(exhilarating music) - [Interviewee] The emotions that I feel when I'm anticipating coming out to Yakima are a mixture of excitement, escaping the concrete jungle, getting to a place where I can spread my wings.

(upbeat folk music) - My name is Christie Tirado, I am an artist in Yakima, Washington and I specialize in relief printmaking, and I am also a art teacher.

(upbeat inspiring music) There's many things to love about Yakima.

I usually take Cora and we go and we walk around and just appreciate the outdoors, just access to the shrub-steppe here in Cowiche Canyon.

Yakima has around 50% Latinx Hispanic people living here.

So I feel that I can get around Yakima speaking my first language, so getting around speaking Spanish.

There's that cultural connection but also there's a lot of narratives and a lot of stories, and it's really rich in that regard that I feel as an artist, it's, I feel like I've hit gold.

My mother always bought me things to craft with whether it was, you know, working with origami, or creating jewelry, or just my pencils so I can sketch.

Just having access to that really allowed for me to be where I'm at today.

I stumbled upon the printmaking studio at the University of Washington.

I learned about the process of like monotypes, creating monotypes, dry points, relief printmaking.

One of the things that I really love about printmaking is how versatile it is.

It's very meticulous, it keeps me thinking all the time about the next step or three steps from now, so I'm not just working in that moment in time I'm working in various steps.

I'm thinking about the various steps that are coming ahead and I really like that.

I like how I have to be very analytical, I have to like synthesize everything that's going on.

That's just a part of me, that's a part of the process.

Traditionally, printmaking has been used as a form of communication to disseminate information to masses.

And particularly in Mexico, it's been used as like a form of social, political activism and protests as well.

For me, I'm really tied to that background.

I use that, that form of creating to be able to do something very similar, to really reproduce and recreate and fully illustrate and represent these communities here in Yakima, which historically have been underserved and marginalized.

So I began to create pieces that reflect my heritage but also the many realities of people that live here in Yakima, in particular a lot of our farm workers in this community.

Initially, like I was creating pieces to just ground myself and just fully express myself.

And over time I realized that there was more people that were connecting to my pieces.

When I began to create pieces that also encompassed you know, the community that I'm a part of now and started to be more intentional with who I'm portraying, who I'm creating, who are the lives of these people that historically haven't been illustrated or represented.

Being the daughter of two Mexican immigrant parents, I firsthand saw all of the struggles that my parents had to go through.

I noticed how invisible they felt and how they weren't really seen in the cultural social tapestry of this nation.

So being here in Yakima and being able to make these connections with people that resemble my background, my parents' background, I wanted them to feel like they were seen, they were valued, they were appreciated, and they still are going to continue to be valued and appreciated.

(gentle guitar music) I first started doing workshops when people started asking me more about the process.

I teach art and I'm teaching Monday through Friday but I feel like outside of teaching it's really important to also give access to people who maybe don't have an art program at their school, or don't have access to materials.

So creating these workshops I think it's just really crucial for the greater community.

(gentle soothing music) Okay, so today we're going to learn how to create a simple relief print.

And some of the tools that we are going to be using today include various gouges with different like shapes that you can use to create different cuts on a surface.

We need a brayer, which is to roll the ink out, a surface like table with like plexiglass or just glass so we can fill the ink.

You're going to need paper to print on.

The first thing that you're going to need to do is create an image.

So here I created some monarch, two monarch butterflies.

When you have your image, you're going to go ahead and tape your image down on your block.

So once it's taped down, you're gonna take just a wooden spoon or anything that you have at your house, and you're gonna apply pressure holding down that image on the block.

And there you have that transfer.

This is where you can go in with your pencil or your marker, or Sharpie and go ahead and fine tune some of those details.

And then I'm going to go in and just kinda start carving around them, or carve within the butterfly for that negative, carve out that negative space.

So now we're going to go ahead and ink up our plate.

I'm gonna go ahead and spread out the ink by just using a pallet knife.

Okay, we're gonna be using a brayer to roll out the ink.

When you're ready, you're gonna come over very gently glide the ink over onto your relief block.

Okay, so once it's inked up, just grab a sheet of paper and this paper's going to be my registration.

So I'm gonna center it, this is gonna be the size of the paper that I'm going to print on.

So now that it's lined up, I'm gonna go ahead, grab my paper.

Set it over, hold onto it and use my spoon to create the print.

So essentially what I'm doing here is I'm transferring the print onto my paper.

And you have your own relief print.

You can go in and you can go ahead and add color to it, if you'd like.

That's printing 101 for you.

(soothing music) Art is a reflection of our heritage, can be a reflection of our cultures, of our ideas, of our thoughts, of our emotions.

And I feel that even if we maybe don't wanna feel inclined to create a work of art, I feel that just allowing yourself permission to connect with something and explore that is just something that should be accessible to anybody.

(slow music) - [Announcer] "Made There" is made in part with generous support from Yakima Valley Tourism.