Art school offers a range of opportunities for all

A mighty little art school on a dead-end street claims it’s the best-kept secret in Coupeville.

The Pacific Northwest Art School is a 39-year-old nonprofit welcoming beginners, pros and everyone in between into its inclusive creative hub. As a nonprofit, the school’s mission is to make art accessible to its local community and the rest of the country.

The school offers around 70 year-round visual workshops in the mediums of fiber arts, painting, photography and mixed media. Some students are professional working artists who want to learn new techniques, while others are hobbyists.

Though multi-day workshops can cost around $800 a session, students have come from all over the U.S. to take the classes led by renowned national and regional faculty. However, the school also offers less expensive opportunities for the community to get involved in art. On “Treat Yourself Tuesdays” from 10-2 p.m., community members are invited to drop by and work on whatever fiber art, mixed media, painting or photography projects they have for no charge.

“We try to kind of reduce those barriers to entry for people in different ways that you traditionally wouldn’t think about,” Executive Director Lisa Bernhardt said.

To cultivate further opportunities for inclusion, the school created a class assistant position to allow artists to take the multi-day classes at no charge, in exchange for their help around the workspace. Community members have also opened up their homes to non-locals at affordable rates to encourage artists to take a class at the art school. The school also provides a little art cupboard on the street, where it supplies free art supplies.

“Being an artist is being in community. Whether you practice in solitude, with friends, or with strangers,” Matt Nienhuis, an independent contractor for the art school, said on the business’s Instagram.

Outside of its classes, the art school supports local artists by offering free resources like the camera club, the book club, the art library and supplies. The team is also trying to find spaces to house a maker’s space or artist studios. Next year, they will be accepting a donation of a print studio for makers who don’t have a printing press. The trade-off for using the small art school’s studio could be teaching a class, Bernhardt hypothesized.

The school is also involved in jail art instruction for inmates in residential substance abuse treatment. The team visits the county jail twice a month to instruct an art program.

“When we go into the jail setting, we’re teaching them skills to cope with anxiety, depression, fear. You know, our teacher likes to say, when you’re creating, there’s no room for anxiety in your brain,” Bernhardt said. “It’s healing, it’s therapeutic, you know, and I think humans were meant to create. So I just like being part of that.”

Outside of working with inmates, the art school has contributed to uplifting the community’s art scene. Because Coupeville is a designated creative district in Washington, it is required to have a community project, and for the city, that is its indigenous coffee shop and cultural hub on the Coupeville Wharf.

“We work with them, putting on cultural and educational events, not just indigenous, but everything. I hold classes down there, we do programs,” Bernhardt said.

Bernhardt came to the art school 19 years ago as a volunteer, and she is excited to see how it can continue to evolve to have something for everybody.

The advanced class covered topics such as color mixing, fabric selection, fabric preparation and safety. The student’s colorful fabrics dry on lines (Photo by Matt Neinhuis)

Dyed fabrics flap in the wind. The class explores what happens when color is repeatedly added and removed through sequential shibori techniques (Photo by Matt Neinhuis)