Space Grant Recipients
Olympia Artspace Alliance (OAA) announced the second round of space-related grants for local artists in Thurston County in the spring of 2023. As a dedicated advocate for artists, OAA recognizes the importance of providing support for artists' space-related needs and is committed to fostering a thriving creative community.
To assist artists in covering essential costs associated with their spaces, OAA awarded ten (10) Space Grants, each valued at $500. These grants are designed to alleviate financial burdens by helping artists with expenses such as rent (living/studio), rehearsal space, storage, space repairs, utilities, ADA accommodations, and more.
OAA believes in the transformative power of art and recognizes that providing artists with the necessary resources and support for their spaces is crucial for their creative growth and success. By offering these grants, OAA aims to empower artists in Thurston County to thrive and continue contributing to the vibrant arts scene in our community.
Below, we’re putting a spotlight on the ten Space Grant recipients.
Asenath Lizárraga
Asenath Lizárraga is a non-binary, mixed Peruvian and Finnish multidisciplinary artist living in Olympia, Washington. Their colorful, emotional works draw from personal experience, dream worlds, and family history, expressed as drawings, paintings, prints, fiber arts, and music. Their drawings and paintings particularly explore their inner emotional world, working through grief to find peace in life's chaos. Their work includes lots of symbolism, which tells the story if you notice the details. Asenath is also a compassionate and experienced teacher who believes in the transformative power of community art-making and aspires to one day help create a community art space where anyone can access resources and an area free of charge.
Joseph Moran
Diving into the realm of lenticular images, those grooved plastic marvels that come to life with movement and depth, Joseph Moran finds a canvas in the overlooked. These images, often dismissed as fleeting novelties, hold profound significance.
"Lenticular images are anachronistic and embody the churn of progress that briefly excites and satisfies our thirst for novelty before moving on. Lenticular images are also passive objects that require active engagement, and in our world of thoroughly commodified passive consumption, the internal experience of viewing lenticular imagery is full of tension and contradiction," said Joseph.
Constructed from PET plastic, a material omnipresent in our convenience-driven era, lenticular images encapsulate our age's essence—ubiquitous yet perilous to our ecosystems. Joseph's artistry rekindles the dialogue around materials that shape our world.
Mikaela Shafer
Step into the captivating world of artist Mikaela Shafer. Her work weaves a poignant tale of disconnection and reconnection, reflecting the intricate tapestry of life's experiences.
In her current chapter, Mikaela is on a profound journey of self-discovery within her culture.
The process behind Mikaela's art is untamed and wild, mirroring the intricate chaos of life itself. Painted, burned, and sewn, her pieces are a marriage of unconventional techniques that speak volumes about the human experience. She employs found materials and unconventional tools, crafting a symphony of lines and jagged edges that resonate with turbulence and serenity.
Betania Ridenour
“Hi there! My name is Betania. My identity has always felt very Amphibious, like I don’t fit into any of the assigned boxes. I am a mixed (Mestizx) or Ancestrally diverse person. My people come from the Ancestral homelands of the Mexica in Mexico, the Iberian peninsula, Sardinia & Wales (plus a few other little connections that I don’t know much about).
I am a teacher and student of place-based skills and crafts, a Broom Maker, a forever student of Plants and folk medicine, and I was raised by Trees. For as long as I can remember, I have turned to the Trees, Animals and other beings in the Forest for council. As a young person running from the various institutions I found myself in, the best places I found to hide were "wild spaces." In these so-called "wild" areas, I found a sense of family with the Non-human world around me; here is where I felt held and safe. I believe strongly in the healing powers of “Nature,” believing that strengthening our connection with our More-Than-Human relatives can improve our interpersonal relationships and emotional well-being.”
Yvonne Kunz
Over the past twenty years, my voice has been consistent, honest, courageous, and sometimes shy. It is an exploration of layers of my being: sexuality, motherhood, my personal belief system, and "home." My artistic practice consists of improvisational drawing and collage inspiring play and exploration. A daily drawing practice deepens my observational and representational skills while providing source materials for my paintings. My encaustic practice is a longer, slower process where I paint, scrape, and fuse layers upon layers of wax, pigment, and collage.
Kiana Diaz
Kiana Diaz is a Honduran-Jamaican artist and illustrator who currently lives in Olympia, WA.
Through her creepy-cute combinations of flora, fauna, and food from her disparate homes Diaz’s multicultural and immigrant experience blossoms in her work. Diaz brings together elements of fantasy and diverse places while grounding them in highly detailed renderings with pencil and watercolor on paper. Each artwork combines multi-faceted animal characters that are intensely stylized and pushed to the limits of saccharin with their combinations of delicious desserts, eye batting cuteness, and childlike nostalgia. With her paintings, she creates home goods and stationery products that are sourced as locally and sustainably as possible.
