Creating an Interdisciplinary Artistic Career

Allyson Arendsee Darakjian ’10 attended Westmont to explore questions of meaning and to work with paint and paper as a studio art major also studying religion. She grew up hearing about the college from her mother, Lyndsey Perino Arendsee ’84, and sensed that art and experience of the divine belonged in the same conversation. After graduating, she studied at the now-defunct New York Center for Art and Media Studies and interned with International Arts Movement, which painter Makoto Fujimura started. His work and writing explore faith, beauty and cultural renewal, and the experience confirmed that art could be a serious, lifelong vocation.

Allyson studied at several graduate institutions where theology, culture and the arts intentionally overlap. At the Brehm Center at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena and later at the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, she examined how images and story shape our sense of God and self. She completed a master’s degree in theology and culture with an emphasis in visual art, adopting an interdisciplinary approach that treats studio practice as a form of theological inquiry rather than simply production. A curatorial assistant and resident artist with the Cascadia Residency through Fuller Seminary Northwest, she helped design programs that invited artists to wrestle with place, spirituality and community.

Her work changed when she and her husband, Gary, settled in Fresno in 2017 and became parents to two sons. Allyson designed stages and props for community theater while navigating the shift to motherhood and the interruptions of early childhood. When Gary lost his job in the restaurant industry during the pandemic, the family converted a backyard shed into a studio. “It was a strange time of young children, the pandemic, being a new kind of body and figuring out what I wanted to do,” she says. She experimented in the studio, where her changing identity as a mother, anxious headlines, scattered crayons and baby toys all belonged. “I put aside my pursuits in ministry and spent more time on art,” she says. She then completed a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Nevada Reno in 2023 emphasizing interdisciplinary arts.

Allyson has since worked as a creative coach and resident artist for the Inhabit Arts Collaborative in Fresno, teaching art part time at Clovis Community College. Her young sons, now 6 and 3, became central collaborators during a recent residency with Parts & Labor in San Antonio, an organization that prioritizes parent-artists. “I’m making collages out of my sons’ drawings, turning them into large paintings to revisit art I made as a child with my greatest creation: my kids,” she says.

“I’ve taken a long road to return to my genesis: making art as a child — now I involve my children in my art."

My current work expresses the feeling of many caregivers: being stretched thin, a bit undone and yet alive to beauty in new, sometimes monotonous ways. These collage paintings hold competing realities of the mess on the floor and the tenderness of young children. I feel something holy happens even in exhaustion.”

Westmont served as a launching place for her exploration, a community that first gave her permission to link rigorous thinking with creative risk. Although many of her artistic shifts occurred later, she locates their roots in conversations with professors and peers. She recently returned to campus for Homecoming to help organize her class’s 15th reunion.

With interests that span performance, abstract intuitive painting, poetry, theater and installation, Allyson will likely keep tracing where divinity and daily life intersect, whether in the studio, at the kitchen table or on stage — but most likely in the everyday moments of mothering.