Jacob Dimond / jake@yelmonline.com
The Yelm Arts Commission’s goal is to serve as the city’s primary resource to promote the area’s unique community assets through paintings, sculptures, landscape architecture and more.
On Tuesday, Aug. 26, Mayra Pena recapped some of the group’s accomplishments over the last two years.
Pena, the current chair of Yelm Arts Commission, was joined by Commissioners Heidi Haslinger and Karen Conley during the meeting at city hall. She first recalled when the commission unveiled the Centennial Bloom statue at the trailhead of the Yelm-Rainier-Tenino trail in September 2024.
The organization also hosted the inaugural Prairie Days 2024 chalk art contest, which returned for the second consecutive year in 2025. It also initiated the creative district application process, which aims to enrich a geographically defined area of “cultural and economic activity” in Yelm.
Additionally, the Yelm Arts Commission installed the centennial wrap onto an electrical box near the corner of state Route 507 and Yelm Avenue. Pena said the group has been working on installing more of those wraps in 2025.
“We’ve been working with the electrical wraps. We want to wrap all of the electrical boxes … We want to cover up and beautify those,” Pena said. “Because we’re working on a creative arts district, certification through arts walk, we want to do the work of reaching out to the community and having community members participate with the art we want to share.”
She added that Yelm Arts Commission received 63 submissions of art wraps from local artists, noting the participation from the Yelm community was great. The commission was able to narrow down the 63 submissions to just seven pieces from seven different artists.
“We’re working right now with Studio 703 to install those wraps. We expect to have two of them done by the end of the year,” Pena said. “We hope that you support us with this.”
Pena said that in 2025 the second annual chalk art contest grew in size, and participants received a T-shirt themed around the activity. She believes the annual activity helps inspire artists and creatives within the Yelm community. Winners of the second annual event also received gift cards from Yelm Cinemas, and each of the participants received one of the themed shirts.
For the remainder of 2025, Yelm Arts Commission will be working “very strongly” on the application process for a creative district certification through ArtsWA.
“ArtsWA is an award winning program through the state, which helps bring economic development through creativity in our community. We’ve been working on this for about a year, and a big part of it is community outreach to our business folk, to the artists and creatives. We hope to have our application in early next year. That’s what we’re going to be doing for the next four months,” Pena said. “We’re still within our budget, we’re happy, we work well together, and we’re really happy to serve our community in a way we love.”