Thurston County Museum of Fine Art (TCMoFA)
Thurston County Museum of Fine Art (TCMoFA) is a dynamic pop-up art museum located in Olympia. With a unique vision, TCMoFA transforms vacant storefronts into captivating art experiences, bringing the beauty of free, accessible and local art to the heart of the city.
As a pop-up museum, TCMoFA offers a temporary but immersive art journey, showcasing the talent and creativity of artists from Thurston County and beyond. By utilizing vacant storefronts as their exhibition spaces, TCMoFA revitalizes these spaces with thought-provoking and visually stunning artworks, creating a symbiotic relationship between art and urban revitalization.
Alice Grendon
Alice Grendon (name/they) is an emerging artist working in dance and movement-based performance art, installation, and dance film. Alice is originally from occupied Duwamish territory known as Seattle and now lives on Stechass land known as Olympia, WA. Alice has been choreographing and performing for over 15 years and has created work shown on both the east and west coasts of the U.S. After studying dance making and performance at Hampshire College and the Five College Dance Department (FCDD), Alice returned to the South Salish Sea where they do work primarily in outdoor and public settings. Alice’s choreographic work is rooted in collaborative, community-based processes as reflected in their 2018 work “Group Body as Whole We Felt Like Home,” exploring community building and the use of collaborative improvisation-based creating. Collaboration is emphasized even in solo work, like their 2019 piece “Daughter,” a multi-media solo show exploring ambiguous-loss based on their own story and stories gathered through interviews with other daughters woven into the installation. Alice aims to use their work to facilitate connection between people as well as between viewers and the natural world. They explore themes related to living in the Anthropocene, such as connection to place, climate disruption, decolonization, surviving and resisting late-stage capitalism, love, and grief. Alice wishes to inspire greater care for and curiosity about each other and the places we dwell in through movement-based performance art.
Clare Follmann
Clare Follmann is a writer, editor, tea-leaf reader, and herbalist located in Olympia, Washington. Her writing engages with themes of landscape and sense of home, language, philosophy, anarchy, story-telling, and the occult. She has published articles and prose in Oak Journal, Innersleeve, and Elderly Mag and was the artist-in-residence at Sou’Wester in the spring of 2020. She is working on two books. How to be at Home: Fragments on Modern Dwelling is a series of prose vignettes exploring what it means to be at home—in the body, in a dwelling, in a community, and in a modern world in crisis. Spellbound is a collection of essays detailing the power of language while seeking to decolonize our modern lexicon. An M.E.S. graduate from Evergreen State College, Clare's thesis The Art of Arguing Science: A Critique of Scientific Rhetoric through the Invasive Species Narrative explores both inaccessible language and misleading militaristic rhetoric used in the scientific narrative of invasive species. In the summer of 2019, she was a guest speaker at the Washington State Department of Natural Resources to share and engage with the work from her thesis. Clare received her B.A. in Philosophy and Literature from Sarah Lawrence College. Her essay The Walls of the Mind House was nominated for the 2013 Spencer Barnett Memorial Prize for Excellence in Latin American Studies, and her essay Two Tales of One City was nominated for the 2013 Lipkin Prize in the Humanities.
Above, a video created by Phoebe Moore for artist Briana Marela.
Phoebe Moore
Phoebe Moore's art recontextualizes the familiar. It looks for Phoebe Moore's art to recontextualize the familiar. It looks for ugly in the beautiful and tenderness in cold images. Her work is playful, dark, colorful and tactile. A steady flow of collaborations with artists across many mediums has kept her art technique expanding and evolving over the years. She thrives on pre-production, usually storyboarding, prop and costume designing and making a production schedule meticulously before starting a project. She explores themes of intimacy, growth and habit. Her videos utilize layers and effects in digital and film to bend reality. Her work always incorporates her surroundings. Her work often mixes performance art, visual art and video art. WORKS SHOWN Sou Wester Artist Residency Program 2021, 2022, 2023 Site specific video installation and performances Melbourne Underground Film Festival "Static" Official Selection 2019 Fall Centrum's Artist Residency Program 2019 Fall Directed a site specific Animation Tiny Thunder Designs: Owner Operator 2013-Present Designs and produces unique jewelry The Olympia Exquisite Corpse: Founder/Organizer 2010-Present A collaborative film relay race SpaceWorks Tacoma: Streetside Display 2012 Multimedia window installation in downtown Tacoma Washington. Participant in PLOP: Performance Laboratory for Objects and Puppets ToySlam Festival Wrote, designed and performed a puppet show 2010-2011 Internships Fall 2006 Interned at the ArtRod art gallery in Tacoma. Summer 2010 Interned with Video Artist Vanessa Renwick in Portland Oregon.