Past event
From Emotion to Artwork, Building Creativity from Scraps
About the event
Join teaching artist AshaAung Helmstetter for a workshop to help build abstract work from the ground up, using intuition and emotion as guidance. This workshop is helpful for working through artistic blocks, getting in touch with your creativity (even for the first time!), and practicing following your intuition while giving grace to your emotions. Each piece will turn out differently, while there are guidelines, this is an open-ended project.
About the artist:
AshaAung Helmstetter (She/Her) is a painter, storyteller, performer, and community artist from Seattle’s Central District, where she’s still based today. Having left school early to manage chronic health problems, she has very little formal training. Her work amplifies community-connection, self-reflection, and finding freedom from within; which she also explores through teaching and participating in community spaces, creating community art projects with organizations around her city. In 2025, she shared her exhibition “Recognition, Love, and Healing” with the Northwest African American Museum, her dearest project to date, after working on the series of paintings intentionally since 2021. AshaAung has been Artist in Residence (AiR) with: SOIL Gallery (Young AiR 2021), PrideFest’s Artist Retreat at Rockland Residency (2023), Wa Na Wari (the 2021-2023 cycle), Common Area Maintenance (2nd Ave Sign Project AiR 2023), and the Wing Luke Museum with the International Community Health Services (Arts and Culture as Apothecary AiR, 2024-2025).
She has been the recipient of Foundry10’s Young Artist Grant in 2021, Living Artist Grant in 2024, 4Culture’s 2024 Cultural Producers Recovery Fund, and the first place winner of Onyx Gallery’s 2024 All Women Juried Exhibit. Her work’s been featured on King 5 News, Fox 13, and on the cover of Real Change News. When she isn’t painting, you can find Asha around town under her burlesque and go-go persona, Ms. Kitschy Kupid!
