The South Sound Studio Tour, a free tour that invites the public into 46 working art studios, is more about process than product.
“At Arts Walk, you get to see a wonderful range of not just visual art but performance and so on, but it’s mostly finished stuff,” said Susan Aurand, acting president of the tour’s board of directors. “The point of the studio tour is to allow people to go behind the scenes and see how the work is made.”
bottom: Debra Van Tuinen, Maia Erickson at Artubus Folk School, Mo Golden
Many artists are sharing their studio space with colleagues for the tour, happening the last weekend of May in Olympia, Lacey and Tumwater, so there’ll be about 80 artists involved, showing their work and offering insights into their methods. That’s twice the number who participated just two years ago, Aurand said.
“People love the more in-depth connection with artists,” she said. One 2025 tourgoer described the tour as their favorite Olympia arts event of the year,
New for 2026: Some of the artists on the tour are creating installations for the Olympia Artspace Alliance’s spring exhibition, Please Mind the Mess: Makers Making.The installations, on view mid-April through August in the Goldberg Building at Fourth Avenue and Capitol Way, will invite viewers into the artists’ workspaces and imaginations — just as the tour invites people into the studios themselves.
Aurand, whose nature-inspired oil paintings often incorporate three-dimensional elements, paints in a studio off the dining room of her westside home. “Some people are better than I am at being able to talk and paint at the same time,” she said. “If seven people show up, it’s hard to keep painting, but I’ll have works in progress and images of how work started.”
She’s invited photographer Bob Haft and printmaker Barbara Blacker to “bring their studios with them” to her home for the weekend. Haft will show his process on his computer, and Blacker will be demonstrating gel printing, an easily accessible technique that doesn’t require a press.
Eunsil Kim will be firing Raku pottery at John Campbell’s studio on Olympia’s west side. (Experienced potters are invited to participate in the firing; email Kim at sunflowerclay@gmail.com.)
In Raku firing, glowing-hot pieces are pulled from the kiln and placed in metal containers with paper or other combustible material, which ignites, creating a reaction that gives the pottery its characteristic colors and textures.
On last year’s tour, Kim’s demonstration was fiery indeed. At one point, flame jumped out toward her legs. Though it appeared as though she was in danger, “the flames didn’t touch me,” she said.
Mariella Luz, also a ceramic artist, will be throwing and trimming pots at her studio on Olympia’s east side. Luz, well known in Olympia’s music scene, has been making mugs, dishes and other useful ware for more than a decade.
“I love making things from clay — the transformation it goes through, the meditation of making things over and over again,” she said in an interview for Artist Trust (https://artisttrust.org/board_member_profile_series_mariella_luz/).
“I’ve done the tour three times,” Luz, who’s on the board of the Olympia Artspace Alliance, told Oly Arts. “The biggest motivation for me to do it is that it forces me to clean my studio. I know that may sound ridiculous, but it is true.
Cindy Petersen, a lifelong woodworker who makes both practical and decorative objects, will demonstrate finishing techniques she and partner Patty Mitchell use in their pieces, often made from repurposed or scrap wood. It will be the first time on the tour for Petersen and Mitchell, who have not one but four studio buildings on their property in South Bay.
WHAT:
South Sound Studio Tour
WHEN:
11 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday, May 30, and Sunday, May 31
WHERE:
Various locations in Olympia, Lacey and Tumwater
COST:
Free
LEARN MORE:
southsoundstudiotour.org
See this article in the Spring 2026 Print Edition.