Kalaija Mallery: Student profile

Kalaija Mallery will be graduating Summer 2020 and she is well on her way to being an important voice in the national arts community.

Mallery is Manager of The Luminary, a non-profit contemporary art center in St. Louis. Mallery connected with The Luminary while the center's co-founder James McAnally was a Visiting Artist for the Low-Res winter intensive. Mallery is continuing the practice of managing an arts institution with a holistic approach.

In her art practice Mallery is a research-based artist who works with an experimental approach towards photography, the archive, and epistemological concerns of "how we know what we know". Currently, she is looking at cults and alternative living movements of the 1970's hippie communities to compare them to today's crisis of urban gentrification, colonial "wanderlust", and escapism. She is interested in how people gather, the circumstances for such, and why that is important to pay attention to in building new worlds. Mallery plans to expand her research on this topic through further education. Her website is kalaija.works.

Additionally, Kalaija Mallery has been running Third Room Project since 2017. Third Room is an artist run project space in Portland. Mallery is the driving artistic voice and coordinator of that space. She has curated and coordinated numerous exhibitions and events. Her work there has been highlighted recently in Oregon Artswatch and Art & About PDX.

Art & About PDX says of Third Room:“These types of art spaces are equally as important, and maybe even more so now because they provide an opportunity by having a space for artists to practice showing work, displaying it, talking about it, and having discourse with their viewers/community members. We all know that the opportunity to practice showing work slowly disappears for most artists’ after they leave academia. Third Room effectively holds and provides this space for artists and that allows viewers and relationships we have with art to be more playful, eliciting connections that aren’t purely taste driven. “