When the River Becomes a Cloud / Cuando el río se transforma en nube

Project Overview

When the River Becomes a Cloud / Cuando el río se transforma en nube is a multi-year, radical public artwork that Tia Kramer and I are developing in partnership with students, teachers, and staff at a preK-12 public school in rural Eastern Washington. Since December 2021, we have been long-term artists-in-residence at Prescott School. During this five-year residency, we are creating a multi-media, permanent public artwork in the form of a river that winds throughout the entire indoor and outdoor school campus. The project utilizes artistic and scientific inquiry to examine local ecology and watersheds, agriculture, and migration and belonging.

This ongoing work is commissioned by Carnegie Picture Lab as part of their Rural Art Initiative. The residency was co-initiated by Prescott School District and Carnegie Picture Lab as a mutually beneficial, reciprocal relationship that addresses the unique opportunities, challenges, and relevancy of rural contemporary art education.

How is this funded?
The 2022 6-month pilot was funded by a grant from Sherwood Trust and Blue Mountain Community Foundation. The 2022-23 school year was funded by an SEL in Action grant from Education First. The 2023-24 school year was funded by an ArtsWA Arts in Education (AIE) and a mini-grant from Cornell Lab of Ornithology. The 2024-25 school year is funded by an NEA Artists Projects Grant, ArtsWA Arts in Education (AIE), and funding provided by Prescott School District. The project is directed and administered by Carnegie Picture Lab. 

Context, Values and Approach

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. The remaining 20% of our students live in the small town of Prescott (pop 377), which consists mainly of white working class families who support our region’s dryland wheat farming economy. 

Through this project, we ask: Is contemporary art relevant to rural communities? What is missing when contemporary art fails to account for rural perspectives? How does contemporary art reproduce class-based elitism in rural contexts? How do we create our own criteria for defining meaningful artwork within a rural context, rather than replicating urban-centric systems of artistic production? 

A Collaborative, Co-Authored Rural Contemporary Artwork

The closest regional art museum is more than two hours away from Prescott. Until this project began, most students had never seen artwork made by working artists in person.

We wholeheartedly believe that rural students, especially students from low-income households, deserve equitable access to innovative, context-responsive contemporary art education. This value has led to the development of this unique rural artist residency model. Students collaborate with us and invited visiting artists on projects that are made by/with/for our school community.

As part of this unique partnership, we engage Prescott School's burgeoning agriculture program to develop site-responsive, experiential learning projects that connect culturally-relevant contemporary art practices with agriculture and local ecology.

By-With-For Our Rural Community

When the River Becomes a Cloud initiates process-oriented projects that promote social-emotional learning and trauma-informed design. We recognize how crucial it is for young people to see their cultures and identities represented in leadership, which means we prioritize visiting artist-scholars whose lived experiences align with the experiences of our students.

Through collaboration and co-authorship, the project challenges notions of who is considered an expert by blurring the boundaries between authors, producers, and audience members. This approach rejects the traditionally individualistic, singular-author approach to artmaking and instead presents a model for responsive artmaking in a rural context.

Project Learning Outcomes

• Creative Risk Taking: Students learn to embrace risk-taking as an integral part of the creative process.
  
• Collaboration with Peers: Students develop collaborative skills by actively participating in group projects that have public outcomes.
  
• Self Empowerment: Students cultivate leadership abilities by making artistic decisions that directly influence project outcomes.
  
• Social-Emotional Growth: Students engage in creative practices that encourage attunement to their full selves, lives, and stories.
  
• Culturally-Relevant Research: Students study and emulate a diverse canon of historical and contemporary interdisciplinary artists.

Visiting Lecture Series
Throughout the course of the project, in addition to large-scale artworks, we have hosted artist/research lectures by Zoemiel Henderson, Joel Gaytan, Juventino Aranda, Fanny Julissa Garcia, Mark Menjívar, and the PSU Art + Social Practice MFA Program.

A majority of Prescott School families work at one of Washington’s largest apple orchards.

