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

Eastern Washington University Gallery of Art is pleased to present the exhibition When the River Becomes a Cloud / Cuando el río se transforma en nube

November 21, 2024 through February 4, 2025. This exhibition features artworks and ephemera from a multi-year, socially engaged art project created by the DeepTime Collective in collaboration with students, staff and families from Prescott School on Prescott, WA. An opening reception and gallery-talk will be held on Thursday, November 21st at noon. A closing reception and lecture will be held on Tuesday, February 4th at noon.

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Join us for the opening reception of When the River Becomes a Cloud / Cuando el río se transforma en nube, an exhibition featuring a multi-year, socially engaged public artwork created by DeepTime Collective (Amanda Leigh Evans and Tia Kramer) in collaboration with students, staff, and families from Prescott School in Prescott, WA. Founded in 2021, this ongoing site-specific project creates a permanent public artwork in the form of a river that winds throughout the entire indoor and outdoor rural school campus. The featured artworks–co-authored with students, staff & families–utilize artistic research to examine local watershed ecologies, agriculture, and the migration of people throughout the region. DeepTime Collective’s exhibition at Eastern Washington University Gallery of Art features process images, performance ephemera, and original artworks developed with Prescott students.

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 río se transforma en nube is commissioned by Picture Lab as part of their Rural Art Initiative. The project was co-initiated by Prescott School District and Picture Lab to foster a mutually beneficial relationship that addresses the unique opportunities, challenges, and relevance of contemporary art education in rural places. Since its inception, the project has received funding from local and national organizations including, the National Endowment for the Arts, ArtsWA, Sherwood Trust, SEL in Action, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and Community Engagement Org.

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.

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.

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.