THE NEXT 17 — End-of-year Fundraiser

DIRECTOR’S NOTE

Dear 12Gates Friends,

For seventeen years, Twelve Gates has held dozens of exhibitions and countless

Conversations - artists and audiences from across the world, arguments and openings and first encounters with a work. None of it quite leaves. The room keeps something of everyone who has passed through it, and you feel it the moment you walk in - all of it in a little over seven hundred square feet in Old City. That is what seventeen years does.

What began as an idea and a great deal of grind has, somewhere along the way, become a place that is fully itself. We are five now - three full-time and two consultants - with relationships built slowly and deliberately across artists, partner institutions, funders, and universities. We have, in a word I keep returning to, landed.

But the part of this work that moves me most is no longer about our own arrival. It is about the people who keep arriving now - new colleagues, our advisors, the artists and collaborators around us - who come with ideas I wouldn't have reached on my own. New ways to meet you where you are, from digital giving to a wider and more visible presence. Artist conversations growing into something larger: collaborations with other arts and academic institutions, where a single talk opens into many.

More and more, ideas like these begin with the community around this room, and my work is to help them take root. That, I have come to feel, is the real measure of what we have built. For years the founders worked toward a vision of arriving here. The work now is to make sure this remains a place where new visions can be realized - a space that stays contemporary because the voices inside it always are.

For seventeen years we have centered South Asian diasporic voices in contemporary art, while insisting, always, that the conversation reach outward and belong to everyone. We intend to do it for seventeen more - with our artists and advisors, with the community around us, and with YOU. Because this is work none of us can do alone, and I can't imagine wanting to.

With gratitude,

Aisha Zia Khan
Co-founder & Executive Director, Twelve Gates Arts