About Caroline
Caroline holding Lucy
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caroline{dot}armijo
{at}gmail{dot}com
Expect a Southern accent
Caroline Rutledge Armijo, a mixed-media artist, is a ninth-generation North Carolinian who transplanted to Washington, DC’s Chinatown. Much of her work focuses on family and spirituality. She primarily works in book arts and paper sculpture, but also works in collage, Chinese Brush Painting, graphic design, digital photography, and embroidery. She has studied art a variety of DC institutions, including the Corcoran and Smithsonian, as well as schools such as the San Francisco Center for the Book, Penland School of Crafts, Asheville Bookworks and the University of North Carolina. Her instructors have included Lynn Sures, Ati Gropius Johansen, Katie Dell Kaufman, Susan Joy Share, Paul Johnson, elin o’hara slavick, and Dana Ellyn.
Caroline is the artist-in-residence at Calvary Baptist Church in Downtown Washington, DC. There, she created Telling Stories, a Summer 2008 series of book arts and paper sculptures based on ten stories from the Old Testament. The works were featured each week on the altar during worship. In 2008, she co-led a retreat in New Orleans to help St. Charles Baptist Church discover their needs in their search for a new minister. She was also the featured liturgical artist for Feast: Festival of Word, Table and Image, hosted by the Virginia Baptist Women in Ministry in May 2009.
She has taught a wide range of workshops at the Paper Source, including Wedding Event Invitations, Paper Portfolios, Single Sheet Books, and Gift Wrapping. She has led hands-on activities with numerous non-profits, including The Textile Museum, The Scrap Exchange Creative Reuse Center, the Horizons Club after-school program for DC teens, and Star Light Ministries. To Caroline, everyone is creative. Art should be fun and playful. She loves the power of surprise that art often reveals.
In December of 2003, Caroline received her MA in Liberal Studies from North Carolina State University, focusing on cultural institutions and lifelong learning. For her final project, she wrote a book on art and play, which explores the work of six modern artists as an evolution of each artist’s childhood interests. She also completed a series of coursework on art, psychology and creativity at the Lucy Daniels Foundation in Raleigh, North Carolina in 1997. She received her BA in Journalism with a focus on advertising from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1996, and has worked as a marketing and production specialist, graphic artist, and web designer at several institutions at UNC-Chapel Hill and the state of North Carolina.
Caroline enjoys being an urban mom with her newborn Lucy, cooking with her husband Henry, and practicing Tai Chi in Chinatown. She has a gallery space and working studio at F St. Arts in downtown Washington DC and is a member of the Downtown Artists Coalition.