Bring the ARTS into your community

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Bring the ARTS into your community *

Engaging in the ARTS can be life changing.

The ARTS are for all of us.

Teaching Artists Program

  • Sonia Allen

    As an artist, I seek out and explore doorways into pockets of unexpected beauty. When painting, I use brush or palette knife to tell a story and coax a vision to life. In printmaking I work on a gelatin or metal printing plate. Transferring images layer by layer to paper results in a one-of-a-kind original piece. My sketchbook is my playground.

    Drawing / Sketchbook / Watercolor

  • Shirley Brown

    I’m an artist in a way that every human is creative. My choice expression is connecting with self through movement and stillness, also known as the practice of yoga. Practicing for over 20 years and teaching both children and adults mindful movement, my true intention is to hold space for you to explore more of what’s at the core of you. Not what society says you should be like or are. I have found more and more self acceptance, and self expression through the practice of yoga.

    Kids yoga / Yoga / Mindfulness

  • Amy Charnholm

    My work mainly includes large-scale murals with bright and playful colors, dynamic compositions, and flattened shapes, including natural and floral elements. I am passionate about this medium because of the power it has to change learning and living environments, filling them with color and life.

    Murals

  • Jesus Escobar

    I create because I am inspired by the places around me and the stories they carry. Historic buildings, monuments, landscapes, and everyday spaces remind me that the things we leave behind can continue to inspire others long after we’re gone. That idea influences both my abstract paintings and my photography. Working primarily in acrylic, I use abstraction to explore color, movement, and emotion rather than literal representation.

    Murals

  • Naomi Halpern

    Naomi comes to art with backgrounds in humanitarian rights, ecosystem survey, farming, and youth mental health. These disciplines weave together in their place-based art which centers belonging, observation, experimentation, and mutual tending. They live and make on Kalapuyan land, where they hope to precipitate community, ruckus, and healing through their art and arts facilitation.

    Paper Mosiac / Papermaking / Paper History / Drawing

  • Alex Hitchen

    My belief is that art education is more than just learning how to paint and draw. Artistic opportunities offer learners the chance to fine-tune their abilities around problem solving, planning, fine motor skills, historical knowledge and the social emotional tools needed to give and accept critique. When done well, these skills transform the educational potential of students outside of the art classroom and out into the world.

    Mixed Media Collage / Oil Pastel / Watercolor / Drawing / Transfer / Acrylic

  • Jessica Rehfield

    As an art instructor, I believe exploration and learning with creative processes is more important than ever in helping students to emotionally engage and process their experience, and to support and enhance learning. There is no skill like hands-on art-making to help students develop patience and resilience, and to make sense of their world. Their favorite arts to make are painting with every type of paint, making collage zines with print media and drawing with pencil, pen and charcoal.

    Creative zines / Drawing

  • Lillian Roth

    Most of my artwork are paintings on canvas, which have evolved into more sculptural aspects, wood working, and fiber arts to expand on the concept of evolving characters. I thrive in creating art works with various media in order to explore the intersecting identities that create a person and the vulnerability in showing them all at once.

    TAB / Montessori / general art mediums

  • Ashley Smith

    My work begins with a circle and a single fold. From that simple whole movement, form and space emerge that mirror the rhythmic patterns of growth found throughout life — from seed pods, cellular structures, and root systems to handmade textiles, architecture and spiritual systems across cultures. Working primarily with paper, fibre, and textiles I bring the skills of a longtime costume designer into this practice — the art of making an idea visible, of giving physical form to something felt but not yet seen.

    Geometry of Folding Circles / Paper sculpture / Paper Circle Books

  • Eric Tautkus

    I am a self taught mixed media artist born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. I grew up on cartoons, comics, graffiti and skateboarding culture. Plant life, nature, and organic compositions are my main source of inspiration and aerosol as well as pencil work are my primary mediums but since ive always worked without rules or limits in how an artist works towards bringing their vision to life i stay open minded and forever a student to creation and what it means and takes to be an “artist”.

    Sketching 101 / Street Art in Commercial Design / Basic Logo Design / Gallery Readiness for Youth

  • Victor Villegas

    Victor Villegas, also known as “DroneSinger,” is a bilingual, bicultural teaching artist who brings STEAM learning to life through music, storytelling, puppetry, and ventriloquism. His interactive K–12 programs use the Arts to help students explore science and technology, think creatively, build confidence, and express their ideas in new ways. Through humor, hands-on learning, and culturally responsive teaching, Victor creates welcoming experiences where every student can discover their curiosity and creative voice.

    STEAM Poetry / Songwriting / Puppetry / Body percussion / Biosonification

  • Rio Wrenn

    I am an environmental artist working with plant and minerals. My work is a celebration of process that has evolved as I developed and experimented with its boundaries. I mainly use textiles as my canvas in combination with rust, plant dyes, found objects and raw materials that manifest by dyeing, embroidery, needle weaving, basketry, sewing, soft sculpture, printing, pigment extraction and painting.

    Natural dyeing / Pigment extraction / Embroidery / Rust fusion / Indigo