Announcing the Public Art Bootcamp 2026 Cohort!
The Office of Arts & Culture is pleased to announce Public Art Bootcamp’s 2026 cohort! Public Art Bootcamp is a training and education opportunity intended for artists who are interested in entering the field of public art. In-person workshops, seminar-style discussions, lectures with subject matter experts, and cohort-model learning are all part of the curriculum curated by our Public Art staff. Participants receive insight into a variety of topics like community engagement, design development, fabrication, and administration. Workshops began in late September 2026 and will continue through January 2027.
For this iteration of Public Art Bootcamp, 18 artists engage in seminars, lectures, and workshops designed to provide insight into the world of public art. With an eye towards diversifying the public art field, this professional development program aims to help artists transition their work from the gallery to the public realm.
Congratulations to the 2026 Cohort:
- Alison Bremner
- Arthur Derksen
- Elva Bennett
- Francisco Guerrero
- Gina Ariko Marioni
- Jessie Blackmer
- Jo Cosme
- Keerthana Venugopalan
- Keiden Carlos
- Kelly Haejung Paik
- Leah Crosby
- Lisa Myers Bulmash
- Malia Peoples
- Mel Isidor
- Oscar Pearson
- Quinton Merada
- Robin Momii
- Tamar Alsberg
Read more about each member of the cohort below!
Alison Bremner is a Tlingit artist born and raised in Juneau, Alaska, in the traditional homelands of the Tlingit people. Working in formline design, acrylic paint, wallpaper collage, digital drawings, and found objects, Bremner tells contemporary stories that portray the current Tlingit experience – rejecting exotification while bringing visibility to the cultural nuances of daily Indigenous life. Culture is not stagnant. Through contact and technological revolution, Tlingit culture constantly adapts, observes, and claims space in the world. Bremner’s practice is rooted in traditional formline design learned directly from Tsimshian masters David Albert Boxley and David Robert Boxley. Alongside her commercial and exhibition practice, Bremner is committed to creating work that returns to community such as pieces made for potlatches, dance, and ceremony.
Arthur Derksen was born East of the Rocky Mountains, in a suburb on the South Platte River Basin, growing up wielding rocks, sticks, and mud as implements of endless creativity. Early on, the mouse and keyboard joined this repertoire of creative tools. Arthur spent as many childhood days manipulating worlds inside a humming box at 1024×768 as chasing crickets and wandering cracked asphalt in bare feet. Nowadays, Arthur inhabits the concrete banks of the Salish Sea, where the Duwamish River once wandered, still playing with computers and making art with mud. Arthur often grasped at permanence through art, using computers as a tool to delay degradation. Arthur’s current work seeks transformations which find meaning beyond preservation, interested in art that invites its own dissolution. Arthur wants to make art that can be composted like memory. Nature will show us how to remember by forgetting.
Elva Bennett is an interdisciplinary artist working in sculpture and illustration. Elva love to make figurative sculpture and slab-built forms from stoneware clay and often illustrate these objects with webs of figures in inky mason stains. Elva’s work explores the weighty grace of bodies in moments of overlap. The figure’s exaggerated proportions and sloping silhouettes invite the viewer into the raw surrealism of embodiment and presence in everyday moments. Also informed by Elva’s experiences as a queer trans mixed-race Filipino American who grew up in the South, it wrestles with the weighty ideas of identity and belonging. In many ways, the identities that have “marginalized” have led Elva to the warmest and most loving communities and connections. Elva seeks to illustrate the struggle, tenderness, and homecoming present in those experiences.
Gina Ariko is a Japanese-American artist based in Seattle, WA. Growing up, she spent most of her summers visiting family in Kokura, Japan, where her ojichan and obaachan first taught her to paint. Despite the language and distance barriers between them, they learned to connect through a shared love of painting. Her interest in art and storytelling overlapped at Santa Clara University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in both English and studio art, with a minor in art history. After graduation, Gina worked in marketing, events, and community development before pursuing art full-time in 2020. Since then, she has exhibited her artwork across the US and Japan, and is currently represented by Gallery 110 in Seattle. In addition to her studio practice, Gina is a freelance floral designer and art teacher.
Francisco Guerrero is a painter by training, mostly using oil paint and sign painters’ enamel, but a love of making objects has led him to make many different types of artwork. Wood constructions and decorating found objects. Francisco has been looking at the aesthetics of power; military, religious, social. As that power related to the Mexican Americans in California and questions the visual language of those that wield power and those that are subject to it.
