Drawwing-Cabinet — Sohyeon Jenny Eom

📍 Los Angeles, CA

I wear many hats – a founder, producer, educator, curator, creative director, visual artist, designer and caretaker. I am passionate about building communities, bridging cultural gaps, creating experiences that spark inspiration and sense of connection. I enjoy meaning-making and connecting the dots.

In work, I value efficiency, alignment and clear communication, and in life, I value people, freedom and openness, but more often than not, work and life are intricately intertwined.

I’m occasionally a party-thrower, frequently the decision-maker and always a daydreamer.

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Drawwing Cabinet is an artist-run educational studio in La Crescenta, CA, offering K-12 art classes, workshops for adults, and art-related public programming for companies and organizations. By creating opportunities for learning and sharing of skills, ideas, and resources, Drawwing Cabinet aims to build a pluralistic platform where a multitude of creative thinkers intersect and continue to mutually inspire and support one another.

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01 Establishment and Development

August 2022 to February 2023

About: Establishment and Development

Drawwing Cabinet was founded at the height of the global pandemic in 2020 to build community and support local teaching artists. In our La Crescenta studio, we produce artist-led workshops for K-12 students that span across art, design, craft, cultural practices. We also offer scholarships ($18K in the last 2 years) through operational structure, community fundraising and private donations. In our third year, Drawwing Cabinet is now offering six to eight K-12 art classes per semester with plans to expand to offsite venues in the upcoming semester (Spring 2024).

02 Teaching Life Skills

Ongoing

About: Teaching Life Skills

Teaching skillsets that last students’ lifetimes is core to our programs.

It’s not enough to help students get into prestigious colleges. It’s just as important (if not more) to teach students critical thinking, problem-solving skills, time management, taking risks and responsibility – real life skills they can continue to utlize as they navigate adulthood.

In the Exhibition-Making class, students produced an exhibition of their own from beginning to end. Through this process, students developed a deeper understanding of the art of exhibition making, gained the practical skills needed to put on a successful exhibition and got a glimpse of what it’s like to pursue a career in the creative field. Students learned about the various elements that make up an exhibition and execute the roles of a curator, writer, editor, marketer, graphic designer, spatial designer, art handler, documentation photographer, event producer, and of course, of an artist.

Under my guidance, students came up with a curatorial theme, titled the exhibition, wrote about the exhibition, made a press release, designed marketing materials, promoted the exhibition, organized an opening reception, installed their works and presented their works.

Their works were publicly on view at LA Artcore in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles.

03 Connecting Communities

Ongoing

About: Connecting Communities

Another core value that is embedded into our DNA is our mission to connect the immigrant community with communities that are at the heart of various creative fields. We want to make sure students are exposed to the contemporary conversations in the fields of their interests, granted access to resources that are available to them and given the language to be an active particiant in the field.

This is why we welcomed partnerships with organizations such as GYOPO, LA Artcore and Mending Kids; held free information / Q&A sessions inviting specialists that work at Google, Dreamworks, as well as universities like USC, UCSD and CalArts; regularly organized grant-writing workshops; arranged field trips to Hauser & Wirth, LACMA, dublab, Hammer Museum and more.

04 Thinking Outside the Box

ongoing

About: Thinking Outside the Box

My mother was an art-educator. Although I grew up in the studio surrounded by her students, I never received formal art education in my childhood. Ironically, my mother feels proud of this, because although she was providing the education that was much needed to navigate the Korean society at the time, that type of education left little room for creativity and experimentation.

To my surprise, most art classes in the immigrant community in LA are still offering the same type of art education that my mother used to offer 30 years ago, focusing primarily on techniques and often limited to the mediums of drawing and painting.

The field of art has expanded tremendously between when my mother was teaching and now, and the education should mirror this growth. The field is much more versatile than what it used to be, with artists utilizing unconventional mediums such as research, tea, institutional systems, gift-giving, fermentation, DNA, etc. and working across fields such as science, computer engineering, sociology and so much more. There is much more emphasis on concept and this is true not only in the fine art field, but also in design, craft, entertainment, animation, etc.

As a way to meet both the technical needs and our desire to expand the horizon for our audience, we’re offering classes and workshops like sound and art, performance, food as art, painting in the dark, incense making, tea blending, natural dyeing and more.

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