Gallery Opening: Free to Sp%@k

Village Well Books & Coffee presents Free To Sp%@k!, a group exhibition by three Southern California fiber artists: Kathryn Pellman, Kelly Hartigan Goldstein, and Marty Ornish, who test the tensile strength of free expression at a moment when language itself has become a battleground. Across new works and installations, the artists pose a direct question: What happens to a democracy when the First Amendment is treated as negotiable?

About the exhibit:

Free To Sp%@k! moves between hush and outcry, annotation and redaction within the tactile mediums of fiber and paper. Long considered unassuming women's work, feminine craft has a rich tradition of saying what needs to be said while hiding in plain sight. These works engage the contested public square where truth collides with rumor, dissent is labeled threat, and the power of expression comes under mounting pressure. Rather than presenting free speech as a settled promise, the exhibition treats it as an active verb: speaking inconvenient truths that must be performed, protected, and continually reasserted.

"Without free speech, we won’t have democracy," says Kathryn Pellman. "If speech didn't matter, they wouldn't work so hard to police it."

Marty Ornish adds, "We're interested in the moment before a word is said: the hesitation, the risk, and what it means to choose speech anyway."

Kelly Hartigan Goldstein worries that intolerance is growing as debate and discourse become constrained by limiting language and expression asking, “Can the truth of different experiences coexist?” She fears free speech will erode as in Hemingway's quote regarding his own bankruptcy, "Gradually, then suddenly."

The exhibition frames free expression not as mere courtesy, but as infrastructure: the civic architecture that permits disagreement without collapse. It traces the subtle mechanics of erasure: the edited phrase, the narrowed vocabulary, the forbidden subject. In response, these artists counter with acts of making that insist on reclaiming voice and agency. When speech becomes dangerous, stitching becomes defiance, transforming quiet craft into bold political commentary on democracy's fragile foundations.

Free To Sp%@k! invites viewers to consider their own thresholds: When does caution become complicity? When does restraint become self-censorship? And perhaps most urgently: what is not being said?

Host or Publisher Village Well Books & Coffee