Alessandra Gordon’s voracious appetite for culture has led her down an unconventional path. As a child, she spent summers in Japan with her grandparents, who embedded in her an unadulterated sense of tradition and loyalty to something greater than herself. Throughout her young adult life, she lived and traveled to Japan many times on her own, searching for that shared experience across communities and questioned how this has imprinted onto her identity as a mixed race queer woman. It was then that she discovered the enriching landscape of food as a medium for expressing the tension between belonging, home, displacement, family, sexuality, and the in between.

In 2017, she become the second generation owner of her mother’s business, Ayako & Family, a decade old jam company founded upon a relationship to nostalgia, Japanese food tradition, and the beauty of reflecting that onto an American life. It is the synthesis of these interests that have emerged in her artwork and business.