The Rural Art Initiative is a re-imagining of art education that is uniquely tailored to fit the needs of rural schools. In January of 2022, Carnegie Picture Lab launched our first program in the Prescott School District, a multi-faceted program of innovative art opportunities for PreSchool-12th grade students. As part of the program, artists Amanda Leigh Evans and Tia Kramer served as Artists-in-Residence, making weekly visits to facilitate art education, collaboration, and community engagement. In June, the entire school community was engaged in an immersive art performance entitled “When the River Becomes a Cloud/Cuando el Rio se Transforma en una Nube”.
The 2022-23 school year features an expanded collaboration that integrates a social-emotional learning framework with a variety of art experiences. This partnership includes classroom arts instruction, special programmatic activities, and the return of Amanda and Tia as long-term Artists-in-Residence. The initiative includes regular group art classes, small group and 1-on-1 art activities, special on and off-site art programs, projects, field trips, activities, and a large, collaborative public artwork.
Thanks to a recent grant from the Walla Walla AAUW Chapter, Picture Lab has purchased 60 children’s art books based on significant artists, past and present, who represent a variety of artistic genres and mediums. The books reflect diversity in gender, race, and ethnicity. More than half the books are on women artists.
CPL’s Rural Art Initiative artists-in-residence Amanda Leigh Evans and Tia Kramer recently created a permanent outdoor wall drawing in collaboration with first grade and high school students at Prescott School in rural Prescott, WA. The co-authored, large-scale artwork covers three sides of the school’s Ag/Art building. It is created to last until the first grade student collaborators graduate from high school in 10 years.
Evans and Kramer initiated this project last April as the 2021-2022 school year was coming to a close. The artists asked all of the first grade students to make drawings of their homes, their families, their pets, their parents at work, the school, and the landscapes they experience on their daily commute to school. Then, Prescott’s high school art class used hundreds of the first grader’s drawings to make a design that represents the disparate but interconnected communities of the school: Prescott (town), Prescott School, Eureka, Vista Hermosa, the First Fruit apple orchards, and fields of wheat and other crops farmed by the students’ families. The drawings and the communities they represent are connected by a river, inspired by the Touchet river, that literally flows through the school's campus and metaphorically draws connections between the concept of a watershed and the formation of the school’s community.
The wall drawing was painted and drawn by middle & high school students this October and November. Final tracings, finishing touches and a wall plaque noting contributors will be installed during the next stretch of warm weather.
As this project draws to a close, Evans and Kramer are beginning their next collaboration, a public sculpture created with contributions from every student in the school (PreK-12th grade), depicting individual and collective internal weather systems. The sculpture will take the form of two large ceramic clouds with a bench between them.
The highlights of 2023-2024 school year are: Installation of an Art Gallery for students, Exhibition of drawings on tracing paper with alcohol markers and prismacolor pencils, and a large-scale printed banner of scanned drawings.
Visiting artist Mark Menjívar worked with 4th Grade students and their teacher Laura Chabre, 8th Grade students with their teacher Ryan Anderson, and High School Art students with their teacher Mark Grimm.
The drawings on this banner are of ten birds that migrate annually between Eastern WA and places to which our students have connections across the Americas. The drawings on Prescott’s banner include 10 birds that migrate annually between Eastern Washington and places to which our students have connections across the Americas. This is part of La Misma Canción (The Same Song), an ongoing project by San Antonio-based artist Mark Menjívar working primarily with Latinx communities by making connections with birds migrating from their home countries to where they are living now.
Thanks to the generous support of The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Prescott School community created the Migratory BirdFest; a school-wide festival to welcome migrating birds and celebrate students art work with a large size banner.