Jessie Blackmer is a glass artist. Glass is the foundation on which she has built her material knowledge, and it is the lens through which she sees other mediums. Jessie’s sculptural work has always reflected her lived experience, including poverty and illness, while providing a way to explore relationships between the natural and constructed worlds. As a teaching artist, education and accessibility are central to her practice. She believes everyone has the right to explore their creativity and artistic expression. Different people respond to materials and processes in different ways, and for some, glass is the material that speaks to their inner creative voice. Jesse works to remove barriers to that experience and increasingly create spaces for collaboration. She wants to create moments of immersion and joy, connection and recognition, where both the experience of making and what we make have meaning.
Jo Cosme is a Native Boricua multimedia artist from Borikén, Puerto Rico, based in Seattle after being displaced by Hurricane María. Working across photography, video, sound, and interactive installation, she makes work about colonialism, displacement, memory, and the ways Puerto Rico is sold as paradise while its People live under colonial subjugation. Her ongoing project, Welcome to Paradise: ¡Viva Puerto Rico Libre!, uses the visual language of tourism, games, advertising, and spectacle to invite people in and then confront what is often hidden beneath that image: U.S. control, disaster capitalism, gentrification, and ongoing resistance. Grounded in lived experience and love for her homeland, her work creates space for Native Boricua stories, histories, and self-determination to be seen on our own terms.
Keerthana Venugopalan is a transdisciplinary artist and designer working across interactive installations, sculpture, ceramics, and painting. Keerthana’s work has explored ideas around perception, identity, belonging, human behavior, and our relationship with space and objects. Taking different forms, from interactive and participatory installations to abstract paintings, sculptures, and ceramics, Keerthana is drawn to geometry, material, scale, movement, and spatial relationships, but also makes simply out of enjoyment of creating beautiful things. Without being about one particular subject, Keerthana often begins with something I am observing, experiencing, or thinking about, and explore it through making and experimentation. A background in architecture and interaction design strongly influences Keerthana’s visual language and shapes thinking about form, space, and experience. Keerthana enjoys moving between disciplines and learning through hands-on processes.
Keiden Carlos is a Filipino-American artist and illustrator from Marysville, Washington, who graduated from the University of Washington studying art. Keiden primarily works in digital and painting mediums for illustrations, often blending the techniques and aesthetics of both to create vibrant, dreamy worlds filled with bright RGB colors, pop culture influences, and painterly textures. Keiden explores the beauty found in the everyday—the passing moments, familiar surroundings, and quiet experiences that often go unnoticed. Keiden’s work is inspired by memories, growing pains, and the feeling of being different or out of place. Keiden hopes to continue growing both as an artist and as a person, creating work that captures these shared “everyday” feelings and resonates with people whose lives and experiences may be very different.
Kelly Haejung Paik thinks of art as a form of communication through visual language. A work may begin with careful observation, research, and preparation, or sometimes with a more intuitive impulse. Through the physical process of making—experimenting, revising, building, and working through materials and ideas—it gradually takes form. Kelly is interested in that movement from thought to expression, and then in letting the work go: allowing it to leave the studio, enter the world, and communicate independently.
Kelly’s practice moves between painting, mixed media, and dimensional installation, often drawing from Korean visual traditions and cultural memory. Recently, Kelly has been exploring translucent materials, sculptural forms, and light. Public art particularly interests Kelly because it extends this process of communication into shared space, where a work encounters people, place, and experiences I cannot entirely predict or control.
Leah Crosby makes story-centered, multimedia and performance work about power, care, and human connection. They remix scavenged sound, broken machines, and thrifted materials to connect seemingly disparate ideas, people, and images into networks of meaning. They believe in the empathetic potential of fantasy–that when we imagine together, we become more human humans.
Their work has been presented in New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Oregon, and Washington, in traditional and nontraditional spaces, including Mini Mart City Park, On the Boards, Velocity Dance Center, Theater off Jackson, SLIP Gallery, on the world wide web, and over radio waves. They collaborate regularly with Alyza DelPan-Monley, Kara Beadle, Hannah Simmons and Ari Kaufman. Leah has an MFA in Art from the University of Michigan where they were fully funded as an Elise Choy Lee Scholar and Nontraditional Student Fellow.
