Home: CUE Teen Collective 2017-18

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HOME an exhibition by the CUE Teen Collective May 25 — 31, 2018

Faye Arranz Martine Arranz Jason Bacalla Benjamin Ciufo Katrina Dydzuhn Miriam Entin-Bell Gio Fabre Gia Gambrell Nina (Al) Gatta

Petvy Li Mezi Mumtahina Nabila Crystal Robertson Angelica Ruano Sophia Schupp David Winner Sterling Ellen Toeroek Xuduan You

Co-curated by Amanda Adams-Louis and Sonja John with the help of student curator Mumtahina Nabila

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Home is the inaugural exhibition of the CUE Teen Collective, a free after school program designed for NYC high school students interested in art careers. Participants met once per week from October through May to investigate the contemporary art world, develop professional skills, and produce a group exhibition in CUE’s gallery space. The CUE Teen Collective aims to cultivate teens’ personal artistic voices and to expand their notions of what art can be and how artists function within the world today. We pay particular attention to collaboration, non-traditional art and artists, and hybrid career paths.

Through field trips, engagement with CUE’s exhibiting artists, and conversations with art professionals, participants are offered unique access to NYC’s art world.

The teachers for the 2017-2018 season of the CUE Teen Collective were Amanda Adams-Louis, Deepti Menon, and Sonja John.

ABOUT CUE CUE Art Foundation is a dynamic visual arts center dedicated to creating essential career and educational opportunities for emerging and under-recognized artists of all ages.

Through exhibitions, arts education, and public programs, CUE provides artists and audiences with sustaining and meaningful experiences and resources.

CUE carries out its mission through its core programs, which include solo exhibitions for emerging and under-recognized artists; an annual fellowship for an emerging curator; mentorship and publication opportunities for emerging writers; professional development workshops for practicing artists; and arts education intensives for high school students.

These programs make a profound difference in the lives of the students and artists who participate. Alumni have gone on to achieve such successes as museum shows, reviews in prominent publications, residencies, awards and scholarships, and commercial gallery representation. CUE is one of the few New York City arts organizations offering such transformative services to visual artists, providing them with the tools and resources needed to start and sustain a successful career as an artist.

CUE was founded in 2002 by a group of visionary and entrepreneurial art enthusiasts who wanted to showcase a wide range of incredible artwork from across the country.

Ever since, CUE’s founders have remained dedicated to supporting artists at all stages of their careers.

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CUE Teen Collective and Home “We are now witnessing the highest levels of displacement on rec​ord. An unprecedented 68.5 million people around the world have been forced from home. Among them are nearly 25.4 million refugees, over half of whom are under the age of 18. There are also an estimated 10 million stateless people who have been denied a nationality and access to basic rights such as education, healthcare, employment and freedom of movement.”

- 2017 Global Displacement Statistics copied fr​om the United Nations High

Commissioner for Refugees (U​NHCR) In light of the current geo-political climate where nearly 70 million people have been displaced from their home countries and continents and forced to recreate home elsewhere because their homelands are no longer safe1; 1,475 unaccompanied children are residing in government holding facilities, living in political limbo due to the current administration’s decision to enforce the “zero tolerance” policy2; and 10 million people worldwide are unable to physically relocate themselves to a new homeland because they do not have a passport from a “home country”3; it is imperative to reflect and ask ourselves these five questions: 1.

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Where is my home?

What is the significance of my home and indigenous culture to me?

When do my historical or legal ties to my homeland begin?

Which relationships, objects or animals make me feel at home?

Why am I able to remain at home?

Over the past six months, 18 youth artists working together in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, New York have been grappling with these questions and others while developing their artistic practices and producing a dynamic, themed exhibition. These 18 creative young people are members of the CUE Teen Collective (CTC). CTC is a year-long, after school residency program housed at the CUE Art Foundation for youth ages 15-18 interested in attending art school and/or pursuing careers in the visual arts. The CUE Teen Collective spent the fall of 2017 visiting cultural institutions, exhibitions, and a festival; meeting art industry professionals; and studying the inner workings of the NYC fine art world. During the 2017-18 winter season, the CUE Teens developed their ideas for the exhibit while learning about the unseen labor behind creating and maintaining an artistic practice in an urban metropolis. Between February and May of 2018, CTC members developed the artwork reproduced in this catalogue.

