While National Arts Honors Society (NAHS) may not yet be well known, it makes a big impact by creating a community of artists.

Many of the benefits of NAHS are comparable to the similarly named National Honors Society. According to the NAHS website, the organization grants students “opportunities for national recognition, scholarships, and connectivity to 58,000+ outstanding art students.”

Although the society has a national membership, according to senior and president of Lincoln’s chapter, Sage Taylor, it’s “organized into different schools; we have four different committees and work to organize different events and workshops for our members.”

The society is made up of a board of four students who, according to Taylor, “organize different art workshops every month so members can join those and learn different art skills that are typically outside of the classes that are taught [at Lincoln].”

The society also helps the artists “do community service and give back to the art community in Portland,” according to the Vice President of Lincoln’s NAHS chapter Evie Babbie, who also takes Ceramics 7-8, The Art of Product Design, and IB Visual Art.

“We have ten hours of community service that we need to do, and that’s a big part of [being in the society].” The community service has to be art related.

“We’ve done a lot with the school. Working at the NAHS booth during the winter art bizarre counts, helping a teacher paint their room counts, making posters for a teacher counts,” says Babbie. “There are other things outside of school like working at Scrap, working to design sets [of plays] if it’s not [already] part of a class, those also count.”

Because of NAHS, senior Anna Tillier, who painted the mermaid mural in Senior Hall, has seen other members “going to a school and teaching elementary school students how to draw and planning a short lesson” and “doing murals.”

However, in the eyes of Tillier, Lincoln’s chapter of the society is more of “a way for artists to encourage other artists to do art.”

“For me, I enjoy having this time that’s a little bit official to basically hang out with friends and do art,” Tillier says. “If you were to tell someone ‘I want to hang out with friends and do art,’ especially to some parent they might [say] ‘that doesn’t sound like you’re being very productive.’ But if you were to say ‘I’m going to do art for this special club I’m in’ it’s a little bit more [acceptable to them].”