The Painted Cloud is a collaborative arts initiative led by artists Sarah Conarro (@sarahconarro) and Julian Bozeman (@julianbozeman). Their collaboration began in 2003 when they shared a studio in Athens, GA, and they’ve been working together ever since—contributing to projects through a shared commitment to creativity, community, and collaborative making.
Julian, originally from Atlanta, Georgia, has toured the world as a musician and video artist. His work blends sound, movement, and visuals to create immersive experiences. Sarah, from the foothills of north Georgia, spent nine years in Alaska working on statewide community collaboration projects, centering connective processes.
They share a live-work artist loft in Brooklyn with their two children, Margot (a painter and illustrator) and Ramón (a videographer and animator), along with four cats.
Through The Painted Cloud, Sarah and Julian offer creative experiences that encourage exploration, experimentation, and connection. Whether collaborating with artists, working in schools, community settings, or independent projects, their work is about sparking curiosity, inviting new ways of seeing, and fostering collaborative spaces where everyone has a role.
👉 Learn about their teaching philosophy and approach.
👉 Explore their community partnerships and projects.
👉 Discover how their personal art practices directly inform their teaching.
The Painted Cloud is a registered LLC and an approved W/MBE NYC DOE vendor.
At The Painted Cloud, Sarah and Julian’s personal art practices are not separate from their teaching — they are essential to it.
As artists and educators, we make no distinction between our personal practices and our work with young artists—each informs and transforms the other. Teaching, for us, is not a static act of instruction, but a shared, emergent process of making, listening, and exchange.
Our classrooms are spaces of participatory inquiry, where materials, ideas, and relationships are approached with vulnerability, curiosity, and reflection. We don’t arrive with answers—we arrive with tools, intentions, and questions that invite open-ended exploration.
We offer our conceptual tools and processes—our prompts, questions, and visual metaphors—as open invitations. Young artists bring their own insights, shaped by a beginner’s mind: unfiltered perception, emotional clarity, and the courage to follow instinct.
What emerges is not a single narrative, but a shared landscape of experience.
In our own art, we work with forms like assemblage, collage, installation, and performance to explore themes like vulnerability, impermanence, collective memory, transformation, and shared human experience—not as abstractions, but as traces that remain. We are especially drawn to materials and moments that hold evidence of time, interaction, and fragility—those that invite contemplation or spark connection.
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Whether it’s the shimmer of a surface, the rhythm of repeated forms, or the fleeting nature of a fire-lit performance, we are attuned to the ways meaning can be held and released. And when something moves us—visually, conceptually, emotionally— our first thought is: How can young artists enter this conversation? How might they reshape it in their own terms?
The projects you’ll see here—side by side—show how these inquiries come to life: professional works created through our personal practices placed alongside student projects that explore parallel themes or processes. These pairings are not about replication, but resonance.
Through The Painted Cloud’s Consider Community Concepts™ and a commitment to accessibility and co-authorship, we create porous structures of awareness—spaces where agency, discomfort, awe, and shared vulnerability can coexist. In teaching, we are always also making. And in collaboration, we are always also being remade.
Ultimately, we don’t teach because we have something to give—we teach because we are in constant dialogue. With our own practices. With the questions and thresholds young artists bring. With the layered beauty of shared inquiry, and with the invitation to be changed in return.
We don’t see teaching as the transfer of knowledge, but as an act of sustained presence in the space of co-creation. That dialogue, the exchange, the experience is the gift.
Sarah led a permanent mural project in the open-air gym of Juneau’s youth center with teen collaborators. The youth version, made on the ground and raised as a photo backdrop, shared the same focus: collective authorship at community scale.
This participatory installation invites individuals to surrender control through gesture, sound, and projection, creating a collective experience of intuitive, non-decision-based action.
The first-ever rendition (right), created with students, included a process to write a song inspired by the experience—choosing the rhythm and stillness of water as their theme. The second was an adult version, complete with the water song, at the Spring Break Art Show in NYC.
An adult workshop where participants gather to eat, write, unmake, and mail letters—engaging in connection through small, inconsequential decisions.
The Painted Cloud iteration included inviting young artists to create and mail cut-paper cards to family. Both versions explore how tactile, low-stakes making can foster presence and relational care.
Gary Beaver collaborated with Bozeman to merge Yup’ik song and electronic sound, rooted in storytelling and cultural exchange.
At The Painted Cloud, Beaver taught traditional Yup’ik music to children, echoing the same themes of shared voice and intergenerational connection.
Julian and his team (VML) create immersive video feedback environments with sound-responsive visuals.
At The Painted Cloud, students made sculptures that activated a collaborative video piece—blurring the lines between installation, technology, and youth-led form.
