New This Month

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Art Story: Reflection of an Artist Couple at Tacoma Community College

Painters David Noah Giles and CJ Swanson, who, after 33 years as a married couple, are having their first two-person exhibition this month. The show runs Jan. 2-30. It is titled: Art Story: Reflection of an Artist Couple. It can be seen in The Art Gallery at Tacoma Community College. “This exhibition will give the viewer some insight into two artists’ lives together,” Swanson said. She and her husband view their experience to be similar to the experiences of other artist couples such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, Elaine and Willem de Kooning and others who came before them in art history.

Bella Kim’s Jogakbo Art and Classes to Grace Arbutus this Spring

Bella Kim will lead a community workshop at Arbutus Folk School in 2026 inspired by the resourcefulness of Jogakbo and the practice of transforming leftover and discarded materials into new meaning. Her art is both delicate and large in scale. As you encounter her pieces, the myriad of brightly colored, intricately stitched pieces in swirling matrices envelope you in a light embrace, seemingly inviting you to dance with them. When you look closer they are made of sterner stuff, recycled woven plastic packaging with writings and messages therein tell of more serious environmental concerns, and bring us necessarily back down to earth again.

Wild Child’s New Year’s Menu: “Eat the Rich”

Olympia’s family friendly Wild Child Taproom’s openness to a wider swath of the community is evidenced by their involvement with Arts Walk and SafePlace, and by the range of their events programming, whether organized in-house, or, in the case of music, by CapCity Presents, or in New Year’s Eve’s “Eat the Rich” by Capital City Pride, or by the many other individuals and organizations, large and small, who’ve come to see Wild Child as a welcoming venue.

Art of Light at AHA Museum for the Holidays

Light in the Dark, an exhibition of illuminated art at Olympia’s Arts & Heritage Alliance Museum, can be viewed not only from inside the museum but also from the sidewalk outside.
“We wanted to do something that would lighten our windows and celebrate the holiday season without leaning into any particular holiday,” said Ruth Kodish-Eskind, the museum’s exhibitions and programs manager. “And we wanted something that folks could engage with even when the museum is closed.” The panels describing the pieces are double-sided, so passersby can get the full experience.

Matilda the Musical at Tacoma Little Theatre

Given the flights of fancy of both the Roald Dahl novel and the Danny DeVito film of Matilda, it seemed only a matter of time for Matilda to get the musical treatment, which it did in 2010 with music and lyrics by Tim Minchin and book by Dennis Kelly. Now, Matilda the Musical is hitting Tacoma Little Theatre through December 28, directed by Jennifer York, with a sizable cast of child and adult actors, led by Hazel Barnett and Nell Edlund, trading off performances as Matilda.

The Carpenter’s House — A New Multidisciplinary Events Space

The Carpenter’s House was envisaged by Justin La Gra, who wanted to manifest a warm, intimate, and inclusive community space for creativity and art made for real people with real materials. Murphy and Ruiz joined the project, with their own specialized skills, resulting in a creative venue, involving a functioning carpentry studio, an art gallery, a live music venue, a community gathering space, and a developing broadcast and media studio. They say that it began as one person’s original idea that grew stronger with a collaborative vision, which was shaped by the community around them.

Creative Theatre Experience Celebrates 45th Anniversary, New Leadership

In preparation for next year’s 45th anniversary season, the Creative Theatre Experience Board of Directors has announced the selection of Kristina Cummins as their new program director and Kyle Murphy as executive director. In addition to these staff leadership changes, the CTE Board of Directors has elected new officers to its executive team, with Nora Gant as president, Jerod Nace as vice president, and Louise Doran as treasurer/secretary. Together with Murphy’s new-fashioned thinking and old-fashioned commitment to community theatre arts, and Cummins’ long experience teaching and directing theatre with young people and actualizing in them her love for the craft, Creative Theatre Experience looks ready to go boldly into the future.

Studio West launches holidays with Nutcracker

Studio West Dance Theater kicks off Olympia’s holiday season with Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker on the weekend after Thanksgiving at the Washington Center for the Performing Arts. “The music is delicious,” said Studio West co-owner/co-director Stephanie Wood-Ennett. “People are drawn to it — the costumes, the dancing. The story is timeless. It’s a classic.” The Nutcracker cast includes about 200 people, mainly children. “There’s such a sense of community,” she said. “I think people end up loving the community as much as the dance itself.”

Can you crack the case?

Tacoma Little Theatre’s Murder Mystery Dinners return with Knock ‘Em Dead.
If you fancy yourself a part-time gumshoe, you may be interested to know that the game is once again afoot. These evenings of interactive theatre began in 2017 as fundraisers for TLT before they broke out and became regular productions. TLT put on three of them a year until the COVID pandemic forced them to go on hiatus. 2024 saw their return, and November 20, 2025, marks the opening night of the first Murder Mystery Dinner of the season.

Refuge and Remedy — Marilyn Frasca at Childhood’s End

Marilyn Frasca’s drawings, on view through Nov. 16 at Childhood’s End Gallery in downtown Olympia, exist at the intersection of dreams and stark reality, “I had arranged to do this one-person show years ago,” she said, “and in the process, the world fell apart. I’d look at the abstract images and I’d see horrible things because I’d been hearing about them. … I thought, ‘I’m going to have to cancel this show. I can’t work.’ ”
(And then) Frasca found her way through after she heard historian Heather Cox Richardson encouraging artists to work. “She said many artists she knew had trouble working during that time and that what the world needed was for them to work,” Frasca told Oly Arts.

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