The dynamic artist, artist organizer, community arts leader and curator June Sekiguchi designs new creative experiences for artists and viewers alike. “Art is more important than ever, especially in these trying times,” Sekiguchi reminds us, and she continues to create opportunities for diverse artists to come together, connect, and present their work to fellow artist communities and the public. The most recent exhibit she curated, Unfinished Business, consists of new artworks created out of incomplete pieces from the studios of other participating artists.
Unfinished Business is on view through January 26, housed in the elegance of Auburn’s Postmark Center for the Arts. Originally built in 1937 as the city’s Post Office, the Postmark renovation transformed the old office into a vibrant arts and cultural space. It was considered so successful a project that Postmark garnered King County’s 2023 John D. Spellman Award for Excellence in Adaptive Reuse. Sekiguchi credits landing the space for her creative exchange to Auburn’s Art Program Supervisor Allison Hyde, who agreed to host a show without knowing what its end point would be. Similarly, Sekiguchi herself did not have advance knowledge of what the show would be beyond her seed of an idea.
Sekiguchi moved forward with the belief that the exhibit would offer a profound experience to participating artists as well as viewers. Like a carefully orchestrated round robin, Sekiguchi presented each artist anonymously with the work or materials of another artist. The curator’s prior acquaintance with the artists enabled her to make informed choices about what languishing unfinished artwork or leftover materials might inspire the receiving artist.
Artists from both the Parallax Arts Collective and CLUSTER (Creatives Laughing Uniting Sharing Talking Empowering Repeatedly), along with individual artists aligned with them, rallied around Sekiguchi’s invitation to collaborate. Formed just a year ago by Sekiguchi and co-founders Anita Merina and Cheryll Leo Gwin, Parallax Arts Collective is an AANHPI (Asian American/Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander)-based organization of artists and allies that aims to amplify their voices in this era of recurrent aggression against Asians and overall racism. CLUSTER, also launched by Sekiguchi with multidisciplinary artist Stephanie Hargrave, brought together 8 women artists with the mission of “aiding & abetting women who make art in the Pacific Northwest.” Sekiguchi’s connection to these various artists provided the cohesion required to execute such personal work collaboratively.
Indeed, Sekiguchi turns the intimate connection between artist and their artwork on its head: artists are accustomed to control over their work from conception to completion. So this kind of successive engagement was a “big ask,” in Sekiguchi’s words, for artists. And yet, Sekiguchi reflected, the participants enthusiastically joined in.
The journey of each artist began with releasing something of their own for another artist to rework however they imagined. To a casual viewer, this concept could be taken as play rather than a serious project for artists. The actual practice, however, belies the burden of balancing the ideal of an “original” work of art that has pervaded western artistic creation since the Romantics; the notion that an artist reworking a precursor of another artist can be creatively disconcerting.
At the same time, handling the unfinished business of a fellow artist might call for a sense of respect, or even obligation, to honor the original. Sekiguchi’s challenge elicited insecurities, or at least questions: Would the finished work enhance, surpass or fail to make the first artist, or the artist who finished it, proud? The curator’s generous invitation to collaborate, in short, could be daunting, even if also liberating. The journey that Sekiguchi anticipated meant digging deep into one’s own creative essence, where necessarily, the curator articulated, “The emphasis is on trust, transformation, and the generative potential of creative exchange.”
Ultimately, Sekiguchi’s and Hyde’s tacit alignment was clear in the finished experience of Unfinished Business at the Postmark. Sekiguchi organized diverse artists while Postmark provided its intimate space to foster the co-mingling of artists and communities through the exchange of artistic creation. When the paired artists, along with the public, saw their “finished” works for the first time at the show’s opening, it was a collective experience of anticipation and excitement. Eyes lit up. Murmurings of “Oh wow, you did that” were audible. Artists sought out viewers for response to their work made of the former piece, which was featured in a photograph beside the new work.
Bella Kim delightedly showed off her installation, “Glory Morning,” composed of dyed fabric fragments she received from Rosalie Frankel. Kim relied on her key practices of sewing and recycling materials to transform the beguiling fragments into morning glory blossoms that dazzle against the shine of their plastic vehicle. In her excitement, Kim also pointed out the wondrous shadow her work produced in the Postmark’s careful lighting.
Carole Okamoto reveals her growing confidence as an artist by covering the surface of a painting that Elaichi Kimaro had put aside. No disrespect, however, to the “original” artist because Kimaro’s bold expression of chaos propelled Okamoto to lean into her artistic response to it. She relied on her experience with encaustic art to entirely rework Kimaro’s preexisting image and “wrap” it in a beautifully designed Japanese “gift” after Okamoto’s recent poem about cocoons she observes Americans of Japanese descent have woven to protect themselves after the trauma of their families’ WWII incarceration.
Meanwhile, MalPina Chan cut Okamoto’s large sheets of dangling, illegible text to fill panels of an accordion book she provocatively entitled, “Unfinished Conversations,” where what’s illegible also goes unspoken.
Sekiguchi presented a similar show 20 years ago through ArtEAST, an Eastside nonprofit of which she was a founding member. Whereas most art shows, again, hinge on “originality,” Sekiguchi recycles the “unfinished” idea at the Postmark. This daring redux conveys Sekiguchi’s commitment to art as a process and a practice for artists themselves, well beyond the finished works for viewers. Growing, developing and connecting art communities compels Sekiguchi as does curation where she can sustain viewers through her accessible and captivating ideas.
Unfinished Business is on view at the Postmark Center for the Arts in Auburn, WA, through January 26, 2026.