A view of Prescott School District from the Touchet River. The school is adjacent to large-scale dryland wheat production fields.

A USGS image of the water cycle. Like water, we are part of circular systems. We cycle back and forth to our places of work and school each day. The river becomes the cloud and the cloud becomes the river. 

WHAT
All-School performance and interactive temporary installation

WHO
Developed through embodied research with high school ASB students and their teachers Bob Young and Tiffany Hedman

WHEN
Performed June 2022

When The River Becomes A Cloud officially launched in June 2022 following a six month exploratory pilot period. For the launch event, we collaborated with high school students from the Prescott School Associated Student Body (ASB) to create an all-school performance.

During the performance, more than 300 students, teachers, and staff moved across the school's campus as an embodied river. The river's path included indoor and outdoor immersive art experiences, all designed by the students to conceptually engage water. Participants wore a rainbow of monochromatic shirts featuring a logo created by first-grade students. The walk concluded with the entire school sitting in the shape of a cloud on a baseball field.

_{Photos by Allyn Griffin (drone pilot), Kyle Peets and Tara J Graves}

A line-by-line poem was printed as wayfinding signage for the launch event

WHAT Large-Scale wall drawing on Prescott’s Agriculture Science building

WHO
Developed in collaboration with first grade students and their art instructor, Jessica Johnson, and high school art students and their teacher Mark Grimm

WHEN
Started: March 2022
Completed: November 2022

In September 2022, we moved into the second phase of the project, which is to create permanent, collaborative public artworks that connect like a river throughout the school’s campus. The first permanent artwork was a large-scale drawing on three sides of the Ag Science building, which depicted the school's metaphorical watershed.

In the water cycle, rain falls onto the hills and trickles into streams, rivers and lakes before eventually evaporating into clouds. Similarly, each morning, students walk out their front doors, ride the bus to school, and gather in the school hallways and classrooms before returning home at the end of the day. The cycles are mirrors. When you enter the Ag building, you enter our collective watershed.

Over the course of four months, we met weekly with first grade and high school students to develop a design. The black and white drawings, made by first-grade students, reference the disparate but connected communities that make up our school: Prescott (town), Prescott (school), Eureka, Vista Hermosa, the apple orchards, and the wheat fields. When the first grade students completed the drawings, the high school art class chose images they felt best represented the school’s metaphorical watershed. The drawings were then scanned and arranged as a digital design before being projected and traced with permanent paint pens onto the walls of the building. The drawing incorporates color block aerial tracings of significant landmarks along the Touchet River, which flows through the school’s campus. 

This project was installed with the support of local artists Zoemiel Henderson and Joel Gaytan.

WHAT
Large-Scale Outdoor Ceramic Sculptures

WHO
Participatory artwork with ceramic contributions from each student at Prescott School (all PreK-12th grade students)

WHEN
Started: December 2022

A ceramic cloud being delivered by the school’s Ag tractor.

Each student at Prescott School created a fist-sized singular cloud with high fire stoneware clay. The cloud expressed the emotional weather the student experienced that morning on their way to school.

We used the small clouds as collage material to build two enormous ceramic clouds that will live permanently outdoors and will perform simultaneously as sculptures and benches. The once ephemeral internal weather, like a cloud, becomes eternal, like a stone, through its translation into a ceramic material. 

Since 1914, each graduating class at Prescott School District has posted a frame with graduate photos in the school hallway. This 110-year and counting archive of the school is a literal and metaphorical river. We worked with the class of 2023 to design a frame that articulates the flow of time and graduates through the school.

WHAT
Building façade for middle school portable buildings

WHO
Design collaboratively co-authored with 6th grade students and their teacher Ryan Anderson

WHEN
Started: December 2022
Completed: September 2024

From December 2022 to June 2023, we met each Thursday morning with 6th grade students. Our meetings cumulatively worked toward developing a design for a hybrid painted and digitally-printed building façade that covers the middle school portable buildings.

Students selected an aspect of the watershed that best referenced their middle school experience. The students decided the concept of swamp was the perfect representation of the in-between, murky unknown of middle school. 

