Educating on Art Careers With 10 Years of Art Talk

NEWBERG, Ore. — Every Monday evening this fall, the ballroom at the Chehalem Cultural Center will serve as a meeting point for George Fox University art students, faculty, and anyone else in the Newberg-Dundee area who wants to walk in off the street and listen to professional artists talk about their path to a career in art. The event is free. No RSVP, no tuition, no George Fox ID required.

It’s called Art Talk, a weekly visiting-artist lecture series run jointly by George Fox’s Department of Art & Design and the Chehalem Cultural Center, with sessions held every Monday at 6 p.m. in the center’s ballroom. The fall season opens with 13 scheduled speakers pulled from working studios in Newberg, Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Diego, and beyond, according to the university’s Department of Art & Design website.

“We know at this point that Newberg really loves the arts,” said Adam Long, associate professor of art and design at George Fox University and organizer of Art Talk. “We want to foster those connections in the Newberg art community for students and for the locals. It’s open to everyone.”

The format is straightforward: attendees gather in the ballroom, often perusing the speaker’s work in person or on a projector screen while enjoying beverages and light bites. The speaker then gives a presentation on their career journey and what it’s like working in their field, followed by 25 to 35 minutes of questions before the talk concludes.

“It’s very low pressure,” Long said. “We want to celebrate the artists and share their work, and show there are a lot of creative ways to work in art — and not all are traditional.”

This season’s lineup, which has only a few vacant weeks, ranges from Newberg — with George Fox ceramics faculty member Tiffany Hokanson — to San Diego, home to studio artist David Carlson, to the farthest speaker, designer David Jon Walker of Hamden, Conn.

“We really have to send a lot of emails and messages to see who wants to join us,” said Long, who combs through art collectives and association websites to find artists. “I’d say about 50% of our emails get responses. When I do get an artist on the hook, we usually ask them to refer some friends.”

Now past the 10-year mark, Long has a new source of presenters for Art Talk: former George Fox art students who at one point sat in the Art Talk chairs and now have art careers.

Spencer Fuller and Nicole Williford are two of them. Both graduated from George Fox in 2016, both sat in the audience for the series’ earliest sessions, and both have since returned to the same room as featured speakers. Their careers look nothing alike, which is close to the entire point.

“There was still a lot of general sense that graphic design is the way to make money as an artist,” Williford said. “There’s maybe a few that wiggle through and are able to make personal work that sells, that supports their family, but that’s very rare.”

Williford, now a painter and small business owner based in the area, remembers Art Talk arriving during her senior year, brought in by Jillian Sokso, then chair of George Fox’s art department. At the time, Williford said, most students assumed there was really one practical path through an art degree, but Art Talk showed the flaws in that assumption.

“There were just so many different voices — this is the direction I went with my further schooling, or these are the kind of paid and unpaid jobs that I do as an illustrator or a painter, a book cover designer,” Williford said. “There’s a whole world of options, and I feel like it gave me a lot of excitement and confidence about building my own creative life for myself, without a box to fit in.”

What stayed with her most, she said, were the visiting artists — women, in particular — who had built creative practices alongside families. A decade later, Williford has both: a daughter, a painting practice, and a separate career in human services after earning a master’s degree in special education.

Fuller, a studio art and graphic design student when Art Talk launched in 2016, is now a senior art director at Face Out Studio, a book design studio based in Bend, Ore. He said the program’s early guests — including a designer whose interactive gallery installation used taste, smell, and sound to represent the color blue — cracked open what had otherwise felt like a small, insular campus.

“It became this really expanding, super inspirational thing for us, the students,” Fuller said. “We were having conversations because of our excitement in seeing totally new ideas for art.”

Fuller said the talks that stuck with him most, though, were the practical ones: working designers and artists explaining what their jobs actually looked like day to day, deadlines included.

“I’m a designer. I take art, and it’s got a purpose, and I’m using it for a purpose,” Fuller said.

Both graduates said the series’ biggest gift wasn’t any single piece of advice — it was proof that there was no one correct path from art student to working artist.

“To see how somebody got there, and to know that that path isn’t very orthodox most of the time — that was what made it invaluable for me,” Fuller said. “Knowing that it’s going to be possible, and that I don’t have to have everything figured out.”

Asked what they’d tell a student walking into an Art Talk for the first time this fall, both graduates landed on some version of the same advice: show up, and don’t be precious about the work.

“The program is there to help you succeed, to help you grow and discover what you want to do,” Fuller said. “But it takes engagement, and it takes effort on your part as well to get everything you can out of each of those resources.”

“Don’t be afraid of making bad work,” Williford said. “The repetition and volume — just showing up and putting something down on paper or through paint over and over again — is going to bring good stuff. You make some bad work along the way, for sure.”

Art Talk Lineup 2026-27

George Fox’s fall 2026 Art Talk lineup, published by the university’s Department of Art & Design, runs weekly from early September through mid-December.

The season opens Sept. 7 with ceramicist Tiffany Hokanson of Newberg, followed by designers Adam Garcia and Megan Clark, both of Los Angeles, on Sept. 14 and Sept. 21, studio artist David Carlson of San Diego on Sept. 28, and designer David Jon Walker of Hamden, Conn., on Oct. 5 — a talk Long said he’s particularly excited for. 

Illustrators Sunny Eckerle of Portland and Jordan Kay of Seattle speak Oct. 12 and Oct. 19, followed by designer, illustrator, and author David DaCosta of Portland on Oct. 26. Designer and illustrator Anita Magaña of Portland speaks Nov. 9, followed by arts administrator and ceramicist Chasse Davidson of Newport on Nov. 23, studio sculptor Matt Devine of Portland on Nov. 30, and studio painter Hickory Mertsching of Portland on Dec. 7. 

The season concludes Dec. 14 with senior thesis presentations. Two dates, Nov. 2 and Nov. 16, are listed as to-be-determined on the university’s schedule.

Talks run from 6 to 7 p.m. at the Chehalem Cultural Center. Admission is free, and the series as open to the public — not restricted to George Fox students, faculty, or alumni.

For Fuller and Williford, that open-door format is the point. A program that once cracked open their own sense of what was possible now does the same for a new room full of students each fall — and for any Newberg neighbor willing to pull up a chair on a Monday night. Learn more at the George Fox University Art Talk webpage.