Making Art, Making Connections

Kyra Wolfenbarger had a decision to make. Her two final choices for college were the University of Washington and another West Coast state university. A visit to the UW made her decision clear.

“I saw that the UW was a place that really valued research, full of professors who were invested in their work,” recalls Wolfenbarger, who grew up in Las Vegas, Nevada. “That was exciting to me, because I knew college would end up being about the people I met. Learning about the people at the UW brought me here.”

Now Wolfenbarger is graduating with a bachelor’s degree in interdisciplinary visual art, with departmental honors, from the UW’s School of Art + Art History + Design. She also completed a minor in business.

During her years at the University, Wolfenbarger created artwork in diverse media, participated in creative research, interned at the Seattle Art Museum, and had work exhibited in campus galleries. Yet, as she anticipated, what’s meant the most are the people she’s met along the way.

Art has always been a part of Wolfenbarger’s life. Her mother, an artist and art teacher, encouraged her creativity. Today Wolfenbarger is primarily a painter whose colorful artworks often feature receding and emerging layers.

“I use those aesthetics to explore themes of the lived Black experience,” Wolfenbarger says. “The visual medium can help us understand things we wouldn’t be able to understand without it. It can prompt questions and have them answered by looking at the work, which then prompts other questions. I see my artwork as a way of having a conversation with the viewers and with art history.”

As an interdisciplinary visual art major, Wolfenbarger took studio art courses in painting, drawing, ceramics, performance art, sound, and other media. She also took art history courses, finding inspiration in art that has come before. Her first art history class highlighted the work of esteemed painter Jacob Lawrence, an important chronicler of African-American life. Discovering that Lawrence taught at the UW from 1970 to 1985 and served as professor emeritus until the end of his life in 2000 “made me even more invested in the UW’s art program,” Wolfenbarger recalls.

When Wolfenbarger later received the Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Endowed Art Scholarship from her department, her familiarity with Lawrence made the award all the more meaningful. “I was honored,” she says. “Jacob Lawrence is so much of why I am passionate about the UW’s art program, so that was a privilege for sure.”

Beyond studio art and art history, Wolfenbarger wanted to interact with people in other fields as part of her UW education. That led her to the Summer Institute in the Arts and Humanities (SIAH), an undergraduate research program offered by the UW Office of Undergraduate Research in collaboration with the Simpson Center for the Humanities. SIAH brings together students from across the arts and humanities, immersing them in research theory and practice. In 2023, the theme for the institute was “A Black Sense: Time, Art, and Being” — a topic that intrigued Wolfenbarger.

Each SIAH participant works on an individual research project with support from a Mary Gates Research Scholarship. Wolfenbarger explored how Black communities in the US archive their family histories, recognizing that methods of archiving those histories have been systematically prevented or erased. As part of her ethnographic research, she spoke with her own relatives about her family’s methods for archiving their history.

“Our archives were stored in a way where when you encounter something and you’re reminded of someone, you share that memory with the person you’re with,” she says. “I wanted to make artworks to sustain that archive, as a site to encounter family history and share it.” Wolfenbarger created two paintings as part of her final project.

Long after her SIAH experience, Wolfenbarger’s ongoing discussions with fellow SIAH participant Jai Lasker, a sound artist, led to a collaborative art installation that combined visual and sound art. The work was included in the Jacob Lawrence Gallery exhibition Artists & Poets, a 2025 show highlighting the collaboration of Black artists in the past and present.

Beyond creating art, Wolfenbarger has been interested in arts education since assisting in her mother’s art workshops. Last year, through the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) Emerging Arts Leader Internship, Wolfenbarger interned with the interpretation team in SAM’s Education Department, creating an interactive gallery experience to enhance people’s understanding of SAM’s Alexander Calder exhibition.

This year, she took on another challenge. She wrote about art through The Black Embodiments Studio (BES), a program dedicated to building discourse around contemporary Black art and artists. Through BES’s “Arts Writing Incubator,” participants read contemporary writing about Black artists, view artwork together, and work on their own arts writing, to be published in the annual BES journal, A Year in Black Art.

“I process a lot of things through writing,” says Wolfenbarger. “It’s been a crucial component of my art practice. So part of pursuing Black Embodiments Studio was me wanting to sustain my writing practice. Also, I’d seen a talk by [UW professor and BES founder] Kemi Adeyemi and was just really invested in the way Kemi talked about art.”

Thanks to these diverse UW experiences, Wolfenbarger is now ready for her next chapter in the arts world. This fall, she begins an MFA program at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, with the hope of one day becoming an art professor.

“The dream is to find an institution where I can teach and that also values my art practice and will provide me a studio,” she says. “To be able to do those things in tandem — teach and make art — would be amazing.”