains, at times, extractive and transactional.

As working people, we aimed to create and share resources, and upend conventional notions of who art is by or for. Connections made across difference and between generations were an important part of our work year after year, and we believe that the full impact and meaning of this work will be ongoing. It doesn’t end, it gets passed on.

Thank you for twenty wonderful years of community.

Gallery Aferro’s true legacy is every moment shared between people, a wildly dispersed constellation of memories held by all of us collectively and individually. If you’re moved to share a story about Aferro, we hope it will inspire, as example of what we can accomplish collectively.

Let the legacy be love.

Co-Founders, Evonne M. Davis and Emma Wilcox

Gallery Aferro: Dignity and Beauty at VACNJ - https://mailchi.mp/aferro/vacnj

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Kea Tawana had a love of the natural world—most likely driven by all the ways in which it is an essential partner to survival.

Among her books are several volumes about foraging, basic gardening, and geology and she was known to feed the neighborhood’s stray cats. Included in her limited possessions are many specimens of rocks and minerals. The collection is sorted into nine drawers in a trunk weighing 137 pounds. Its burdensome weight suggests the importance Tawana must have given the collection. A selection of her collection were identified by Michael and Ruth Riesch of the Earthaven Museum in Gillette, Wisconsin and are on view at the Arts Center

Plan a visit to the Arts Center and explore Kea Tawana: I Traveled into the Future in a Dream and view pieces from her collection.

Photo: Kea Tawana: I Traveled into the Future in a Dream installation view at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, 2023. John Michael Kohler Arts Center Collection, gift of Gallery Aferro and Kohler Foundation Inc. Photo courtesy of John Michael Kohler Arts Center.