Victoria's Alcheringa Gallery Announces New Ownership

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Mark and Mary Loria are the new owners of Alcheringa Gallery in Victoria, taking over from founder Elaine Monds.

Mark is a local arts and culture advocate and his wife, Mary, is a ceramic artist and educator.

The gallery has promoted Indigenous art and artists from the Pacific Rim, including Papua New Guinea, Australia and Canada for 30 years.

Alcheringa is a word borrowed from the Aranda people of Central Australia and loosely means eternity touching time or the eternal now.

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Elaine Monds

Monds, who was exposed to Indigenous culture growing up in Kenya, met artists when she traveled to Papua New Guinea and was inspired to open the gallery.

Since then, she has supported hundreds of artists and their cultural art forms, particularly the revival of Northwest Coast art in the 1980s and, more recently, the rebirth of Coast Salish art. 

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Mary and Mark Loria

Mark, an artist, has experience with the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, the Institute of Modern Art in Australia and the Shaw Centre for the Salish Sea on Vancouver Island. 

Mary is a sessional ceramics instructor in art Education at the University of Victoria.

Source: Alcheringa Gallery