The show examines the past, present, and future of the oyster, its home in the Willapa Bay, and how the oyster has shaped local communities and economies.
By Taneum Fotheringill
Rural Assembly Director of Programs and Partnerships
Along the edge of Willapa Bay runs a road that connects gorgeous rural communities in the southwest corner of Washington State. In early November, I traveled this path, passing over bridges where the Bay sprawls into the tree line and cruising past piles of oyster shells, along with three reporters from the Daily Yonder. Our destination was Ilwaco, Wa., on the south end of the Long Beach Peninsula, home to the Columbia Pacific Heritage Museum (CPHM).
There, we met with Madeline Matson, the museum's executive director, to learn more about the area, and to join the celebration of graphic journalist Nhatt Nichols' The Willapa Oyster and its Environs gallery show which was opening at the museum. The exhibit features feature over 30 large format comic panels about oysters and Willapa Bay drawn by Nichols, who is a contributor to the Rural Assembly and Daily Yonder. The Rural Assembly provided financial support for the exhibit.
The show examines the past, present, and future of the oyster, its home in the Willapa Bay, and how the oyster has shaped local communities and economies.
The exhibit will be open through March 1. It’s our pleasure to share the a video feature about the exhibit, featuring interviews with Nichols and museum director Matson.
"I started this project by having a lot of curiosity around oyster farming," Nichols said. "Washington state is very unusual in that you can own tidelands here, which means we have generational oyster farms in a way other places don't. I'm always interested in food systems and what the way we make food and the way we grow food means about us as humans."
About Nhatt
Currently based out of Port Townsend, Wa., Nichols is a multi-disciplinary artist and poet. Her work focuses on the intersections between humans, animals, and their environment. She is a 2024 Blue Sky Community Action Fellow, a 2023 Artist Trust Literary GAP Grant recipient, and a writer in residence at Seattle Public School through the Writers In The Schools (WITS) program. In addition to her work for the Rural Assembly and Daily Yonder, she frequently contributes nonfiction journalism comics to news outlets like Civil Eats, Modern Farmer, and High Country News. Her graphic poetry book, This Party of the Soft Things, is available from Bored Wolves Press.
