Gallery Gachet is a unique artist-run centre located in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Gachet is a collectively run exhibition and studio space built to empower participants as artists, administrators, and curators. The organization’s cultural services have grown from the operation of a small, basement studio in downtown Granville South, offering one exhibition a year in 1993, to coordinating approximately three thousand square feet of public-access arts space with up to twelve exhibitions each year, in addition to residencies, workshops, artist talks, symposia, special projects, and other events.
The gallery’s exhibition schedule features a range of contemporary and experimental performance and installation work in addition to community arts programming. This balance allows Gachet to involve its community of developing artists and professionals alike in collaboration and dialogue, in the interest of exposing each other to new ways of seeing. Collective members are the governing body of Gallery Gachet, guiding management and programming while building professional art skills and capacity. This structure grows out of the gallery’s central mandate as a space for the interplay of art and healing, which its empowerment model builds upon.
Gallery Gachet strives to provide a focal point for dialogue among outsider/dissident artists. Through artistic means, it aims to demystify and challenge issues related to mental health and social marginalization in order to educate the public and promote social and economic justice.
The gallery sees a time and place where people who have experienced marginalization feel fully supported in their struggle for a creative life and career, including access to adequate housing, studio space, and economic security. It believes that the expression and practice of art and active participation in culture-building is a human right, and that art and culture are critical elements of a healthy society.
Note: gallery hours are subject to change, please call to verify hours before visiting