For their final exhibition, Home, CTC artists used eight different mediums to elucidate their personal definitions of the word “home.” The collective brainstormed and decided 6

Lead Educator, Amanda Adams-Louis and Assistant Educator, Sonja John help students during installation

upon using the concept of home as the impetus and title for their final exhibition, as well as conceived of the five subthemes to contextualize their diverse notions of home.

The subthemes are: objects we associate with home; relationships that comfort and empower us at home; the outdoor natural places or indoor man-made spaces that we call home; emotions and/or feelings we express around or about home; and memories and/or nostalgia that we possess in regards to our childhood homes.

All of the artists still live with their parents and guardians throughout the boroughs of New York City. Some artists take a more concrete geographic approach that showcases places that feel like home to them, while other artists explore the more abstract meanings of home, examining the sacred comfort and private feelings that they associate with their homes. Some of the artwork featured in Home explores the identities that arise from a shared space, whether it be sharing an apartment with siblings and parents or sharing your life with your friends and finding a piece of Home in moments with them.

-Amanda Adams-Louis, CUE Teen Collective Lead Educator and co-curator of Home 1 2017 Global Displacement Statistics from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees or (UNHCR) Figures at a Glance page.

2 Miriam Valverde, “Sorting out the facts about nearly 1,500 lost children, Trump family separation policy, � May 29th, 2018.

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2017 Global Displacement Statistics from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees or (UNHCR)

Figures at a Glance page.

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Statement from the CUE Teen Collective Student Curator Growing up and going to school in Queens, I felt that the “art world” was a distant creature who I, a teenager, could not interact with. I feel now that I was sheltered, but the CUE Teen Collective introduced me to the gallery scene in Chelsea as well as a world of individuals and institutions in the art world that furthered my interest to work in the art world and showed me opportunities to get my feet in the door. The CUE Teen Collective was an amazing program and a very rewarding experience that sharpened my goals as an artist as well as an art student. This program also introduced me to many talented artists and admirable people in the art world who inspire me as an artist as well as a person deeply interested in curating or working in galleries.

On the first day of the program, I remember all the staff and the arts educators who work in the gallery told us how they came to be in the art world. Their journeys and well as the journeys of the guests in the program throughout the year inspired me to be a driven individual because I wanted to work around these individuals in the art world.

The second class was when I got to talk to the students in the program who are so talented and inspiring. Through the months in the program, I got to see their impressive sketchbooks and learn more about their art process, ideals, and artistic preferences.

Once, we went on a gallery crawl (led by Art Historian Halima Taha) and visited an exhibition with giant paintings that were very flat and some of the students did not like them because the paintings did not look traditional; there were too many brushstrokes and not enough depth. However, it wasn’t contemporary works they disliked because the same students, in another exhibition, were very moved by these large, otherworldly sculptures we saw. Some of the sculptures looked like furniture, some like lamps, others like dressers. The exhibition floor was covered in dirt and the room was dark and overcrowded with viewers, and also the sculptures themselves. The artists in the two galleries were very different but both unconventional. I thought it was very interesting to see the different reactions to contemporary works.

The fall and winter semester was an explosion of information about the art world, from artists whose works were on display at CUE, art historians, and exhibitions around Chelsea as well as downtown. In November, we went to see Barbara Kruger’s Untitled (The Drop), which was a very good example of today’s conceptual art that completely omits the traditional definition of art. While controversial, the performance was very insightful as to how limitless the mediums are to explore a concept. All of this expanded my definition of art and allowed me to create the multi-media installation I showed for the exhibition Home.

