Everett Community Art Walk

It's easy to feel discouraged with all the bad news of closed businesses, lost jobs, and disrupted routines. Integral Arts founder and director Karyn Alzayer has been hard at work making sure there are activities and programs to participate in to help us forget, at least for a little while, some of this uncertainty. Healing Hands We’ve all been thinking about how much our hands can carry germs these days that it’s easy to forget they are also vital, powerful parts of ourselves that we use to connect, create, communicate, and console. I wanted to create a project to help us feel connected to one another through this difficult time, and I thought there would be no better way to do that than through our hands. I’m inviting people to write words of encouragement on a tracing of their hand, scan them, and send them to me. I’ll be gathering them into a big art project for public display when this is all over. But I’ll need YOUR help to make it happen. So get those art materials out and ...

A statement from our Founder/Director regarding COVID-19: I’m sure by now many of you have heard all about what NOT to do and what is being cancelled/postponed as a result of this outbreak. What I haven’t heard much of is what we CAN do. I know things are usually tight financially for those of us doing this work, and that things are especially difficult now as we watch our entire livelihoods evaporate before our eyes. But as creatives, we have a unique capability to uplift those around us. What we do brings joy, provokes thought, instills hope, and inspires action. People of all ages are anxious, lonely, isolated, struggling, and sick. Children are home from school and missing the comfort of their routines. We as a society need the arts now more than ever. And so I’m here to tell you it’s time. It’s time to pull out all the stops, time for us to do what we do with more ferocity and more purpose than ever before. Time for us to create like our lives depend on it, like someone else’s l...

Our founder and director Karyn wears many art hats, one for this organization, and one as the chair of the Everett Cultural Council. It's not often she wears them both at the same time though! Thank you from the bottom of our hearts for coming out to the grand opening for the Everett City Hall Gallery. Many thanks to the Everett Cultural Council and to the City of Everett for their help in giving life to this idea, building the infrastructure to hang artwork, and lending their time in service of this goal. Also many thanks to Everett High School for lending some amazing musicians for this evening's opening! There is some really stunning artwork in honor of Langston Hughes and Black History Month on display by some stellar local artists both young and old, and we are so proud to have helped make this happen. We can't wait to keep building partnerships in the arts here! Another evening of fantastic art in Everett, keeping our hearts full and our souls energized to continue th...

Integral Arts is proud to announce the city of Everett will be opening a dedicated permanent gallery exhibition space at city hall to feature work of local artists! This comes as a direct result of the tireless efforts of our founder and director Karyn Alzayer and the establishment of the first annual Everett Community Art Walk. Thank you to our donors who helped make all this happen and to those volunteers who helped make the first annual Everett Community Art Walk a success. It seems we inspired the city to create some desperately needed art space in the city. We can't wait to welcome you all into YOUR new gallery, so be sure to go down and see it after it opens next month! Everett City Hall Gallery First Show: Deep like the Rivers Langston Hughes and his work are often associated with the Harlem Renaissance, an intellectual, social, and cultural explosion of African-American arts centered in Harlem, NY around the 1920s. While named for Harlem, this rebirth also included expr...

A note from our founder and director: Here at Integral Arts, we are founded on the idea that arts build trust, which builds community. And we set out to prove it with our first event: the Everett Community Art Walk. By providing the opportunity for the public to explore Everett and discover great art, artists, and businesses, we invited conversations, relationships, and vision for our community, with our community. We use our arts events to show that fostering arts and building community makes a place feel more “like home” to our residents and visitors. And when a place feels like home, we find people are more invested in its success, which leads to increased involvement, improved safety, and an overall better place for all of us. As this year comes to a close, we’re reflecting on the many ways Integral Arts has already begun to transform our community through arts experiences even in our first year of operation. And we look forward to continuing this vital work for our community. ...

Integral Arts was proud to see our closing reception for the first annual Everett Community Art Walk featured in the Everett Independent and Everett Advocate.

Thank you so much for your support and thanks to those of you who came out to celebrate with us last night for the closing of our First Annual Everett Community Art Walk! Many thanks to our artists, business owners, sponsors, volunteers, community partners, the Mass Cultural Council, and Everett Cultural Council for everything you have all done to help make this event a success. We couldn’t have done it without you! I’d like to reiterate that I meant every word of what I said last night. I do feel passionately that just because we don’t have dedicated arts spaces in Everett doesn’t mean the people here don’t deserve great arts experiences. And I’m committed to helping foster those experiences from any and every angle where they may arise. This also means that I’m dedicated to fostering connections among local artists across city lines, and breaking down barriers for the arts and artists of all disciplines. If you would like to stay connected with us and...