AMcE Creative Arts Gallery Brings a New Vibe to Seattle

A. McLean Emenegger! That is the name of the dynamic director of the unusually titled AMcE Creative Arts gallery located at 612 19th Ave East. As I walked along 19th Street, its small storefront popped out with the ceramics by Sonja Peterson. The director herself was explaining the significance of several offbeat cookie jars by Ryan Kelly.

It was clear that this dynamic woman was articulate! She told me she came from Los Angeles and had worked in all aspects of art for over 20 years. She began in television, ran a gallery, curated, career coached artists, edited an art magazine, worked in marketing, and makes art. And writes about it. Whew. Her goal is to bring people together for a shared human experience.

The current exhibition is edgy, although its title would not suggest that. “Sacred” includes five artists: painter Niki Keenan, painter and ceramic artist Kendra Larson, ceramic artist Holly Hudson, experimental mixed media photographer Christine Nguyen, and mixed media artist Io Palmer.

The theme of the exhibition is the intersection of humans and nature, but more than that the idea of sublime, the sense that nature is overwhelming and uplifting. The paintings in the exhibition seem to most directly express the sublime. Kendra Larson’s Tree of Knowledge and Niki Keenan’s Sunbeam Marsh are both landscapes, emphasizing trees with strange colors and light. Keenan’s painting emphasizes the sun breaking through a forest that is dense with tangled trees. Larson’s Astral Slugs feels more like swamp trees. In the sky are “astral slugs”—large slugs curling around the blue sky.

I just came from the new exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum “Mystic Modern” which suggests the intersection of especially surrealism with the earlier well known “mystics” like Mark Tobey and Kenneth Callahan. I see the same intersection here, only more removed from classical surrealism. These artists are surreal in their own original way.

Christine Nguygen’s “Deer Spirit.” Archival pigment ink on Entrada Moab paper with salt crystals, 40” x 33”

Christine Nguyen creates magic with a unique technique. She draws and paints on both sides of a negative (her background is in photography). She overlays the two sides and photographs them, then prints it. She then immerses it in a salt bath which adheres serendipitously to the surface. The result is a sparkling image. My favorite is Deer Spirit in which the deer’s antlers become a tree and echo the tree-like form nearby. As articulately explained on the website: “The pieces fluctuate between the micro and macro-worlds while connecting the flora and fauna to the celestial heavens of stars and planets as part of her ongoing investigations of our connection to the natural world” (AMcE Creative Arts).

Holly Hudson is a bigger stretch to connect to “the Sacred” or the sublime. Her ceramics are pure fantasy, though: Jerome’s Lion is a young lion covered in flowers. Rooted features a ceramic foot with a thick tangle of roots growing out of its sole. Green Man has a face half covered in flowers, and The Seer is a large eye surrounded by flowers. What these ceramics have in common (they are both glazed and unglazed) is a sense of eerie fantasy.

Io Palmer’s “The Cut Through,” 2026 – installation view detail. Ceramic, glaze, painted wood, metal brace, wire, plexiglass, size variable (installed 43 x 81 x 12 in.)

Io Palmer’s work achieves the “sacred” in an entirely different way. She creates a combination of glazed ceramic shapes that become clusters of organic forms as they seem to move in clusters across a wall. She has spoken of her open, winding forms as transforming and liberating, overcoming the restrictions she has experienced as a woman of color. The work speaks of flowering branches that are clustered in segments. They do not relate to a specific natural form, but to a sense of nature as freeing. She lives in the Palouse and teaches as a Professor of Art at Washington State University where the landscape is open and has few trees or shrubs. She seems to be creating that in her work as well.

To return to the gallery and its director, the location of AMcE Creative Arts, far from other galleries, seems to liberate the owner to pursue her own path. She said people drop in all the time—her neighbors are her friends, but she does not participate in art walks.

You are in for a treat when you visit this gallery. The next exhibition is a selection of her gallery artists. You can preview them on the gallery website. I am not familiar with most of them but it is clear that A. McLean Emenegger is bringing an entirely new vibe to our small Seattle art scene.

~Susan Noyes Platt, PhD.

Art Historian and Art Critic

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