Project logo designed by first grade students in the spring 2022
Project Map
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About the Project
The residency is focused on the production of a long, meandering public artwork that flows through the school. Like a beaded necklace, the public artwork moves in several lines across the campus, and each section contains unique parts that contribute to a unified watery whole. Each section of RiverCloud is designed and created in collaboration with teachers, parents, staff and students at Prescott School District. Each section also responds to interdisciplinary investigations on our local watershed.
Students co-create contemporary public artworks that activate the school’s campus. In addition to working with core artists-in-residence Tia Kramer and Amanda Evans, students work with invited guest visiting artists on projects that contribute to the larger artwork. Visiting artists include: Mark Menjívar, Rodney Outlaw, and the PSU Art + Social Practice Program. Additionally, the project has hosted on-site visiting artist lectures by Juventino Aranda, Fanny Julissa García, Joel Gaytan, and Zoemiel Henderson-Benavides.
When does a river become a cloud?
When the River Becomes a Cloud / Cuando el río se transforma en nube, refers to the way that water changes as it passes through a landscape.
As water moves through different parts of its cycle on land, in air, and at sea, it changes forms. It gains new identities and qualities. It reveals its mutability.
As water transforms, it nourishes. As Robin Wall Kimmerer said so beautifully, all flourishing is mutual. When our river flourishes, we flourish. As we study the life of our river, we learn just how interdependent our lives are with the water around us—it is the lifeblood of our crops, ecosystems, jobs, and households. We look closely at the living beings who rely on our river, and we recognize how inextricably linked our lives are. The more-than-human world depends on the river’s water just as much as we do.
When does a cloud become a river?
Like water moving through the water cycle, we participate in circular systems.
Each morning, we leave our homes, come to school, and trickle into classrooms. Like water droplets trickling into streams and rivers, we flow through our hallways and the school becomes our river. At the end of the day, when the bell rings, like water evaporating, we scatter and return home.
Each day at Prescott School, the river becomes a cloud and the cloud becomes a river.
Who is our river?
The Touchet River (”Too-Shee”), a 65-mile tributary of the Walla Walla River, derives its name from a Sahaptin/Ichishkiin term meaning "baking salmon on sticks over coals", a name based on a coyote myth.
The Touchet River emerges from snowmelt on the Blue Ridge Mountains, cascading downward across wheat and canola farmland, through Prescott School’s campus, and out to the Columbia River. It flows across basalt lava fields and loess soil deposits, and throughout its journey, it creates rich sediment. Along the way, some of the river evaporates and forms clouds that provide our landscape with rain.
The river has witnessed countless generations of human and more-than-human beings who have drank from it, swam in it, and relied upon its power. The river, like a timeline, connects us to the stories along its shore, past, present, and future.
The Touchet River as it flows through Prescott School’s campus
Students examine sediment on the banks of the Touchet River
How does our river connect us to the world far and near?
Prescott School’s Motto is, “Bring the world to Prescott and bring Prescott to the world”. The Touchet River is our greatest lifeblood, connecting us to waters and peoples around the globe.
Water from the Touchet River flows across the state of Washington and out to the Pacific Ocean, where it circulates the globe. Water from the river is captured in the flesh of our locally-grown apples and wheat, which provide sustenance to people around the world.
Context and Process
Process
When the River Becomes a Cloud / Cuando el río se transforma en nube is a living, co-created public artwork in a PreK-12th grade rural public school.
We are making public art by/with/for our school community. Each section of the artwork is created in collaboration with one or more groups of students, staff, or families.
Context
Apple orchards near Prescott, WA
Wheat is farmed on the field adjacent to Prescott School’s campus
A majority of Prescott School families work in Washington's agricultural industries. Approximately 80% of our students live in a predominantly Spanish-speaking farmworker housing community that serves one of Washington's largest apple orchards. Many of the remaining 20% of students live in the small town of Prescott, which primarily consists of white, working-class families who support our region’s dryland wheat farming economy.
