Tieton Arts & Humanities

Mission

Tieton Arts & Humanities enriches & celebrates our community through artistic & cultural programming.

Description

Fundamentally, Tieton Arts & Humanities (TA&H) brings people together, creating environments where families, businesses, and artists can collaborate and flourish. We believe that access to the arts builds community resilience by sparking connections over time, fostering networks of culture, technology, and idea-sharing.

Our goal is to prepare students and families in our rural area for participation in a quickly changing and ever-more-automated future landscape of work. We are doing this by offering year-round creative and cultural experiences for families and youth not generally available in small communities with limited resources. Everyone is welcome to our public events, and we keep admission free so that there are no barriers to entry.

We produce a roster of annual events such as creARTe, Día de los Muertos, LitFUSE: A Poet's Workshop, the 10x10x10xTieton exhibition, and the Student Art Show, as well as workshops and projects in collaboration with the local community. We’re based in the Fueling Station, a new public space we have opened for and with the Tieton community. 

Our programmatic strategy is to look closely at the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and habits that foster cultures of innovation, and then to plan backwards to bring the exposure, practice, and mastery necessary for participation and leadership in civil society. By offering similar, high quality access to the arts still prioritized in more affluent urban areas, we engage kids and families with soft skills and cultural capital that will be useful to them and to their communities no matter where they go in the future. 

One example of this shift: after 10+ successful summers offering kids an art project once a week, the Art in the Park program matured to offer bilingual co-curricular arts and humanities enrichment for youth and families year round, in response to a call for stronger partnership from the Highland School District. With this expanded scope (and moving the art out of the park), the program is now called creARTe, a portmanteau of “create+art” that works in both English and Spanish.

TA&H has persisted despite the uncertainties of the pandemic, responding to community demand for our programming while maintaining safe access for the public. We have modified every one of our programs to run entirely virtually where needed while simultaneously executing our plan to expand their scope and reach. Adapting to bumps in the road has been a beautiful demonstration of the value proposition we are suggesting with this work, that the very creative thinking skills taught through art education build the agility, adaptability, and intelligence needed to solve unexpected future challenges.

Your ongoing support is what allows us to continue offering our popular programs at no cost to the participants AND to pay professional artists for their services. 

Now more than ever, our success in the year ahead depends upon you, our donors, our community supporters, and those who care about the difference that art makes in the lives and livability of small communities.

Now more than ever we need your help. Please make a donation, in any amount. We can't say enough how much we appreciate your support. Thank you.

Recognition

Up to $7,500 of gifts made during this time will be matched, thanks to a generous group of donors!