Each May, the Gallery at the Park in Richland celebrates students with an exhibition featuring the recipients of the Allied Arts Association’s student scholarships. To help support visual arts in the community, Allied Arts awards annual scholarships to Columbia Basin College students and students working toward a master’s degree in fine arts.

This year, scholarships went to Li Wang, a student attending CBC, and Todd McKinney, a graduate student at the University of Washington.

Li Wang

Li Wang grew up in Jiangxi, a small city in southern China known for its rivers and lakes, and has lived in the United States for seven years. Before moving to the U.S., she earned a bachelor’s degree in biology. She became interested in medical illustration when one of her classmates mentioned some difficulties he’d run into while writing a paper: He could not find a professional medical illustrator to draw an accurate, polished diagram.

This was the first Wang had ever heard of medical illustration, since Chinese universities do not offer this degree. After doing some research, she decided this career would be a perfect fit for her due to her biological background and love of drawing. Now she is studying at CBC to improve her art skills with the goal of eventually applying to a graduate program in medical illustration.

Todd McKinney

Todd McKinney, the other scholarship student, is from the Bay Area in California. His father was an industrial painter who wanted his son to follow in his footsteps — but McKinney went into the fine arts instead.

As an undergraduate, he fell ill with pseudo-tumor cerebri, a rare degenerative disease of the brain, which changed the course of his life. He writes on his website, “As my ability to function deteriorated I began to question the nature of existence. I began my investigation of chaos, which led me to this road.”

Though McKinney has learned many forms of art, painting is his passion. Currently, he uses random drips, tape, mops and brooms for his paintings, which results in experimental, abstract works of art. Because he can never fully control the outcome of paint drips, his paintings organically evolve on their own. He continually adds layers until the painting is complete, demonstrating his idea that “chaos eventually blossoms into a pattern.”

For more information or to view McKinney’s work, visit his website at toddraymondmckinney.com.

The student scholarship show will be on display at the Gallery at the Park from May 7 through May 31. The artist reception will be on May 11 from 2 to 4 p.m. in the gallery.

The Gallery at the Park’s April exhibit features beautiful works of art from the Mid-Columbia Watercolor Society.

The Mid-Columbia Watercolor Society is an organized group of artists that formed in 2015 with the purpose of encouraging watercolor in the Mid-Columbia region and promoting their members’ work. The group meets on the second Tuesday of every month at Yellow Dog Studio, located at 214-B Torbett Street in Richland.

Watercolor refers to a method of painting in which the paint is made of pigments in a water-based solution. Using water rather than oil gives the colors a more translucent look, resulting in a gorgeous palette of pale colors.

Membership for the Mid-Columbia Watercolor Society costs $20 a year, and paying members are given the opportunity to showcase their work at Mid-Columbia Watercolor Society exhibitions. To learn more, or to view some of their amazing work, visit facebook.com/groups/mcwcs.

The show will be on display at the Gallery at the Park from April 2 through April 26. The reception will be held on Friday, April 5 from 6 to 8 p.m.

This March, the newest exhibit at the Gallery at the Park in Richland features works by Harley Cowan and Nathan Robles. This show displays a combination of two-dimensional and three-dimensional art, with Cowan presenting his photography and Robles his sculptures.

Cowan is a photographer and architect based in Portland. He studied large-format photography with Ray Bidegain and became a research fellow in architectural heritage documentation and preservation, with work in the Historic American Buildings Survey collection at the Library of Congress. He has also lectured for the Portland Art Museum, the Society of Architectural Historians, Docomomo Oregon, the University of Oregon and the Pacific Northwest Preservation Field School.

The photographs featured at the Gallery at the Park are in a series commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Manhattan Project. Though Cowan had to work hard to get the necessary permissions to document the Hanford Reservation, he believes in the importance of archiving and recording history. Eventually, he was given authorization to spend a week at the site, which he took full advantage of by photographing everything he could.

Cowan’s Manhattan Project is a unique blend of photography, architecture and history that uses stunning artwork to pay tribute to a significant event in our city’s past. See more of Cowan’s work by going to harleycowan.com.

SCULPTURE

Along with Cowan’s photographs, the exhibit features contemporary sculptures by Nathan Robles. Robles has been interested in sculpting for many years. Growing up, he would receive modeling clay and woodcarving tools as birthday and Christmas gifts. He studied art at Columbia Basin College in Pasco for three years, and in 2014 he graduated from Brigham Young University-Idaho with a degree in art.