Our school includes many intergenerational families. Photos of graduating classes, with many familiar last names, fill the high school hallway. Many parents, grandparents, uncles, cousins, and siblings attended Prescott School. The history of our school, like the river of time, is the history of our community.
Questioning Contemporary Art
- Is contemporary art relevant to rural communities?
- What is missing when contemporary art fails to account for rural, agricultural perspectives?
- In what ways does contemporary art reinforce class-based elitism in rural areas? What does contemporary art represent to rural communities?
- How can rural communities create their own criteria for defining meaningful artwork rather than replicating urban-centric systems of artistic production? Can rural public art support, encourage, and invigorate rural creative practices?
- Can rural public art be culturally responsive, reflecting the diverse and distinct lifestyles, cultures, and values of rural life?
A Collaborative, Co-Authored Rural Artwork
Urban spaces consume natural resources from rural spaces. Rural spaces consume culture produced in urban spaces. The cultural capital of urban spaces is often perceived as unidirectional, imbalanced, or extractive.
Within this project, Prescott students move from observers to producers of culture. Our framework asserts that rural spaces aren’t just consumers of culture produced in urban centers. Rural spaces can and do make meaningful and important contributions to culture. Rural artists offer perspectives that are sorely lacking in contemporary art.
Learning-by-Doing
Creative Risk Taking: Through the unknowns of creating new artworks (not art assignments), students learn to embrace risk-taking as an integral part of the creative process.
Collaboration with Peers: Through the collaborative artmaking process, students develop collaborative skills by actively participating in group projects that have public outcomes.
Self-Empowerment: Through frameworks that value student ideas and input, students cultivate leadership abilities by making artistic decisions that directly influence project outcomes.
Social-Emotional Growth: Through projects that embrace the full self, wtudents engage in creative practices that encourage attunement to their whole selves, lives, and stories.
Contextually-Responsive Research: Through projects that prioritize the lives and interests of students, students study and emulate a broad canon of historical and contemporary interdisciplinary artists, especially emphasizing artists whose concepts, topics, and methods resonate with student interests and lived experiences.
Embodying the River
June 2022
Performance art with custom t-shirts and an installation with plastic, projections, and sound
Created by all students and staff at Prescott School
Developed with high school ASB students, and teachers Bob Young and Tiffany Hedman: Tyfany A., Fatima B., Yosceline E., Alexa M., Ayleen O., Yadira Q., Amy Q., Diego V., and Naomi V.
Throughout the entire indoor and outdoor school campus
High school students from Associated Student Body (ASB) designed a walking path for the river to flow from the Tiger Den to the soccer field. Students walked in pairs—one middle or high school student with one elementary student.
As we walked, we saw and heard art made by elementary, middle, and high school students: In the gym and cafeteria, middle school and high school students made huge inflatable sculptures that looked like ice. Video projections of the Touchet River made by seventh graders covered the gym walls and floor. Music filled the air. Third, fourth, and fifth-grade students carried balloons that bounced like a river. Everyone wore t-shirts with drawings made by first-grade students.
At the end, we gathered on the soccer field in the shape of a cloud. We were the art.
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Photos by Allyn Griffin (drone pilot), Kyle Peets and Tara J Graves
These poem posters provided the movement score during the all-school performance.
June 2022
Sculpture with plastic beads and epoxy
Created by Ryan Anderson’s high school Advanced English Class: Brandon C., Violet S. and Javier U.
Outside the door from the lunch line to the playground
Water weathers the rock, gems fill the crack
Here is space to feel safe, to be wrong.
She could imagine herself in the future.
He didn’t know what it felt like to get older,
Time flew by.
When she couldn’t get her mind out, stuck.
Their favorite thing to do was to play in the fields.
Students used small gems to repair a crack in the sidewalk near the playground. The crack, like a miniature river, invites us to think about moments that are painful yet make us stronger and more resilient.
Process
2022
Wall drawing with latex paint and Krink permanent markers
Created by...
