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EWU Exhibition Highlights Innovative Artistic Collaborations with Central Washington Rural School District | Art & Culture | Spokane | The Pacific Northwest Inlander

EWU Exhibition Highlights Innovative Artistic Collaborations with Central Washington Rural School District | Art & Culture | Spokane | The Pacific Northwest Inlander

click to enlarge The EWU exhibition highlights innovative artistic collaborations with the rural Central Washington School District

Photo courtesy of EWU / DeepTime Collective

“When the River Becomes a Cloud” features art created by students in the Prescott School District in rural southern Washington. | Photos courtesy of EWU / DeepTime Collective

Prepresent a work of art. Does it vibrate, move, or move in some other way? Does it giggle? Or smile? Probably not, because when most people think of art they imagine a painting on a wall or a sculpture on a pedestal. But for the roughly 245 preschool through 12th graders in the Prescott School District in central Washington, art is alive.

Just before summer ended the 2021-22 school year, students and staff put on colorful T-shirts and walked across the school campus. Their path mimicked the nearby Touchet River and Whetstone Creek, which frame Prescott’s western flank. Older children shook hands with little ones as the flow of people merged onto the district’s playing field. And then the river turned into a huge cloud, visible to the students from the air as a continuous line of bright dots – red, orange, turquoise and other rainbow colors became the artwork “Embodying the River”.

The 2022 art performance, as this type of action artwork is called (giggle optional), is one of several components of a years-long collaboration between the Prescott School District and Picture Lab, a nonprofit arts organization based in Walla Walla, and its Rural Arts Initiative.

“When the River Becomes a Cloud / Cuando el Rio se Transforma en Nube” is both the title of the collaboration and a recently opened art exhibition at Eastern Washington University that highlights the project.

The EWU exhibition features original artwork developed with and by Prescott students, according to organizers Tia Kramer and Amanda Leigh Evans, who have been the district’s artists-in-residence since 2021. Prescott High School students who participated in the residency will also share some of their experiences at the Feb. 4 graduation reception.

Kramer says she had just signed on as a board member at Picture Lab (formerly Carnegie Picture Lab) when Prescott Superintendent Justin Bradford was looking for creative ways to integrate art into the district’s curriculum.

“(Bradford) basically became superintendent during the pandemic and knew there were no resources to hire an art teacher, but he wanted art in the schools,” she says. “I think a lot of principals might be thinking, ‘Oh, how do we get art teachers here? Or how can we teach some art classes?’ And he thought, “How could we train our teachers to teach art so that art is integrated into all classrooms?” Or could we just have artists come and make art, and then the students can experience it because they make it?”

That concept, Kramer says, resonated with Picture Lab director Susan Greene, who reached out to Kramer.

“When we started (working with the school district), our vision was that there was a certain idea of ​​what art looked like,” Kramer said.

click to enlarge The EWU exhibition highlights innovative artistic collaborations with the rural Central Washington School District

Photo courtesy of EWU / DeepTime Collective

Her challenge, she says, was to “really take each student outside the expected framework of what art is and show them the enormous breadth of what art is.” may what they look like and how they can access them, using the means, channels or forms of expression that are most interesting to them.

Kramer and Evans, who work together under the name DeepTime Collective, describe the nature of their work as social practice or socially engaged art.

“I think that in this practice, in this project, the process of the work and the people who do it with us are (equally) important as the research that goes into it,” says Kramer, who describes herself as…social Choreographer. “They are all part of the practice and part of the outcome of the practice.”

For example, before releasing “Embodying the River,” the two surveyed Prescott students and staff about the types of art they were familiar with or wanted to see, Evans says.

When people mentioned the immersive Van Gogh exhibit in Seattle, Evans and Kramer had an epiphany.

“We thought, hey, we’re going to create an immersive art experience at our school,” Evans says.

The projects of the current residency are organized according to several themes. “Celestial Game,” for example, features images of sunrises and sunsets contributed by Prescott staff, students and student families and posted on the back wall of two basketball hoops on campus, one facing east and one facing west. “Mapping Our Watershed” includes artwork from first graders and high school students.

click to enlarge The EWU exhibition highlights innovative artistic collaborations with the rural Central Washington School District

Amanda Klein Photography Photo

Tia Kramer and Amanda Leigh Evans of DeepTime Collective.

“When the River Becomes a Cloud” thinks about cycles, Evans explains. “The way water circulates through a landscape, the way people cross borders, the way birds migrate, and also we thought about agriculture as a form of movement.”

Located about 20 miles north of Walla Walla, the region is home to a large Spanish-speaking population, most of whom live in a farmworker housing community associated with the region’s apple industry. A smaller group of white working-class families, many of whom live in Prescott, population 377, are rooted in dry wheat farming.

“The apples grown in our region probably go all over the world, at least to the United States,” Evans says.

She notes that media consumed in rural areas is typically produced in urban centers.

“So we really wanted to create a piece of art that defined what was meaningful within the school, rather than looking elsewhere to recreate something outside of the school, because I would be surprised if someone who lives in LA or New York City did that “I heard about Prescott, Washington,” Evans says.

Contemporary art, she adds, “has to figure out how to be relevant to people from different class backgrounds.”

Art is important, says Evans, who describes growing up from a working-class background. She had never visited an art museum until college and never felt like she fully belonged there.

“I believe that creative practice is important and deeply human,” says Evans. “It doesn’t just belong to certain people who have access to art at school. And we believe that Prescott School students deserve a quality art experience that asks these questions.” ♦

When the river becomes a cloud / Cuando el Rio se Transforma en Nube • Thu, Nov. 21 – Feb. 4, 2025; open Mon-Fri 9am-5pm • Free • EWU Gallery of Art • 140 Art Building, Cheney • 509-359-2494