Decorating the community with color, on Oct. 10, the National Art Honor Society (NAHS) arrived at SouthLake Church to paint the windows for the Youth Music Project’s (YMP) annual benefit auction and student concert. 

Despite the club not directly volunteering much in past years, Georgia Crawford, senior, a two-year member of NAHS and the society’s Social Media Officer, led the project. Members of NAHS came the day before the YMP’s event started to paint murals of Mount Hood and Cannon Beach on the windows. 

“In years past, our club hasn’t been very involved in community events,” Crawford said. “We have been volunteering at some retirement homes and doing art projects with the residents, but for a while, we haven’t been interacting with the rest of the community. So this year, as a club, we’re trying to push ourselves to do a wider variety of community events, and this is our first step towards that.”

As the event was being planned and the theme, “Come As You Are,” was decided, Carrie Penkman, Development Associate at YMP, and her co-worker wanted the guests to feel immersed in the Pacific Northwest, which spawned the idea of painting the windows. Penkman was there at the venue, setting up while NAHS students were painting.

“I don’t think I’ve ever worked with teenagers and high schoolers who were more self-motivated and who I didn’t have to check in with and make sure that they felt comfortable or that they felt like they needed any direction,” Penkman said. “They were complete self-starters, and it was such a joy to watch them create this and then to see our guests sort of look at it and see what they thought.” 

The technical process for completing their painting involved students and Diane Gauthier, art teacher, creating templates to hang behind the windows that students could use as guides for their brushstrokes. Students practiced on windows in room 704 prior to the actual painting so they could get a feel for painting on glass as opposed to canvas. Gauthier is the advisor for NAHS and has filled this role for 12 years, seeing the volunteering aspects of the society as well as the artistic ones.

“[This project] completely lines up with the values in our service opportunity commitments,” Gauthier said. “We want to integrate ourselves with the community as much as we can, so this was a wonderful opportunity to do that.”

Penkman also saw NAHS’s opportunity to apply their art as aligning with the values of the YMP, with the artistic displays throughout the event, from the decorations to the murals and the songs sung by students, as a showing of this principle.

“We want to see youth succeed through experiences that are both academic, but for us, particularly creative,” Penkman said. “We know about the social and emotional impacts that creativity and that creative expression has on young people, and that’s why we exist, and that’s why we do what we do, so to be able to sort of broaden that impact of our mission into the wider community and engage with another art form and creative outlet in supporting youth and creative expression in the area was just such a perfect way to sort of tie into our mission. One of our guests asked ‘who came in and did this?’ We would say it was more community youth. It was more students in the community who are artists and who were inspired to create these things. It sort of perfectly tied into [the idea that] this is all about youth and creative expression and the impact that that has on young people’s lives.”

This event is the YMP’s biggest fundraiser, and this year it raised over $200,000 for the organization. The money raised will go towards general operating and other areas of greatest need. In years past, the money has gone towards the organization’s Tuition Assistance Fund, which helps pay for a portion of students’ tuition for music lessons at YMP.

“I did a lot of summer camps at Youth Music Project as a kid, so it means a lot to me to be able to give back to Youth Music Project and to be able to help other kids experience that same sort of thing,” Crawford said. “I’m really glad that we get to share our art [with] the community, just cause I don’t really get to do that very often. I do a lot of smaller projects just for myself, and it’s really nice to be able to share it [with] everyone.”

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Clara Wood

A mural of Mount Hood was the first mural that NAHS students painted on Oct. 10. This mural was in the room with the items up for silent auction, and was designed to remind guests of the wooded and mountainous areas of the Pacific Northwest. In this window, students used techniques like removing the wet paint using the handle of their brushes to add texture and designs. “The only feedback we’ve gotten from guests was that it was a really sort of magical journey through what they love most about living here and being here,” Penkman said. “It was just so iconically Pacific Northwest.”