‘We all build this’: For 16th year, Terrain features 483 artists, including live demonstrations, music and more

Though she has seen the event grow year after year, Ginger Ewing, executive director and co-founder of Terrain, cannot help but think before each year’s art extravaganza: “Is anyone going to show up?”

Since the very beginning of the arts organization’s flagship event, people have. The first Terrain, in 2008, brought submissions from 30 artists and 1,200 attendees admiring their work. The tenth Terrain saw more than 300 artists submitting work and more than 8,500 people celebrating the arts.

Continuing the upward trend, for Terrain 16, nearly 600 artists of all mediums submitted work. Of the 600, 483 artists and 867 works of art were selected for the event, held at the Jensen-Byrd Building on Friday with a preview night Thursday.

Mediums represented at Terrain include everything from paintings, sculptures, mixed-media pieces and wearable art to films, sound installations, digital projections and live performances.

Every submission is evaluated by a panel of jurors. There are juries for visual art, literary works, films, music and site-specific installations. Jurors are representative of the medium they’re reviewing and hold “multiple perspectives and places in the creative community,” Ewing said.

This year, no matter the medium, jurors noticed many artists working through some of what is going on in the world by bringing environmental and societal themes into their pieces. A lot of artists also incorporated fairies and anime-inspired elements into their work.

“One of the things that we also commented on is that this year is really, really strong, and I think it’s because there’s so many different kinds of work that was submitted this year,” Ewing said.

One thing that sets Terrain apart from a standard gallery show is that the art does not just hang on the walls. Live performances are also part of the evening.

For preview night, Spokane Poet Laureate Mery Smith has organized a reading featuring participants in the Community School’s Youth Poetry Lab.

At the main event, there will be music all evening from DJ Unifest, Imagine Jazz Band, Madrona Hollow, ASPERGILLUS, Andy Rumsey and Phill Brannorland, Truehoods, the Bed Heads, Frog Psychology, Jona Gallegos, John Wayne Williams and Raj Saint Paul.

CorpoRAT Printshop will host a live screen printing experience, while Terrain’s Literature Park will host poetry readings and literary performances. Films will be played in Terrain Theater, and dance and other creative performances will take place on the Indoor stage.

One of those performances features Wolfbat, aka Dennis McNett, an artist known for larger-than-life print-covered sculptures, in partnership with printmaker Reinaldo Gil Zambrano and local universities.

Zambrano has been working to bring Wolfbat to town for a while and reached out to the visiting artist lecture series at Gonzaga University, Spokane Falls Community College and Eastern Washington University for their support.

A week before Terrain, Wolfbat will visit those schools and host puppet-making workshops. The night of the event, Wolfbat and Zambrano will lead a parade of puppets from Gonzaga’s campus to the Jensen-Byrd Building, arriving at 8:30 p.m. for their performance.

“Reinaldo is gaining an international presence, and Wolfbat has a similar presence, so to have a local artist bring another really incredible printmaker to town and have that tied to and specifically geared around the flagship event is a testament to not only what Reinaldo is doing in this town and the caliber of work he’s doing in this town, but also a testament to the growth of the event as well,” Ewing said. “It’s a really meaningful thing, and I think the people who are there in the space during that time are going to be really blown away. And I love that it involves the broader university student community as well.”

Terrain also features site-specific installations from set designers who work in the area. Jeremy Whittington, program director at Spokane Arts, will design for the Indoor stage; Kaitlyn Kelm, who works with Anthropologie, is designing for the Literature Park; and James Landsiedel, technical director at Stage Left Theater, will design for Terrain Theater.

A collective of artists will design an installation piece for the event entrance as well.

At the flagship event, there will also be food trucks from Indigenous Eats and Island Style Food & BBQ as well as a mocktail bar.

Ewing said she and the team keep thinking they will hit a plateau in terms of the number of artists submitting or the number of work they can accept, but that has not happened yet. Still, she does not tie the success of the show to the amount of artists who submit or people who attend.

“We don’t want people to gauge and have their excitement tied around solely the growth of the show, because if we did decide to cap it at 483 next year, it’s still going to be a really exciting show, even though we aren’t physically growing larger,” she said.

This year in particular, the Terrain team had discussions about whether they had grown so much they had reached their limit. They do not want the free one-night event, plus a ticketed preview night, to overwhelm attendees with a “so much art, so little time” situation, and jurying all the submissions and hanging 900 pieces of art is no small feat.

But they also do not want to erase the magic of the one-night only event that is there one day, gone the next.

The event could potentially move to include two floors of the Jensen-Byrd Building, but for now, Ewing feels good about the framework they have used over the last few years.

The fact that they are even having those discussions, Ewing said, is a testament to the support Spokane has shown the event and the arts community as well as the volunteers who help behind the scenes year after year.

“When we talk about ‘We all build this,’ this event is ‘We all build this’ personified,” she said. “It takes all of us coming together and doing our part and contributing our talents in our own unique ways. This celebration is so much bigger than our organization, and it’s even bigger than the event itself. It’s a showcase of how talented and how collaborative and how beautiful our creative community, and our community at large, is here in Spokane.

“For me, it’s a great honor to be able to showcase how amazing our city is, how talented our city is, and the fact that it continues to get bigger and better every year, and now we have people traveling to Spokane for this event. It’s nothing that me and the co-founders could have ever dreamed. But I feel really so damn lucky to be able to be doing this work in Spokane, and I hope that when people come to the event, they feel that same energy and that same specialness and that same pride in our city.”