Meet Emily. Emily Thao, a student at Hmong American Peace Academy, is an artist who designed and pained one of the benches at Green Tech Station.

Inspired by cleanups of nearby Lincoln Creek where the ArtWorks interns pulled plastic trash and other debris from our local waterways, Emily painted the theme of pollution on her bench.

At first, she thought to paint a beach with blue water, but then decided her bench could help tell a story about the process of pollution—on the left of her bench, the scene is clear with blue and green, but on the right the water color is murky where cans and bottles mar the scene.

Emily, whose native tongue is Hmong, was also impressed with a bench painted by another ArtWorks artist. On that bench, the word for water is depicted in several different languages, including Hmong: dej.