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

Artist Statement

This exhibition highlights context-driven, radical reimagining of public art in a very rural context. Prescott School is a PreK-12 public school located in the rural town of Prescott, WA (population 377). 80% of Prescott students live in a predominantly Spanish-speaking farmworker community, which supports one of Washington’s largest apple orchards. The remaining 20% of students are from predominantly white working-class families serving the region’s dryland wheat economy. When the River Becomes a Cloud / Cuando el río se transforma en nube is collaboratively coauthored with the school community, challenging traditional notions of art by blurring the lines between authors, producers, and audience members. The project utilizes a collaborative, process-oriented framework to emphasize social-emotional learning, multigenerational exchange, and community-driven narrative change.

Through this exhibition, DeepTime Collective poses critical questions: Is contemporary art relevant to rural communities? What is missing when contemporary art fails to account for rural perspectives? Does contemporary art reinforce class-based elitism in rural contexts? Can rural artists establish their own criteria for meaningful art, rather than replicating urban-centric systems of artistic production? How do complexities of class, race, gender, and politics intersect in rural spaces, and how do they influence artistic production?

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

Artist Bio

DeepTime Collective (Amanda Leigh Evans and Tia Kramer) unearths how we understand ourselves within the interdependent constructs of time, place, community and landscape. Since 2021, DeepTime has been developing When The River Becomes a Cloud (2021-2026), a coauthored contemporary public artwork generated with students at a PreK-12th grade public school in rural Eastern WA. In 2023-24, DeepTime were recently one-year artists-in-residence at the Everson Museum, presenting an experiential artwork and exhibition titled A Day Without A Clock.

Visit their website: https://deeptimecollective.cargo.site/

Tia Kramer is an interdisciplinary artist and social choreographer who creates collective experiences that disrupt the everyday, engaging participants in embodied poetry and radical imagination. Her artworks manifest as socially engaged projects and performances rooted in public art, creative pedagogy, oral history, dance, and social action. Kramer is also Co-Founder and Director of the Walla Walla Immigrant Rights Coalition’s Colectivo de Arte Social (2018- present), which initiates bold creative projects like The Listeners Project: Queremos Escucharte to share unheard stories from the Walla Walla Valley. Kramer has a BA from Macalester College, a Post Baccalaureate in Fiber + Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an MFA in Art and Social Practice from Portland State University.

Visit her website: https://www.tiakramer.org/

Amanda Leigh Evans is an artist, educator and cultivator investigating social and ecological interdependence. Her work oscillates between self-contained ceramic work for traditional art spaces and multi-year, site-specific collaborative projects. For five years (2016-21), Evans was an artist-in-residence in a large affordable housing complex in East Portland, OR, where she collaborated with her neighbors to create The Living School of Art, an intergenerational alternative art school that centered the creative practices of their multilingual, multigenerational community. For eight years (2014-2022), Evans was a core collaborator at KSMoCA, a contemporary art museum inside a K-5 public elementary school in Portland, OR. Additionally, Evans has coauthored several multi-year projects on the history, politics and ecology of the Los Angeles River through LA Urban Rangers (2011-13) and Play the LA River (2013-15). Evans holds an MFA in Art and Social Practice and is Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Vist her website: https://amandaleighevans.com/