Chardanae Odegard, Spaceworks Intern

Spaceworks offers internships through Next Move, a program of Tacoma Public Schools. This fall/winter we brought on Chardanae Odegard, currently a high school senior at School of the Arts (SOTA). Chardanae helped us with a wide variety of tasks including updating our website, organizing files, moving artwork, and delivering flyers. She also got a behind the scenes look at our Artscapes program: from how we process and select artists’ applications, to how we assign specific artists to specific spaces.

From this internship, Chardanae got to experience the field of Arts Administration from the perspective of an arts focused, non-profit program in her hometown. As an up and coming visual artist, she gained valuable insight into panel selection process. Take a look at three of her recent paintings, along with her artist statement:

Painting by student artist Chardanae Odegard

“I am Chardanae Odegard and I work with acrylic, watercolor and ink pen. These paintings I’ve created are basically a summary of my junior year at SOTA, and are inspired by the murals that were made in my painting class for the Cedar Medical Center last spring. When it comes to art I don’t exactly have a style, I see art as a way to express whatever’s on your mind.

One of the artists that influenced me as I was learning how to paint is Kehinde Wiley; I love how he presents young African-Americans in confident poses, showing the time and effort creating his portraits by using detail to make them look realistic, with the patterns shown in the background of his pieces.

I want my artwork to show that exact amount of time, effort and my own meaning throughout each piece. In the future I want learn how to do Graphic Design, that way I can be familiar in Digital arts as well. Then maybe someday I could have my fine arts displayed at a museum.” – Chardanae Odegard