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

2021-Now [this work is in progress]
Collaborative, interdisciplinary public artwork
Co-Authored with Amanda Leigh Evans (as part of DeepTime Collective)
Collaboration with students, staff, and families of Prescott School District, Prescott, WA

When the River Becomes a Cloud is a multi-year, collaborative public artwork that artist Amanda Leigh Evans 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. 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, migration and belonging and social-emotional learning.

This ongoing work is commissioned by Carnegie Picture Lab as part of their Rural Art Initiative. This long-term artist residency was co-initiated by Prescott School District and Carnegie Picture Lab as a mutually beneficial, reciprocal relationship that addresses the unique opportunities and challenges of rural art education and rural contemporary art practices. 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 is funded by an Arts WA AIE Grant. We continue to write grants to support this project.

Local press: “Massive, immersive art project incorporated every student in Prescott School District” by Shelia Hager of the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin.

Embodying the River: Part 1

All-School Performance and Interactive Installation
Developed through embodied research with high school ASB students and their teachers Bob Young and Tiffany Hedman
June 2022

For the June 2022 launch event Amanda and I choreographed the school community–over 300 students, teachers and staff–into an embodied river that moved through the campus. The river had indoor and outdoor ephemeral immersive art experiences all created by students and conceptually engaging water. Wearing a rainbow of monochromatic shirts created for the event, the school community moved through these art experiences simulating aspects of the water cycle. This event was co-created with the Prescott School Associated Student Body (ASB).

Carrying balloons, simulating water molecules, students metaphorically floated through the air, became rain and merged into rivers. They passed through a hallway transformed into a rushing stream, each classroom darkened with projections of rushing water and storms. Prescott middle school and high school students constructed inflatable glaciers. These huge constructions were installed in the gym with videos the 7th grade. Outdoor class filmed of the Touchet river which flows on the edge of campus. The cafeteria became an underground aquifer, dark, damp and smoky with transparency projections of moving water, interactive pools, and stalagmites, laid out and installed by the 6th graders. A breezeway was transformed into a rushing waterfall with 144 feet of sparkling tinsel curtain and an old basketball court became a rainbow. Campus wide drawings, including those on the t-shirt design, created by the 1st grade art classes. At the end of experience, the school community gathered on a soccer field to construct themselves into a cloud which was documented by drone.


ABOVE: Photos by Allyn Griffin (drone pilot), Kyle Peets and Tara Graves. Images of more current and future initiatives in this collaboration to follow.
BELOW (top): Signs showing a line by line poem was printed as wayfinding signs throughout the event.
BELOW (bottom): An image of the performance was later installed on a baseball dugout at the field where the performance took place.



Mapping our Watershed: Part 2

Large-Scale Wall Drawing on Prescott’s Agriculture Science Building
Developed in collaboration with first grade students and their art instructor, Jessica Johnson, and high school art students and their teacher Mark Grimm
March 2022 - November 2022

In October 2022, the first permanent artwork was installed. It is a large-scale wall drawing that covers three sides of the school’s art and agriculture building. The wall drawing uses aerial tracings of the Touchet River, a river that literally flows through the school’s campus, and drawings made by first grade students that represent the disparate but connected communities that make up the school: Prescott (town), Prescott (school), Eureka, Vista Hermosa, the apple orchards and the wheat fields.

The wall drawing is made using hundreds of drawings by first grade students, who drew their homes, their families, their parents at work, their pets, and their life at school. These drawings were then collected and arranged into compositions by the high school art class, which were then projected and traced on the surface of the building. When you enter the building, you enter an enormous drawing that maps our school’s metaphorical watershed.


Emotional Weather: Part 3

Large-Scale Outdoor Ceramic Sculptures
Participatory artwork with ceramic contributions from each student at Prescott School (all PreK-12th grade students)
December 2022-May 2024


Each student at Prescott School (PreK - 12th grade) 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.

This work is in progress. Updates on this project will be posted in Spring 2024.

The Cosmic Swamp: Part 4

Digitally-Printed Building Façade for Middle School Portable Buildings
Design collaboratively co-authored with 6th grade students and their teacher Ryan Anderson
December 2022-May 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. This work will be completed in Spring 2024.


A Celestial Game: Part 5

Digital photo collage printed on UV-resistant vinyl and mounted on Dibond panels.
Participatory artwork involving parents, teachers, and staff through the school’s communication app.
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.


La Misma Canción / The Same Song : Part 6

Exhibition of drawings on paper and large-scale printed banner.
Project collaboratively developed with Visiting artist Mark Menjívar. Drawings by 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.
February 2024- April 2024

In Spring of 2024, Amanda and I invited San Antonio-based artist Mark Menjívar to collaborate with us to activate La Misma Canción (The Same Song). In this ongoing project Mark 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.

The banner is supported by grants from Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology, Community Engagement Org, and ArtsWA AIE. Mark’s visit to Eastern WA and corresponding lecture at Whitman College was sponsored by Whitman College CELRI, the Whitman College Archives, the Walla Walla Immigrant Rights Coaliton, and The Listener’s Project: Queremos Escucharte.

MORE ABOUT the PROJECT [CONTEXT & ETHICS]


Prescott School is a single school district in rural Eastern Washington. A majority of Prescott School families work in Washington's agricultural industries. Approximately 80% of the students are of Latin American heritage and live in a singular farmworker housing community for one of Washington's largest apple orchards. The remaining 20% of students live in the small town of Prescott, which has a population of 377 and consists mainly of white, working class families who are connected to the region’s dryland wheat economy.

Rural students, especially rural students of color, 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 co-author projects that are made by/with/for our community.

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

When the River Becomes a Cloud uses social-emotional learning and trauma-informed design to develop contemporary public artworks that are present throughout the school’s campus. 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 contemporary art in a rural context. Additionally, the project operates from an antiracist framework, prioritizing visiting artists whose identities reflect students’ lived experiences.

Visiting Lecture Series
Throughout the course of the project, in addition to large-scale artworks, we have hosted artist/research lectures byZoemiel Henderson,Joel Gaytan,Juventino Aranda,Fanny Julissa Garcia, thePSU Art + Social Practice MFA Program, andTessa Hulls. 

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.

  • Antiracist Research: Students study and emulate a diverse canon of historical and contemporary interdisciplinary artists.