About a dozen students were sitting down at work tables, with glue bottles standing up and pieces of colored glass in their bowls, clattering against each other when the teenaged artists’ hands reached in to extract the desired piece. They’re arranging the glass on ceramic tiles in front of them. A couple other students ground down glass while a noisy machine buzzed on a nearby counter. This is the second day of the mosaic stained glass workshop for Southeast Alaska’s Art Fest held last month in Wrangell.
About 70 Region 5 Southeast Alaska high school students traveled to Wrangell for the annual festival. A different community in the region hosts it each year. Petersburg put it on last year.
The first year Wrangell hosted the event was in 1997. Wrangell’s art teacher, Tawney Crowley said it’s been about a decade since it was last held in Wrangell.
“The idea behind it was to expose the students within these small communities to other art teachers around Southeast and other art styles and things that they’re good at, and we also pull in local artists,” she said.
Some workshops include neurographic art, moccasin making and knitting. Two local artists were teaching the students as well – beginner’s beading and watercolor ink fish.
“It’s one thing being a teacher, and then it’s another thing being a local artist who isn’t necessarily used to being in a room full of high school age kids, and so it takes, I think, an extra little bump of bravery to be able to do that,” Crowley said. “We really appreciate that they’re here.”
Crowley’s specialty is working with heat and fire. She said she loves doing stained glass and torch bead making. But she wasn’t teaching this year because she’s the host. That means she’s running around making sure everybody has what they need.
Not every Southeast community showed up, but students came from Craig, Haines, Petersburg plus other communities.
Crowley said students get to choose two specialities to learn this week.
“The idea of covering this variety of things, it takes weeks sometimes,” she said. “It took us almost two months to get through our ceramics unit, because you don’t want to, glaze over it too fast. That was an ironic thing to say, or a punny thing to say, but, like, we don’t want to blaze through it super quick.”
The students have been working on their projects late into the night. Crowley said they ended at 9:30 the previous night.
“There’s something kind of fun about it, you stay up late, you’re making art,” she said. “I just feel for me personally, I feel like when I’m doing my artwork, I’m usually up really late, so it’s like you’re in a zone.”
To help with the costs of running the festival, Crowley said all the Art Fest instructors bring a piece of their own artwork to donate to an auction held during the awards ceremony.
The money raised goes back into the following year’s funds, which helps pay for art supplies and doesn’t impact the hosting community.
“Any of the supplies that we end up getting typically get left with the community that hosts it,” Crowley said. “So it benefits our art program in the long run as well.”
We stopped in the collage workshop where Ketchikan art teacher Cameo McRoberts was talking to the students while ripping up and prepping paper. The loud sounds of the ripping paper filled the room.
“There really is some form to it,” McRoberts said. “There is technique, there are sort of rules.”
We then checked out the neurographic art. It’s a different vibe in here, with jazzy music in the background and everyone’s VERY focused on what they’re doing.
It reminds me of spirograph art, but with more geometric and curvy shapes. It’s known to help with emotional healing with free-flowing shapes and lines.
Fast forward a couple days, and we’re at the award ceremony in the high school gym. It’s busy in here, many people talking in their own social circles, looking at a couple hundred pieces of art displayed on tables and walls. Kake sophomore Ayla Loges said she was in the neurographic art class where she created an octopus. She also went to the beading class.
“It was so fun. It was like therapy that I didn’t know I needed,” she said. “I just went crazy with my art and my beading, and it was really calming for me.”
She said she’s done neurographic art before, but never to this extreme. And this was her first time beading.
Her friend, Kake junior Rylee Kadake, said she focused on something completely different. She took the collage and paper making workshops.
“It was a lot of fun,” Kadake said. “I didn’t really know what I was going into, because I’ve never really been too confident about my art. But the instructors were really nice and pushed me past my boundaries, as a challenge. So it was a really great experience.”
This was her first time going to Art Fest and she said the experience boosted her confidence.
Eventually, awards were handed out by each teacher and Wrangell’s host, Tawney Crowley, received the Rick Mills Spirit of Artfest Award for all her hard work.