First grade students in Jessica Johnson’s art class: Jose Juan A., Adriana A., Joshua B., Isabel B., Branson C., Leonardo D., Estella G., Aranza G., Ethan G., Angel M., Fatima M., Owen O., Kaitlyn P., Alexander O., Isaiah A., Jose B., Kayla B., Colton C., Danna C., Corinne H., Angel M., Dylan N., Miguel R., Regal S., Vivyana S., Jackson S., and Alex V.
High school art students and teacher Mark Grimm: Salvador R., Ayala Y., Fatima L., Karol C., Jaime P., Alejandra C., Lana H., Jose L., Jose G., Michell P., Matt P., Juanita P., Estefani J., Mirian C., Javier S.
with support from Zoemiel Henderson and Joel Gaytan
The Ag Building
First grade students made hundreds of drawings of their houses, parents at work, pets, friends, town, and school. The high school art class then chose the drawings that best showed our school community. We transformed the drawings into digital designs and traced them onto the building at night.
Our community is like a watershed. When we leave our homes and gather at school or work every day, we are like rain that falls on the hills and gathers into rivers and lakes. At the end of the day, like water evaporating, we return home.
Process
2023
Digital photo collage printed on UV-resistant vinyl and mounted on Dibond panels
Created with contributions from Prescott School parents, teachers, and staff through the school’s communication app
The playground
The sun rises in the east and sets in the west. This project is inspired by the Mesoamerican ballgame, an ancient Central American sport played with a ball on a court with hoops facing each other. Historians believe the ball may have represented the sun. Like the Mesoamerican game, our basketball hoops face east and west.
The photos on the blue basketball backboard show sunrises near Prescott School. Photos on the pink basketball backboard show sunsets near Prescott School. A third basketball backboard near the Tiger Den, faces south and shows photos of the sky near Prescott School.
2024
Ceramic Stoneware with Glaze
Created with contributions from all students (Pre-K–12th grade students).
The courtyard
Our feelings, like the weather, change quickly. Our emotions don’t last forever, but unlike our emotions, clay cannot change after it dries. Clay reminds us that we cannot choose our internal weather, but we can choose how we respond to it.
Process
2024
Wall drawing with latex paint and Krink permanent markers
Created by sixth grade students in Ryan Anderson’s English Class: Bryan A., Jimena A., Noe A., Seb B., Ian C., Addilyn C., Val C., Harmony H., Peyton K., Orlando M., Edith Q., Julian R., Emmanuel R., Sirah S., Josue V., Anthony C., Vega G.
The middle school portables
Sixth grade students wanted to change the feeling of our middle school buildings, so our artists-in-residence asked them to choose part of the watershed that felt like middle school. The students chose a swamp.
Swamps can be strange, murky, and unknown. Middle school sometimes feels strange, murky, and unknown, but it is also an important place of growth and change.
Middle school is an in-between time when kids move from childhood to adolescence. Like middle school, a swamp is in between—not land but not water. Some animals in the swamp—like froglets that still have tails—are between childhood and adulthood. Like middle school students, the creatures in this mural are still growing and changing.
Process
2024
Ceramic stoneware and rope
Created by sixth grade students in Ryan Anderson’s English class: Daniel A., Jasmin A., Dayana A., Darina B., Breahny C., Axel C., Justin D., Yahir E., Omar G., Haven G., Amber L., Alejandro M., Kevin M., Melanie P., Allison S., Esteban V., Mauricio V., Chayse W.
The heritage apple tree behind the gym
In spring 2024, sixth grade students studied how the wind moves clouds and storms across Earth. Wind is an invisible force that shapes our planet. It is caused by changes in atmospheric temperature and pressure.
An artist’s role in society is to make things that are less visible more visible. Sixth grade students made a long list of invisible things, including everything from invisible thoughts to intestinal gas, to WiFi, to laws.
Afterward, students chose a location to put an artwork that makes the force of wind visible. They decided to make wind chimes for Prescott School’s heritage apple tree. They made their wind chimes from clay and wrote on the clay about things inside themselves that are invisible to other people.
Process