Prescott students are so lucky to have artists Tia Kramer and Amanda Leigh Evans and the Artists in Residence Program! This exciting opportunity has given our students additional hands-on experiences in Art.
Amanda Leigh Evans is an interdisciplinary artist who teaches ceramics at Whitman College and Tia Kramer is a local professional artist with an extensive background in art and performance. Both grew up in very small agricultural communities, Amanda in California and Tia in Iowa.
In the classroom, they are working with students across grade levels on various arts-based experiential research projects. For example, this past spring 2022 they have been working with our first grader who created drawings about their daily lives. The High School art students have then been designing these drawings into a mural that will be painted on our Art & Agriculture building next fall.
At the end of this year they will also be hosting a unique all-school experiential art activity titled, When the River Becomes a Cloud. In this project all of the students, in concert with school staff and teachers, will become an embodied river that moves through the school campus. Wearing a rainbow of monochromatic shirts created for the event, the school community will move through a series of art experiences simulating aspects of the water cycle. The project uses the metaphor of water’s transformation to embody the school’s social-emotional learning and arts curriculum.
Below are students working with Tia and Amanda on a Kintsugi Line. Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with precious metals. This artwork was created with high school advanced English class who were reading The Samurai's Garden, a book by a Japanese-American author Gail Tsukiyama about not covering up ways we are broken, but celebrating the resilience that comes from struggle. Those students also are working on a poem that will be displayed nearby.
