A letter from the curator.
My name is Alice D'Alberto. I founded ArtLab and I am its curator.
For years I changed my mind about who I wanted to be. Then, in high school, during a time of real discouragement, art was what gave me the most back: history, art and literature, from the West and from the East. That is when I understood it would be my life.
Soon came the choice everyone asked me to make: Eastern languages or cultural heritage, one road or the other. I did not want to give up either. I took my degree in art history in Urbino and kept all of it together, because to me art has always been exactly that: a bridge between cultures, the most universal language there is.
Meanwhile, almost everyone told me no. That working in art, in museums, in galleries, was impossible.
“They told me I would never make it. ArtLab began there too.”
I went in anyway. I did an internship at the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche and then worked at a gallery in Rome, where I co-curated three exhibitions and prepared its participation in miart. From the inside I saw two things. The art world is closed: you get in almost only through who you know. And artists, precisely because they live inside their own work, often cannot show its worth the way it deserves.
The work of a gallerist and of a curator is to build the setting in which an artist can be themselves and be seen at their best. Often it takes only a few things: a proper introduction, a site, words used consistently. That is what the galleries and years of working side by side with artists taught me.
I did not take the traditional road. I opened the door myself, and now I want to open it for artists too. That is why ArtLab exists: looking at art here is free, with no account. Every artist can have a page of their own, at no cost, to show their work and tell its story. And those who want it work with me one to one: portfolios, texts, applications, a site built together.
I have opened a new chapter in Tokyo, to hold my East and my West together and let the two cultures touch where they meet. My aim is to bring artists from different cultures into dialogue, in group exhibitions too, and to make art as open as it can be: young, alive, accessible.
Write to me whenever you like.