February 2021 / SOIL Young Artist Residency: AshaAung Helmstetter

SOIL Young Artist Residency

AshaAung Helmstetter

February 1 – 27, 2021

To preserve the sanctity of the space for the artist, SOIL will only be open to the public the last Friday & Saturday of the month—February 26 – 27, 11–4pm

Closing Reception / Saturday, February 27, 1–4pm

SOIL gallery is excited to announce its first Young Artist Residency.

During the month of February, AshaAung Helmstetter will set up her studio in the SOIL gallery.

Watch for her activity @soilart and her Instagram @artsyasha

Soil sought the council of Anastacia-Renee for this first invitation.

Please join us for a Closing Reception to meet the artist and see the work made during her residency: Saturday, February 27, 1–4pm.

From Helmstetter’s statement of intent /

To start this residency, I plan to use historical black and white portraits of Black Americans as reference for colorful paintings on a larger scale than I have ever worked.

I am doing this project to honor history that makes me feel empowered, history that is often seen as the shame of our country—the history I wasn’t shown in school.

This plan was put together with no correlation to Black History Month, the visibility of Black ancestry is important every month of the year.

In choosing portraits for this project, information about the photographs’ subjects is not always available, but I will pass on whatever history I can to my audience. @Girl_Gone_Golden on Instagram has been an incredible resource, being an entirely self-curated collection of historically Black imagery with as much information on each subject as possible.

Biography /

AshaAung Helmstetter is a Seattle-based, contemporary portrait painter, who often works with oil paints in heavy textures. Originally, her awe for paint was found in museums as a child, looking through European/Western Classical and Impressionistic art, always most captivated by thick paint strokes and the way color describes depth. This helped shape visions of what she wanted to create herself; aiming also to capture in each piece beauty, imaginativeness, and life.

With this in mind, she draws inspiration from the women around her, creating paintings that show confidence in their likeness, often in bold colors or slightly exaggerated. She feels a connectedness and energy in being a black/brown woman painting portraits of other women (also often black or brown as well). She uses her paintings to describe the strength she sees in each of her subjects and shed light on strength that sometimes is even internally unseen.

In 2016, encouraged by a friend already enrolled, Helmstetter decided to visit a figure drawing class at Seattle Central College. It was after that class that she realized her art would paint the road in the path of her life. In the next year of school, art classes at SCC were a place of comfort while diagnosing the chronic pain that has remained an issue to her to this today. Eventually leaving school to focus on her health and personal development, Helmstetter was able to come into her own as an artist, dedicated to her craft. Her constant pain has been the largest detriment to her living, but when looking in the eyes of her portraits she is reminded of her strength and persists forward. She strives to remind the audience of their own persistence when looking at her art.