Director's Notes : Love Letters to Planet Earth

Gallery B612

Pioneer Square | March 5 – April 29, 2026

Hairy Curtain Crust (Stereum hirsutum), 2025 Mixed Media 12 x 12 | Be a Forest, 2025 Painting 36 x 48 | Having listened faithfully to the great teachers, 2025 Mixed Media 24 x 18

Dear Earth,

I love you in the quiet ways you hold us—

in the patience of mountains,

the soft insistence of roots breaking stone,

the way light returns each morning as if it never learned to leave.

You give without asking to be witnessed, yet you carry every footstep,

every breath, every forgetting and

remembering.

If love is devotion without possession, then you are love itself—

and we are still learning how to love you back.

With love,

MiYoung Margolis

Director, Gallery B612

P.S. I love you.

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Migration, 2025 Painting 48.25 x 12

Mother,

When I looked down at my tea cup yesterday it contained

you.

I'd learned that there are more water particles in a cup of water

than there are cups of water on your entire surface.

So after milenia of rain and flowing, snow and ocean waves

could it be that this one cup could hold a bit of every other cup that once was? 

Do I hold the rain that once fell on your Amazon?

Glacier runoff from your oldest, coldest, mountains? 

The wet from the mud that once clung to my boots?

Mud that clung to mammoths' feet?

Did my tea once flow over fish gills, the tentacles of jellyfish?

Do I hold every tear ever spilled? Every river and stream and brook from every corner of you?

Do I hold every cup of tea

held in every hand

in all of time? 

Are we that connected?

to each other?

to you?

Kelly Cook

Curator, Gallery B612

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Girl In The Plasma Fields, 2020 Fiber Art 25 x 16

Tierra Querida / Dear Earth:

In my native tongues, in the language of so many 

you are a mother, a feminine entity; 

what a tender and exquisite serendipity.

Mothers are our home and our making ~

the embodiment of resilience; a soft place to land; fierce protectors.

As the first mother, you have carried the weight of our humanness 

with infinite patience, and endless love;

constantly renewing, forever nourishing.

From you I sprouted, by you I flourish, to you I shall return.

Mi amor es tuyo, es mío, es nuestro / My love is yours is mine is ours.

Con gratitud y amor,

Grace Yolanda

Assist. Curator

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The Significance of This Exhibition

Love Letters to Planet Earth was not conceived as a climate protest exhibition.

It does not rely on catastrophe, statistics, or moral urgency as spectacle. In a time when environmental discourse is often shaped by alarm and apocalyptic imagery, this exhibition intentionally shifts the tone toward intimacy.

The guiding question is simple:

What would you say to the Earth, if you could?

Rather than positioning the planet as something to be fixed or saved, this exhibition asks how we might relate to it — personally, tenderly, honestly.

The curatorial framework invited participating curators to write a love letter. Not a manifesto. Not a warning. A letter.

A letter presumes connection. A letter assumes care. A letter resists abstraction.

Through this gesture, Love Letters to Planet Earth reframes environmental awareness as relational rather than rhetorical. Love becomes the entry point — not guilt, not fear.

The exhibition recognizes three interwoven dimensions of our relationship with the Earth:

• Belonging

• Interconnection

• Devotion without possession

To love something without attempting to own it is a radical stance in an extractive age.

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Material Significance

Many of the artists included in this exhibition work with:

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• recycled plastics and fiber assemblage — Bella Kim, Jack’s Dream (2024)

• beeswax encaustic layering — Sharon Gottula, The Extinction Chandelier (2025); Migration (2025)

• textile weaving practices — Gabriela Nirino, Dreaming That The Land Flourishes III (2023); Dreaming That The Land Flourishes IV (2024)

• layered abstract landscapes rooted in lived environments — Silvia Bajardi, Held Between Two Skies (2025); Golden Hour (2025)

• embodied harmony between human and wild — Janet Fagan, Harmony (2025)

• declarative ecological unity — Lezlie Jane, Be a Forest (2025)

  
  

These works do not function as illustrations of crisis. Instead, they embody process, interdependence, memory, and transformation through material practice.

Wax preserves and reveals. Textile interweaves. Recycled plastic is reimagined. Collage accumulates. Wood is reclaimed.

The materials themselves become metaphors for continuity and care.

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Why This Matters

In an era saturated with urgency, it is easy to become numb.

This exhibition proposes that love may endure where fear exhausts us.

When we remember why we love something — the light, the water, the ground beneath us — care becomes instinct rather than instruction.

Love Letters to Planet Earth gathers multiple voices not to argue, but to remember.

It is not a solution. It is not a verdict.

It is a gathering of devotion.

And perhaps that is where meaningful change begins.

For more on Love Letters to Planet Earth, including exhibition details, artist profiles, and upcoming events, visit: https://www.galleryb612.com/exhibitions-1/love-letters-to-planet-earth

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Related Events and Workshops

First Thursday Art Walk | Open Late | March 5, 2026 | 5:00 PM

Gallery Reception | Love Letters to Planet Earth | March 7, 2026 | 12:00 PM

Gallery B612 | Pioneer Square, 520 1st Ave South