Connecting all the Pieces: Mahonia Crossing Art Exhibition and Sale

Art serves many purposes in our daily lives, including building community, inspiring creativity, joy, and discovery, and connecting us with nature. At Scott Edwards Architecture, our design approach promotes the integration of art and architecture, and we enjoy the process of collaborating with our clients and those who the space will serve to integrate them meaningfully.

This is the case with Mahonia Crossing, a mixed-income “Community for All Ages” housing development in Salem, Oregon. The development’s building typologies include family-centered residential walk-ups, a senior living building, and a community building—each responding to the differing needs of residents in 30, 60, and 80 percent AMI brackets. Art displayed in the senior building was created by students from a local elementary school, Pringle Elementary, a playful direction that enlivens the space. This approach reinforced the project’s vision to create multi-generational interaction, connecting the development’s older adults residing here with younger generations in the surrounding community.

Mahonia Crossing’s student-made art consists of collages, paintings, and drawings, some of which required scanning the original and printing on fade-resistant paper. This left SEA with a handful of wonderful original pieces, sparking an idea to pass the art forward while supporting a local non-profit. That brings us to “Connecting all the Pieces: Mahonia Crossing Art Exhibition and Sale,” a donation-based art sale and exhibition that celebrated this great work and the intention behind it. See the pieces that were featured in the exhibition below.