'Art connects us': Community Hero Chintia Kirana sees endless opportunity in Montgomery

Chintia Kirana moved to Montgomery from Jakarta, Indonesia, at the age of 12.

She couldn’t speak English very well, so school was difficult at first. Other kids would either taunt her or ignore her altogether, and even teachers had a hard time knowing how to help her.

Words weren’t an option, so Kirana almost exclusively expressed herself through her artwork. When she wasn’t helping her parents cut chicken and vegetables in their restaurant, she would paint and draw every one of her emotions.

“Art was my refuge in that sense,” Kirana said. “Now, I find a way to utilize art to bring people together because I think it's so much more powerful than just a piece of painting on the wall.”

After graduating from Booker T. Washington Magnet High School, Kirana went on to successfully pursue her art on a global scale. Museums from New York City to South Korea have featured her art, and she is currently working on a project with funding from The Andy Warhol Foundation.

Through everything, though, she never forgot about her home in Alabama. For one reason or another, she’ll always come back.

“I ask myself why every day. There's this black hole in Montgomery that just sucks you in, in a good way, I think,” Kirana said. “It’s one of those things where if there are things lacking in the city, then actually there's a lot of opportunity. Then, you can be the one that puts in a stepping stone, starts the foundation to build it. I love the idea of that.”

Kirana came home in 2016, and she’s been dedicated to invigorating the community with art ever since.

She started the Expose Art House artist residency, opened her house up as a gallery, taught art students at BTW for years and played an instrumental role in bringing numerous national public arts projects to Montgomery.

For these reasons, Chintia Kirana is the Montgomery Advertiser’s Community Hero for November, an honor sponsored by South University.

Finding her place in the city

Throughout young adulthood, Kirana knew she would always have a tie to Montgomery — because of her teenage memories, and her family and her alma mater. But she never pictured a life here.

When she left in 2012 to earn her Master’s of Fine Arts from Southern Illinois University, she wanted to travel the world and find new perspectives. She wanted to create something somewhere else.

So when Kirana came back to Montgomery four years later, she was a little disappointed in herself. Even though she had become a university art professor and started the international magazine Expose Art all while earning a second degree, she felt like a failure.

Those feelings were compounded by the realizations that she didn’t have a community in the city and locals didn’t seem to care much for contemporary art.

If she wanted either of those things to change, she would have to create something to change them.

“So I started turning my house into an art gallery. I cleared out my living room, I painted the wall white, I set up track lighting and I curated shows,” Kirana said. “That's sort of a way that I could try to bring the public into a private space to experience art.”

She called it the Expose Art House, and from there, everything started happening.

Artists from across the south traveled into town to show pieces at the Art House, and show after show, Kirana’s community grew.

“A lot of people don’t really understand Montgomery,” she said. “They have this perspective of what the people are and what they do in Alabama, but they never really understand how warm it is.”

Even Kirana herself didn’t fully understand that until she left and came back to see the city with new eyes.

Forging friendships

In 2018, Kirana met Sarah Beatty Buller, cofounder of Montgomery Builds. Buller’s company had renovated the historic Kress Building downtown, and she was on the hunt for Alabama artists to participate in the building’s first art exhibit.

Kirana was at the top of her list.

“She's just always been someone that I believe is truly an artist. She's an explorer. She is just someone who's very curious about the world, and I think she's inspired by the human component of the world,” Buller said. “Before I even met her, I knew that.”

Once Buller tracked Kirana down, she had a big ask: “Would you please recreate your massive eggshell art installation that usually takes eight months to construct for my exhibit? And could you have it done in eight weeks?”

The installation was called “In Time,” and it was composed of hundreds of eggshells assembled to appear frozen mid-fall from the sky.

Kirana agreed to create the installation on a shortened timeline, and Buller said she was amazed at the community of friends and fellow artists who showed up in support.

“I just thought, ‘Wow, that is the power of Chintia Kirana,’” Buller said.

The pair became quick friends, and shortly thereafter, they started the Montgomery Art Project together, an initiative dedicated to fostering human connection and opportunity with art.