Lisa Myers Bulmash is a visual artist obsessed with joining elements that seem to have no relationship to each other. As a Black artist, she is driven to spotlight the contradictory narratives in American society that continue to marginalize the most vulnerable. These collisions of ideas lead her to work in three mediums: collage, assemblage sculpture and altered books.
In each medium, Lisa explores issues of identity, memory, and unacknowledged labor. Her collages layer translucent images over opaque scenes to illustrate how the past continues to shape the present. Assemblage sculptures combine 2D and 3D elements to flesh out flattened narratives attached to the Black body. Niches and tiny containers in her altered books compel the viewer to adjust focus onto the individual realities hidden in our shared myths. Lisa’s aim is to compel the viewer to recognize and respect the double consciousness of being both American and “other.”
Malia Peoples is a Kanaka Maoli and Hakka-American interdisciplinary artist, community educator, and cultural practitioner. Her work is dedicated to expanding access to kapa, our Native Hawaiian barkcloth tradition, in Hawaiian diaspora communities. Raised between Washington and Hawaiʻi, she has a unique perspective on our relationship to land, identity, and belonging. Malia’s family includes a number of small-time hoarders, and she has developed an appreciation for reclaimed and excess materials. She is formally trained in fashion design and began making bold wearables from midcentury polyester before expanding into ceramics, printmaking, and porcelain jewelry. Malia frequently collaborates with the Seattle Art Museum and is currently the Pasifika Storytelling Artist in Residence at Hummingbird Indigenous Family Services.
Mel Isidor is a Haitian-American mixed-media artist, designer, and urban planner from Massachusetts and now based in Seattle. Her practice is rooted in a curiosity about the built environment and how our urban fabric reflects the relationship between people and culture. Her work moves across photography, collage, book arts, and film—spanning scales from handmade objects to public installations and civic design projects. Collage is central to her practice where she creates layered compositions that merge realism and abstraction—physically and metaphorically connecting different moments in time and space. Using imagery from her own photography, family archives, and public records, she builds scenes grounded in memory and heritage that reimagine familiar geographies through a speculative lens. Mel also leads Isidor Studio, her design practice dedicated to the intersections of art, design, and urbanism. Across both her art and studio work, she transforms research and observation into visual narratives that deepen our understanding of place and the everyday materiality that shapes it.
Oscar Pearson is primarily an oil painter, but works in a variety of other materials including acrylic paint, pastels, ink, charcoal, animation, cast glass, printmaking, plaster, and ceramics. He is interested in play, mischief, behavior, and biological rhythms. Oscar makes pictures that allow him to explore notions of psychological, physical, and spiritual freedom as they relate to desire and play. He considers play a fundamental element of human and animal life that disrupts the monotony of existence. Play is critical to his work in the process and formal elements and themes. Oscar keeps a sketchbook with him most of the time and often pulls from everyday life and memory when composing pictures. He also makes pictures that relate to stories he has heard from my family members or ones that I have imagined.
Quinton Merada, raised in a working-class family by a union-member father, developed an early interest in the disregarded and overlooked. Through found objects, I explore working-class histories embedded within discarded tools and forgotten spaces, as well as their broader metaphorical significance. By re-contextualizing these objects, I foreground the struggles, resilience, and triumphs of the working class. My work celebrates their contributions while critiquing the privileges afforded to wealthy elites. Employing dark humor, irony, and absurdity, I examine the intersection of labor and leisure and the class structures that shape contemporary society. Through conceptual sculpture and an interdisciplinary art practice, I seek to provoke dialogue, challenge social hierarchies, and encourage meaningful reflection on the systems that determine whose labor, lives, and experiences are valued.
Robin Momii explores art forms whose traditions reach back to dual Japanese and Chinese heritage. Robin develops sculpture that relates to Japanese folklore and older, animistic traditions in China. Robin’s recent, larger-scale works reflect a connection to some of the intricate details of these cultures’ architectural traditions. Choosing stone as a medium reflects the permanence of the material that embodies the ephemeral ideas which evolved out of those traditions for thousands of years. Stone is an unyielding keeper of record that allows me to preserve snapshots of these ideas across time.
Tamar Alsberg‘s art practice revolves around the natural transformation of material, and the patterns within the material itself, along with the patterns within the nature of creation. Tamar finds interest in a certain material and stretches it sometimes literally to the ends of its ability, experiencing all it has to give and how it transforms even after the work has finished. Tamar is passionate about material and connection and how unexpected things relate to one another.
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