http://www.kqed.org/arts/programs/spark/profile.jsp?

essid=17325

Kaleid
View Spark segment on Kaleid.
Original air date: June 2007.
(Running Time: 8:16)

As Silicon Valley's next-door neighbor, San Jose is often considered

prime stomping grounds for techies and corporate desk jockeys -- not
necessarily the sort of place one would expect to find a burgeoning
underground art movement. But in 2001, a program called Phantom
Galleries began filling empty downtown storefronts with the work of
local artists, and San Jose has since become one of the Bay Area's
most art-friendly cities.

One of the most recent venues to open as part of the Phantom

Galleries program is the Kaleid art gallery. This once-empty space in a
downtown parking garage now shows the work of 60 local artists and
holds a monthly reception for featured artists during the city's ongoing
South First Fridays Gallery Walk. This provides artists in and around
San Jose with an opportunity to exhibit and sell their work close to
home. Spark visits with two of these artists while they prepare for an
exhibit at Kaleid.

Longtime South Bay artist and educator Charlotte Kruk N'Kempken's

dresses and capes made from thousands of candy wrappers may have
yielded cease and desist letters from candy corporations over the
years, but her intricately tailored designs have also won her myriad
fans. "It sort of seemed to work for me to express some ideas that I
had -- kind of looking at our society and the way that we package
everything and the way that we package ourselves to present
ourselves to society," Kruk N'Kempken says of her art.
Ema Harris-Sintamarian, a recent transplant to the Bay Area from
Romania, works with another kind of recycled material -- ideas.
Inspired by magazine advertisements and popular culture, Sintamarian
employs a variety of techniques, ranging from graffiti to architectural
composition, to create larger-than-life drawings that are narrative and
imbued with dreamlike fantasy.

"We were really pegged as software companies and a bunch of techies

who stayed in our cubicles from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., but the truth is that a
lot of these people who work in those corporations are also artists,"
says designer Cherri Lakey, one of the founders of Phantom Galleries.

Kaleid and the Phantom Galleries program are produced by Two Fish
Design in partnership with the San Jose Downtown Association and the
San Jose Redevelopment Agency. The South First Fridays Gallery Walk
also includes Anno Domini, GreenRice Gallery, MACLA, San Jose
Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles,
Works San Jose and various other Phantom Galleries' locations.