Yvonne Pepin-Wakefield: A Life in Art, A Refuge for Others

For years, Yvonne has opened her studio to young people in crisis through her work with Youth Empowerment Shelter (YES). The individuals are given the rare opportunity to be seen as emerging artists, not simply a youth in crisis. She provides stability, trust, and a sense of belonging, the studio quickly becoming a refuge.

“There was this core group that happened three years ago, and they just got really into it. They were coming sometimes three or four times a week. I started to keep my phone on me because I’d get a call and they’d say, ‘We’re sitting in the parking lot. Can we come into the studio?”

Inside Yvonne’s studio, students are given access to professional-grade materials. Yvonne uniquely pairs trust with structure. There are expectations, but there is also freedom to experiment, to fail, and to try again without judgment.

The Wasco County Department of Youth Services Multi-Agency Resource Center (MARC) has been an important collaborator in supporting scheduling, instruction, and access to professional-grade materials. Together, they helped secure grant-funded opportunities for youth artists, including the framing of works at Safe Space in Hood River.

But Yvonne’s commitment to education and creativity did not begin here. This is the continuation of her life as it has moved across disciplines, countries, and different forms of knowledge. Her path into art began in childhood, after the death of her parents, while she spent time in foster care. Drawing quickly became her whole focus and a means of survival. Art was not her chosen career at first, but it allowed her to remain anchored while everything in her life was shifting.

That early connection to art carried into her formal study. She attended the Minneapolis Art Institute at seventeen, completed intensive training at the Mendocino Art Center, and went on to earn a BA in fine arts and arts administration from Antioch University. She completed a doctorate focused on nonverbal communication and problem-solving through drawing.

Her work has taken her far beyond the United States. She taught in Kuwait from 2004 to 2010 as a university art professor, where she researched drawing, memory, and the impact of the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (especially through visual/nonverbal expression); lived experiences through art.

Her career has also included a Fulbright fellowship in Japan, where she studied discipline-based art education and calligraphy practices in early education. She has taught across continents, exhibited internationally, and her work is held in private collections in Kuwait, including within royal collections.

Yvonne’s work is driven by presence rather than abstraction. “If I don’t feel it, I don’t paint it,” she says simply. Whether painting landscapes along the Columbia River, creating pit-fired ceramics shaped by elemental and unpredictable processes, or working directly from the terrain around John Day, Oregon, her practice is rooted in place, observation, and her lived experience. She does not do work from photographs or secondary reference, only in real time.

Her pit-firing ceramics are particularly emblematic of this philosophy. In pit firing, her pieces are placed in hand-dug earth kilns, where she lets them burn for days. The ceramics become shaped by smoke, fire, and chance. “You can never predict the color,” she laughs. “Every time I try to predict what’s going to happen, it never works.” The outcome cannot be controlled, only witnessed.

Her studio reflects this same ethos: work that carries unpredictability as a core aesthetic, where transformation is part of the material itself. It is not static or exclusive. It is a living, changing space that hosts pop-up exhibitions several times a year, inviting other artists in to replace her work and activate the gallery as a shared platform. On open days, easels spill outside and people and dogs move through the space.

But it is her work with young people that she returns to most often when asked what matters most.

“You know, some nights when there’s this really good time in the studio, I’ll just lay there smiling… You can’t make money like that.” Yvonne does not position herself as a savior or authority; she builds structure around access. The access is to materials, trust, time, and the possibility of being seen differently.

Many of the young people she has worked with continue to return years later. Some now live independently in Portland or beyond, sending her their work for feedback or visiting on Sundays to paint and work in clay. Others have gone on to exhibit their own work, including in solo shows and public installations.

This summer, Yvonne’s Art Studio is launching a revamped arts program. The program will serve youth connected to the Youth Empowerment Shelter and Wasco County MARC who are ages 14-18 and have experienced challenges such as family crisis, homelessness, bullying, or mental health struggles. It will remain open to additional community referrals on a case-by-case basis. The participants will have the opportunity to set personal and creative goals while exploring their artistic talents. To encourage commitment and creativity, a limited number of stipends will be available for youth who consistently participate and choose to develop a body of work for a community gallery exhibition and partnership project. It is even more exciting to know that students may also be eligible to receive school credit through Innovations Academy and their guidance counselors for attendance.

"Yvonne's passion and enthusiasm are contagious. I absolutely love seeing our YES youth at her studio putting all of their focus and energy into creating something and often going way beyond what they thought they were capable of,” says Livia Christensen, executive director of the YES. “She is changing lives through exposure to art and really showing up for these kids to show them that they matter."

When you see Yvonne’s studio you can see it has become an ecosystem of its own. It has been shaped by a lifetime of her movement, study, and survival. She is now sustained by young people who come seeking structure, trust, and a creative space. It is a place shaped by loss, by mentorship, by scholarship, and by Yvonne’s belief that art is not separate from life. Art is a way of making life bearable, legible, and shared.

Yvonne's work exists in paintings, ceramics, classrooms, books, research archives, and most clearly, in the lives of the young artists who continue to pass through her studio and leave changed by it.

To contact Yvonne, visit www.YvonnePepinWakefield.com or stop by her studio on the Riverfront Trail, 3735 Klindt Dr., The Dalles.