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.