Turning Montgomery inside out

Through MAP, Kirana has been the driving force for numerous community art projects. One of those was the Inside Out Project, which plastered portraits of thousands of Montgomerians on the One Dexter Plaza building in the heart of downtown.

The project was initially created by French artist JR as a way to encourage communities to make a statement about themselves through art. In late 2018, Kirana saw the project on display in Atlanta, and she approached one of JR’s assistants to ask if they’d been to Montgomery yet.

“No. What’s in Montgomery?” the person replied. Kirana said this is a question she is quite used to hearing, and her answer is usually the same: “Well, come and find out.”

A few months and lots of effort later, the portraits went up downtown.

“The idea of that project was to show our inner beauty, show the world who we are by utilizing photos of our community and pasting them on one of the most historic streets in America, essentially,” Kirana said. “We didn’t want this to have a racial divide or a class divide. We wanted everybody to be presented as one.”

Montgomery’s Inside Out was a hit. Representatives from The Andy Warhol Foundation enjoyed it so much that they gave Kirana funding for a new project dealing with similar themes of identity and community.

Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts Board of Trustees President Laurie J. Weil has known Kirana since her first exhibit at the Kress Building. In those years, she's seen Kirana make space for others in the same way that she makes space for art in the community.

"She moves from the inside out and pushes back walls so that more people can join in, those who have had different experiences that perhaps impacted them in similar ways," Weil said. "She is the kind of human being who visualizes people in a circle rather than across a line. There's no hierarchy that Chintia puts people in."

Because of Kirana's strong community work, the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts invited her to join its Board of Trustees several years ago. There, she has continued to drive support for the arts to Montgomery.

“I think she has served on our board with equal amount of passion and dedication as she does with anything,” MMFA Head of Learning and Programs Emily Stuart Thomas said. “She's bringing the world to Montgomery, and everything that she does is worthy to be celebrated because she does it with such heart and community focus.”

Thomas first met Kirana when the two were colleagues teaching at BTW, and they developed a friendship. She was always impressed by Kirana’s ability to defy the stereotype that “those who can’t do, teach.”

“She was really the opposite. She went out and did the thing that she wanted to do while teaching,” Thomas said. “Her students got the front row seats to learn from an incredible artist and see the possibilities of a career and a life as an artist.”

Moving forward

Kirana stepped away from teaching last year, but she still has as much on her plate now as ever.

She’s working on her Warhol Foundation project, splitting her time between her Montgomery and Brooklyn studios, taking on the role of art director for a film called “The Architecture of Love” and continuing to prioritize her vision for Montgomery.

Just recently, she helped the city welcome Little Amal, a 12-foot-tall puppet of a 10-year-old Syrian refugee who represented the journey of every refugee and marginalized person.

Amal walked through the historic Five Points Cottage Hill area surrounded by broken eggshells that community members had decorated. By the end of her journey through Cottage Hill, Amal "put the shells back together" and had her own giant egg on display.

“The whole point of that walk was that we were all these fragmented pieces, like every single one of us has been broken in some ways. And although we're fragmented over the years, we're able to heal and put ourselves back together,” Kirana said. “Montgomery is this place that is rich with history, but it's still trying to heal.”

Seeing the community gathered en masse downtown meant the world to her. She said the picture of every kind of Montgomerian standing together on Dexter Avenue was a beautiful sight, one emblematic of what she hoped will become the city’s future.

“Growing up Chinese, Indonesian, an immigrant, a refugee, whatever label it is that I always have to explain to people, I always feel like I'm the outsider. I always look at Montgomery as this thing that I’m outside of, and I would like to be a part of it even more,” Kirana said. “I hope for the future that everybody could feel like they're a part of something in our city. We're here to make it better, so why not work together?”

Do you know a Community Hero?

To nominate someone for Community Heroes Montgomery, email communityheroes@gannett.com. Please specify which category you are nominating for and your contact information.

Hadley Hitson covers children's health, education and welfare for the Montgomery Advertiser. She can be reached at hhitson@gannett.com. To support her work, subscribe to the Advertiser.

This article originally appeared on Montgomery Advertiser: Community Hero Chintia Kirana always has hope for Montgomery