Where Art Happens

The CASS Mobile Art Studio and its founder create community, one workshop at a time

story by JANET COOK | photos by JANET COOK and courtesy of CASS

Kim Puckett has always had art in her heart. She was raised as an only child by her grandparents, who were both teachers. The family didn’t have a lot of resources, but there were always plenty of art supplies around the house and she spent a lot of time crafting and creating projects.

She grew up and got a master’s degree in early intervention and early childhood special education, settling down in the Portland area with her husband, Brian. They had a tiny cabin near Appleton, Wash., north of Lyle, where they spent weekends and fell in love with the Gorge.

As life settled into a comfortable thrum, Puckett decided to rekindle her affinity for art by taking some online classes. Not surprisingly, she loved it. “It made me want to contact a friend and say, ‘Come do this with me,’” she said. “From that, I felt like I wanted to tell other people about art possibilities, to get together with people and do art.” She took that urge and turned it into a vision for a community art studio. She imagined it as a welcoming place where anyone could come and create in a judgement-free space with plenty of supplies on hand. en, Brian was diagnosed with cancer. e dream for a community art studio was shoved to the side. rough the tumult of surgery and treatment, as well as some complications along the way, Brian lost his job.

She had friends over for a “dream-building dinner,” where she shared her idea and welcomed input. She even came up with a name: Expressatory, a play on “express your story.” She began plying garage sales and hunting art store bargains, building a collection of supplies.

“ at made a couple of things happen,” Puckett said. “It made it feel like we couldn’t a ord the mortgage, and it was also one less person that would need to nd a job if we moved.” e idea of relocating permanently to their cabin near Appleton took on an air of reality rather than a dream for the distant future.

“Going through someone having cancer, it can change your outlook on life,” she added. “Rather than waiting until everything is just right, you start thinking, why not just do it right now?” Puckett put out some job feelers and wound up getting hired by Education Service District 112 as an early intervention specialist for Skamania County. She and her husband moved to their cabin at the end of December 2014 and Puckett began commuting to her job in Stevenson. After a year, the drive to work — especially during bad weather — became too much, and their remote, semio -grid cabin that felt delightful as a weekend getaway lost some of its luster as a permanent home.

In 2016, they moved to the community of Skamania, west of Stevenson, and Puckett took on a bigger job as coordinator of ESD 112’s early intervention program for Skamania and Klickitat counties.

Despite her busy day job, Puckett kept her dream of a community art space alive. Finally, in 2019, she opened a small studio in North Bonneville, naming it Expressatory

Community Art Studio. “It was a small space, but we could have classes with seven or eight people,” she said. The location, on the north side of Highway 14, wasn’t ideal, but it was a start. It seemed like her dream was coming to fruition. Then Covid arrived. She closed the short-lived studio and brought everything home to her house.

“My upstairs art studio was packed to the gills,” she said. Despite yet another setback, Puckett held onto her vision. Whiling away time at home, she came across an enterprise in Canada exactly like what she wanted to do called The LivingRoom Community Art Studio. “They have a YouTube video where people talk about what the studio means to them,” she said. “I still cry when I watch it.” Like her own Expressatory, that studio, too, was forced to close when the pandemic hit. Searching for a way to carry on in some form, its founder hit on the idea of a mobile art studio. Filled with art supplies from the former brick-and-mortar space, an old converted bus now travels to local communities, bringing art supplies and low-cost events to underserved areas.

For Puckett, it was a lightbulb moment. “I thought, maybe that’s a better way to start here,” she said. “It felt not as big as starting with a building space.” She began searching public surplus auction sites for a bus, an ambulance — anything that could serve as a mobile art studio.

“The thing that came up was a step van from Washington State University that was part of the maintenance department,” she said. Puckett held a fundraiser that generated enough to buy the van and get it licensed in November 2021. Thus, CASS Mobile Art was born (CASS stands for Community Art Studio of Skamania).

The van is stuffed with the art supplies Puckett has been collecting for more than a decade. The Community Art Studio of Skamania is a registered nonprofit under the fiscal sponsorship of Community Enrichment for Klickitat and Skamania County (CEKC). Last year, from March through November, she set up the van at the Columbia Gorge Interpretive Center Museum on the first Saturday each month and gave out free art kits. A robust schedule of free pop-up artmaking events and low-cost workshops keeps her busy when she’s not at her day job.

On the CASS Mobile Art Facebook page, Puckett announces upcoming events ranging from family art nights at local schools to crafting workshops. A recent sock gnome workshop sponsored by the Stevenson Public Library quickly filled up and had a waiting list. Puckett and the CASS Mobile Art Studio are also a fixture at most community-wide events in the central Gorge, including the annual summer Gorge Days Festival in North Bonneville and the City of Stevenson’s Christmas in the Gorge celebration.

Puckett wrote and received her first grant last year, from the Firstenburg Foundation, to bring monthly art activities to the Rock Cove Assisted Living Community and Skamania County Senior Services at the Hegewald Center. She plans to apply for more grants now that she has some experience doing it.

Participants show off their work from a flower pounding activity CASSprovidedforaprivatebirthday party.

The CASS Mobile Art Studio is also available for private parties and events, with funds going to help support the free and low-cost services offered.

Puckett’s goal continues to be establishing a physical location — a maker space where people can come and utilize supplies and tools they might not have access to, and where she can host classes and other events. Like everything she does with the CASS Mobile Art van, “the emphasis will be that it’s a safe place for anyone to come and gather and build community,” she said. Her dream follows the Art Hive model, which can be anything from a stand-alone studio to a pop-up that prioritizes inclusion, respect and learning. “You get the benefits of all of that, and it happens to have artwork you can do.”

Puckett hopes to be able to devote all her time to the Community Art Studio of Skamania at some point. “This is my passion,” she said. “I hope that in a couple of years, I’ll be able to do that.” Luckily for the Stevenson-area community, Kim Puckett holds on tight to her dreams and doesn’t let go.

To learn more, go to cassmobileart.org and facebook.com/CASSMobileArt

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