As we developed this project, we presented weekly artistic research prompts alongside field trips to local wetlands, swamp-related contemporary artworks, and texts like Mary Oliver’s poem Crossing the Swamp.

WHAT   
Digital photo collage printed on UV-resistant vinyl and mounted on Dibond panels

WHO
Participatory artwork involving parents, teachers, and staff through the school’s communication app

WHEN
Completed: October 2023

Using the school’s communication app, we sent a community-wide message to parents, staff and teachers to solicit sunrise and sunset photos from the Prescott area. We used their photos to create digital collages for the backboards of two basketball hoops facing east (sunrise) and west (sunset). 

The Mesoamerican ballgame, a similar but ancient game of balls and hoops, has been symbolically linked to the movement of celestial bodies. Historically, Mesoamerican ballgame hoops were oriented in opposition to each other, either on a north-south or east-west axis.

WHAT  
Exhibition of drawings on tracing paper with alcohol marker and prismacolor pencil and large-scale printed banner of scanned drawings.

WHO
Visiting artist Mark Menjívar 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

WHEN
Started: February 2024
Completed: April 2024

Drawing Workshops
La Misma Canción (The Same Song) is an ongoing project by San Antonio-based artist Mark Menjívar that works with primarily Latinx communities by making connections with birds that

migrate from their home countries to where they are living now. The project started when Mark Menjívar imagined if the bird songs he was hearing near his home in Texas were the same bird songs his family in El Salvador could have heard. 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.

[click to enlarge]

Migratory BirdFest
A school-wide festival to welcome migrating birds created in collaboration with Prescott School students, teachers and staff, Walla Walla Immigrant Rights Coalition, Blue Mountain Audubon Society, and the Pioneer Park Aviary. The event took place on April 11, 2024.

Exhibition
Drawings by 4th, 8th, and HS students were exhibited in Prescott’s main hallway

Bird Posters
Using student drawings, we produced a set of educational posters with information about each of the migratory birds studied in this project. These are available as a free downloadable pedagogical tool [click here to download].

Part 8: Making Visible The Invisible

Making Sky Visible: A Study of the Color Blue (7th Grade)

We began our research by studying how the color blue has been used throughout history and around the world. We also studied natural occurrences of blue, the rarest color in nature. Although blue has been significant in many cultures since ancient times, in many instances, the color blue went unnamed often until blue pigments could be manufactured reliably in the culture using that language.

We studied why the sky is blue. When looking at the sky away from the direct incident sunlight, the human eye perceives the sky to be blue. This is because the earth's atmosphere scatters short-wavelength light more efficiently than that of longer wavelengths. This led us to study the invisible forces making the sky visible to us. 

Our research ended with a permanently-installed cyanometer, painted in shades of blue mixed by individual students, that measures the blueness of the sky above Prescott’s soccer field. A cyanometer is an instrument for measuring the color intensity of blue sky. It is attributed to Horace-Bénédict de Saussure and Alexander von Humboldt.

Making Wind Visible: A Study Of Movement (6th Grade)

All artwork points to something. An artist’s role in society is to make things that are less visible more visible. 

We began this project by collectively composing a long list of things that are invisible. The list ranged from intestinal gas to radioactivity to sadness. The list grew over the course of four months while we developed this project with 6th Grade students. The list remained in their classroom and anytime they thought of something invisible, they were encouraged to write it on the list. 

We then discussed strategies to make the wind visible. Students had the idea to make kites, so we started with roughly designed kites using materials we could find around the school. 

In subsequent workshops, we considered a location to permanently make wind visible. It was decided that we should hang wind chimes in the school’s heritage apple tree.

Once we found the location, we initiated a writing exercise on clay. Students wrote about aspects of themselves that are invisible. Then students transformed these slabs into shapes that could become wind chimes. 

A list of invisible things, written by students

Testing makeshift kites

Writing on clay slabs about the invisible. These eventually became wind chimes.


Hanging wind chimes in the school’s old apple tree