Mt. Tabor Middle School Art

08/30/2026

08/27/2026

Happy 1st Day Back, PPS! 🎉💓🎨💫
My Years in School: 50 🤣
Started Teaching: 30 years ago 💗💎

08/20/2026

Charlie’s Jazz Crab 🦀🎺 helps kick off the school year at PPS Visual and Performing Arts Convocation. Mt. Tabor Art Represent!

08/16/2026

Interacting with the Crows, Part 1. 🐦‍⬛🐦‍⬛🐦‍⬛🐦‍⬛🐦‍⬛ Wildwood: Follow the Crows. There’s an app to them all. Portland, Oregon. So proud to see Sakura Hanami by .mcdarragh at City Hall. Make sure to read Maya’s powerful full description of her crow on my previous post. It was stunning up close.
Crows visited so far: 8 of 30
Portland State University
Portland Art Museum
Pioneer Square
Keller Fountain
Director’s Park
Multnomah County Library
Schnitzer

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DcHoCWRhIpA/?igsh=MWo4eTc1eWVwdW03bA==

08/11/2026

Go see Maya’s deeply powerful “Sakura Hanami” Wildwood Crow at City Hall! I was lucky enough to be Maya’s Art teacher at Mt. Tabor. From Maya: “It’s an honor to share that I’m one of the artists that was selected to paint a crow for the LAIKA Studios Wildwood Follow The Crows Art Trail trail in Portland, Oregon!

The trail kicks off on August 7th with crows all throughout Portland. Every single crow was painted by a different artist to celebrate the release of Wildwood on October 23rd!

The trail is presented by Downtown Portland Clean & Safe in partnership with Wild in Art. After the trail ends, the crows will be auctioned off to raise funds for OHSU Doernbecher, to support all the great work they do.

Wildwood was such a magical series to read growing up in Portland — being able to work alongside Laika to help promote a movie about the books I loved is really special.

It was important to me to honor the story behind the beautiful cherry blossoms — or sakura, as I prefer — along the waterfront. The beauty of these sakura is about history, healing, and the power of memory — beauty that can come out from hard times, even if it’s just fleeting. Most people pass by without knowing they were a gift: donated to the city in 1990 by the Japanese Grain Traders Import Association to celebrate the dedication of the Japanese American Historical Plaza and Bill of Rights Memorial Japanese American Museum of OR in 1990. The Plaza sits on land right next to where Nihonmachi, or Japantown, once flourished — a community that was uprooted during WWII. It exists to reminds us how precious Constitutional civil liberties are. What touches me most is that many Japanese American survivors unjustly incarcerated who received redress payments chose to donate part of that money toward building it, turning a government apology into something lasting on public land. Getting to paint that story into this piece means a lot to me. Thank you to City of Portland for sponsoring this design.

Only sneak peeks for now — I’ll reveal the whole crow August 7th!”


LAIKA Studios