Burien Art 2025 - present
Essa curated a section of gallery wall for Burien Arts at the Highline Heritage Museum. Essa took over this programming in November of 2024, and began selecting artists in February of 2025.
Nepantla: Painting the Space in-Between
Jake Prendez
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Nepantla is a Nahuatl (Aztec language) term describing “being in the middle” or “the space in the middle.” Popularized by Chicana writer and scholar Gloria Anzaldúa, the concept often references endangered communities, cultures, and genders who, due to colonialism, marginalization, or historical trauma, develop resistance strategies for survival. Nepantla becomes an alternative space in which to live, heal, function, and create.
In Nepantla: Painting the Space In-Between, Jake Prendez positions his painting as both aesthetic practice and decolonial intervention. Born in San Jacinto/Hemet, Jake grew up going back and forth from California and Washington. He received a Bachelors from UW in American Ethnic Studies and a Masters in Chicana/o Studies from California State University, Northridge. Prendez navigates multiple cultural, geographic, and intellectual terrains. His work reflects this lived in-betweenness, synthesizing Indigenous iconography, social realism, portraiture, and pop cultural references into a visual language grounded in Chicana/o experience
Prendez’s paintings operate as acts of cultural affirmation and resistance. They challenge erasure while centering visibility; they honor ancestral memory while engaging contemporary social justice struggles. Through bold color, symbolic imagery, and figurative representation, he constructs visual spaces where marginalized identities are neither peripheral nor endangered, but sovereign and self-defined.
As co-director of the Nepantla Cultural Arts Gallery in Seattle, along with his wife Judy Avitia-Gonzalez, Prendez extends this philosophy beyond the canvas, cultivating community-based platforms rooted in Chicana/o arts traditions. The exhibition frames Nepantla not as a condition of fragmentation, but as a generative site of transformation—where survival evolves into empowerment, and the in-between becomes a locus of cultural production, collective healing, and creation.
WITH LOVE, BURIEN
Anna Sullivan
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👋 hi! I’m Anna, a multi-disciplinary artist, writer, and teacher of connection. As our world grows ever faster and more demanding of our attention, I believe fiercely in the human need to pause.
Handwriting is my foundational medium, a practice with the power to transcend intellectual thought and allow reflection through body and heart. My work encourages humans to step back from the screen and revel in this simple act, to connect deeply to themselves, others, the planet, and the magic/mystery of living.
So much in our lives pushes us toward greater speed, scale, efficiency. I invite the opposite. Slow down; get personal; be wildly, beautifully inefficient.
This is my rebellion. It’s a gentle, joyful resistance. Thank you for joining me.
Learn more and follow along at https://pidgepost.studio/
Polygon Party:
A Celebration of Color and Shape
Rachel Bender
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Welcome to Polygon Party, a vibrant exploration of the playful possibilities of abstraction through bold lines, sharp angles, and saturated hues.
Drawing inspiration from modernist design, architectural forms, and sacred geometry, this body of work distills complexity into simplicity. The use of straight lines and geometric forms creates a sense of order, while the vivid palette injects energy and emotion. Rather than depicting the world as it is, these pieces offer a joyful reimagining — a party where polygons take center stage and color sets the mood.
Polygon Party invites viewers to engage with shape and color in their purest forms; to see structure not as limitation, but as a space for joy, movement, and playful imagination. It’s a celebration of clarity and contrast, and a reminder that even within the strictest lines, there’s room for play.
Stable Habits
John Woodruff
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As a continuation of the ideas in John's recent series, Stable Habits is a collection of smaller, more monochromatic pieces that read as shorter, concise visual ideas rather than the lengthy sentences of his larger works. John works primarily in the studio and is meticulous in his processes and planning. Created in-camera, the images of each grid are primarily presented in the order they were created, with the flow of each sequence being an important consideration.
John finds artistic clarity in the habit of repetition and adherence to the inherent rules governing each piece or series he creates. He utilizes the tools and techniques of traditional photography and presents the simple interplay of form, light, and time. These combine into intricate, approachable, and visually captivating compositions that transcend the conventional bounds of photography's traditional modes of presentation.
Originally from Seattle, John studied Photographic Arts and Art History in Salzburg, Austria, and received a BFA in Fine Art Photography from RIT. In 1991, he began a career in photography in New York. He eventually made his way west, continuing his career in Chicago and San Francisco. He now lives in Seattle with his wife and kids.
Wool and fLowers
Trisha Gilmore
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This work is made from a rug tufting machine that is held in both hands and pushes out yarn into a stretched canvas. I draw an original sketch onto the canvas with a Sharpie and then start loading the gun with the color of wool yarn that I have chosen. I shoot the wool into the canvas row next to row, changing the color of yarn when the design requires it. I do not choose the colors I’m going to use ahead of time, but choose as I go. I make these decisions in palette and line similarly like my process of painting pictures. They feel organically alike to me, just different materials. I like to use floral and plant designs as they are abstracted easily and offer lots of color and texture ideas.
Trisha works with Wool and a Tufting gun that pushes the yarn into canvas, inspired by the composition of real-life flora and fauna.