by Molly Gilmore
Collaboration is at the center of Olympia Arts Walk, when the city’s creative community transforms downtown businesses, nonprofits and vacant spaces into temporary galleries, markets and performance spaces — and even the Thurston County Museum of Fine Art, a pop-up museum created by a group of artists.
This time around, the impromptu institution (located, for now, at 509 4th Ave. E.) will be home to the work featured on the Arts Walk map: “Lion’s Mane,” a digital photograph by David Hoekje. “My goal is to create something unreal out of the real and highlight the transformation inherent in the photographic medium,” Hoekje (pronounced Hoke-yuh) said of the photo, in which a 1-pound lion’s mane mushroom looks more alien than earthly. “At the same time, I’m trying to evoke some really basic and essential themes of spring: growth, renewal, birth.”
On the map for the twice-yearly festival’s spring edition, happening April 26 and 27, are 100 participating locations hosting visual art, music, dance, puppetry, aerial arts and much more. Amid the wealth of options, collaborative work among literary and visual artists is one of the themes that emerge.
“We’ve had poetry in the past, but this year, there’s definitely a lot out there,” said Arts Walk coordinator Jessica Strauss Tomy. Like this Arts Walk itself, the poetic projects involve a lot of students and a certain amount of serendipity.
Olympia Poet Laureate Kathleen Byrd has teamed up with fellow South Sound Community College professor Liza Brenner for Habitats: Climate, Art and Poetry, an exhibit of paintings along with poems designed and printed by Sherwood Press. The show — on view at KXXO, 119 Washington St. SE, Olympia — will also include poems and paintings by students at the college.
The work by the creative-writing and art students came out of study, observation and research. The art students created work on the theme “Looks Can Be Deceiving: Invasive Species and Repairing the Riparian Zone,” the zone where land meets a river or stream.
The event will include a reception, reading and question-and-answer session with the professors and their students from 5 to 10 p.m. April 26. Byrd and Brenner will also be on hand from 1 to 4 p.m. April 27 to show the installation.
Also focusing their Arts Walk collaboration on the environment are artist Carrie Ziegler and poet Jennifer Johnson. Ziegler, well known for facilitating group artmaking around environmental themes, is showing her studio paintings at The Bandha Room, 119 Capitol Way N., Olympia. She and Johnson will offer “Ritual, Reflection, Writing: A Workshop on Emergence,” from 6 to 7 p.m. April 26. All are welcome to the workshop, which will offer participants the opportunity to reflect on Ziegler’s work and explore their responses in writing. “I find ritual and poetry to be incredibly moving … and accessible, particularly when we strip away the ‘shoulds,’ ” Ziegler said.
“Carrie’s work is deeply evocative and I hope to help people gain insight and begin to process what is evoked for them, personally as well as communally,” Johnson said. “My goal is to encourage people to write from their hearts to help understand what and how they are feeling.”
At Browsers Bookshop, members of the Olympia High School Poetry Club will be selling chapbooks of their poems. On offer will be chapbooks by 16 student poets along with one featuring poetry by Carolyn Gilman, who teaches English and advises the club. “We try to do a special project every April for National Poetry Month, and this is this year’s project,” Gilman said.
Browsers is also showing papercuts by celebrated local artist, illustrator and author Nikki McClure, who’ll be on hand to sign books from 6 to 7 p.m. April 26. The store will display papercuts from McClure’s latest book, Something About the Sky, a collaboration with the late environmentalist Rachel Carson. Sky — based on a piece Carson wrote in response to a child’s request — is not a poetry book, but Carson wrote poems and came to believe that there was poetry in writing truthfully about nature.
Maria Popova, who reviewed the book for the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/09/books/review/rachel-carson-nikki-mcclure-something-about-the-sky.html), had this to say of McClure’s illustrations: “What emerges is a kind of tender visual poem, as boldly defiant of category as Carson’s writing.”
The juxtaposition of McClure’s illustrations and the student poetry was a happy accident, said bookstore owner Andrea Griffith. “We didn’t mastermind the pairing,” she said, “but we’re eagerly anticipating the celebration of words, poetry and creativity at Arts Walk this year.”
WHAT
Olympia Arts Walk
WHEN
April 26 and 27
WHERE
Downtown Olympia, with street closure at Fifth Avenue from Washington to Jefferson streets
LEARN MORE
http://artswalkoly.com