To create his sculptures, Robles often uses scrap metal and other materials that would otherwise be thrown away. He has a remarkable talent for taking what could essentially be trash and transforming it into something wonderful and inspiring, making figures, monuments, robotics and fish that appear dynamic and convey a sense of motion. Visit Robles’ website at wroblewskistudio.blogspot.com.

The Cowan and Robles’ exhibit will be on display at the gallery from March 5 through 29. The artist reception will be held on March 8 from 6 to 9 p.m. Then, on March 9 at 2 p.m., Cowan will have a demonstration and talk on silver gelatin photography methods and equipment. Both the reception and the demonstration and talk are free and open to the public.

If you haven’t had a chance to stop in at the Gallery at the Park yet this holiday season, don’t worry—the gallery will continue to feature its Gallery Aglow exhibition through December.

In November, local and regional artists submitted hundreds of paintings and fine crafts to Gallery Aglow, a show that has been an annual tradition at the gallery for more than 30 years. Now, you can visit the Gallery at the Park to see beautiful decorations and to purchase unique, handmade gifts.

You can also buy wreaths, trees and other holiday décor made by Allied Arts volunteers. All proceeds from these items go towards funding the Allied Arts Association and its various community outreach programs, like Beads Behind Bars and Empty Bowls.

Lucy Dole, a jewelry artist for the Gallery at the Park, started Beads Behind Bars in 2008 as a way of helping young people incarcerated at the Benton Franklin Juvenile Detention Center. Every Sunday, Dole brings beads, clasps, wires and other jewelry pieces to the detention center and teaches beading classes to eligible youth.

These classes give participants the chance to explore their creativity and experience a greater sense of their own value. They see the result of their good choices in designing their jewelry pieces, and each person ends up with creative, artistic, wearable works of art. The classes also allow the youth to have a positive connection with the community.

Fundraisers such as Gallery Aglow are one of the ways in which Allied Arts is able to offer plenty of quality supplies for the Beads Behind Bars program.

Another program these fundraisers benefit is Empty Bowls, a national movement that aims to promote awareness and raise money for the fight to end world hunger. As part of our community’s contribution to this project, the Gallery at the Park displays and sells handmade bowls to raise money for the Tri-Cities Food Bank.

This December, you can view beautiful works of art, finish up your holiday shopping and support your local community all in one trip by visiting the Gallery at the Park, which is celebrating its 70th anniversary this year.

Throughout September and October, the Gallery at the Park will showcase Tom Hausken and Larry Metcalf’s exhibit “Working Through It – 35 Years.”

The title of the show, “Working Through It,” refers to the idea that working is a constant part of an artist’s life. Artists are always working and creating, regardless of what life throws at them. 

Metcalf, who has been a friend and mentor to Hausken for 35 years, taught him to “work no  matter what the outcome” and to “hold the creative process close to one’s heart in order to nurture and maintain a right and pure aesthetic.” Hausken was impressed by his friend’s devotion to his craft and by his commitment to his students, his family and his community.

For over four decades, Larry Metcalf has been a member of the Northwest Designer Craftsmen, a group of artists whose stated mission is “to promote excellence of design and craftsmanship, and to stimulate public appreciation of and interest in fine craft.” Metcalf also received the organization’s first ever Lifetime Achievement Award for his extraordinary contributions and service.

In 1985, Tom Hausken graduated from Seattle Pacific University before continuing his studies in drawing and painting at the University of Washington. He has received two fellowship residencies from the Vermont Studio Center: a Clowes Fellowship in 2010 and a Pollock-Krasner Fellowship in 2016. In 2017, he was the artist in residence at the Yakima Valley Museum.

Hausken creates bold, effusive paintings that are rich in texture and layering. For this exhibit, he has returned to a saturated color palette, reflecting an optimism of an earlier time. He describes his work as “making friends with the memory, melancholy and fragility of the world in which we inhabit.”

Meanwhile, Metcalf has provided the three-dimensional art for the show. His pieces are based on the form of a pagoda—a place for solitude. The pieces were made using white willow, raffia, gold leaf and felt. They are dramatic in their absence of color, with light creating shadows on the folded paper.

Regarding the show, Hausken states, “It is a bold statement of the love and gratitude for the opportunity to do what we do—to be able to work through it together.”

“Working Through It – 35 Years” will be on display at the Gallery at the Park until Oct. 26. The reception will be held on Sept. 7 from 6 to 8 p.m.