Working on the art for the exhibition, I changed my idea a lot and the exhibition did not feel real until the day of the opening. Most of us made a lot of the work in the CUE gallery during the spring semester. The exhibition right before ours had fragile, 8

unframed photographs, but the students were making sculptures, paintings on board and on canvas, and paintings that had 3D components to them. This juxtaposition of mediums meant that only after installing Home did the show come alive. In the curation of the exhibition, the students were grouped by the ideas they explored. Some artists explored their definition of home as place, some illustrated or photographed the people and places that defined their home, and others explored memories or objects that they relate to the simple yet complex word “home.”

The theme of “home” is such a personal subject matter that it felt very vulnerable to look at some of the artworks; each piece a revelation of the artist in some ways, from their childhood memories of home to their journey as artists and their comfort space that they consider “home.” Some of the art pieces were thought-provoking and pushed the definition of home, such as David Sterling’s Guardian series, where he explored his definition of home as something to protect; and Miriam Entin-Bell’s poem and painting that speaks of New York by taking into account the history of ownership of the land that we now live on. I could go on about every person in the gallery and how amazing their artworks were and how much I had learned from them as artists.

My installation in the exhibition, Home in a Bookcase, was a breakthrough for me as an artist. I started with creating a collage of places in NYC that remind me of home. Then I moved on to creating small books to use narrative in my story of home, both as I knew it growing up in Bangladesh and my home now in NYC. The more I thought about home in a less concrete sense (location, objects) and explored the abstract perspectives of home, I found that home, for me, is who you are, not the place you live in. People’s apartments and houses are mere reflections of themselves, and I wanted to create an art piece reflecting who I was and what I grew up with. If I was working in school instead of a gallery, I would not have worked outside of 2D paper, but with the freedom of working like a professional artist in a gallery, I was given a bookshelf and allowed to make a multimedia installation using books from my home. I had Bangla books from my childhood that my mom still owns, I added books I would like to read in the future, and some of my favorite novels from over the years. It was everything I wanted it to be and more, from the ideas that I got to display to the positive feedback I got from everyone who interacted with the installation. Some people really responded to the little notes I left in some of my favorite books on yellow sticky notes. Some people responded to the conversation of home as languages you speak and the multitude of dialogues about home. I am really proud of the work I got to do in this exhibition, and am forever thankful to the CUE Teen Collective for giving me insight into the art world that I want to work in as well as insight into my own art process.

-Mumtahina Nabila, CUE Teen Collective artist and student curator 9

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Faye Arranz

Martine Arranz

Jason Bacalla

Gio Fabre

Gia Gambrell

Nina (Al) Gatta

Crystal Robertson

Angelica Ruano

Sophia Schupp

Benjamin Ciufo

Katrina Dydzuhn

Miriam Entin-Bell

Petvy Li

Mezi

Mumtahina Nabila

David Winner Sterling

Ellen Toeroek

Xuduan You

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Faye Arranz The Elegant Scrapbook (2017-2018)

Accordion book of photographs and laser print photographs on BFK Rives ARTIST STATEMENT The Elegant Scrapbook exhibits my perception of home, where there never is a linear pattern nor a uniform idea. It is as if everyone was born with a different pair of glasses. One may have a pair tinted with fire and rage, while another may be calm and composed. We are blind to these invisible glasses, only knowing our own. Through photography, for a moment, I am able to capture a glimpse of home through my own pair and exhibit it to others.

To display my complex perception, I have bound my photographs on BFK Rives paper in an accordion style book binding. By using this style, I am able to show the complicated idea of home, always having a page vary in angle.

For the photographs on the wall, I’ve also printed and bound the prints onto BFK Rives paper, blowing them up so people are able to have a closer look. By doing so, it portrays the moments that are prominent in my home that play large roles in my life.

ARTIST BIO Faye Arranz’s artistic practice originates from her home life in Brooklyn, NY, where all her family members are either artists or designers. Faye is an honor student attending LaGuardia High School, concentrating on visual arts. She has attended classes at the Brooklyn Museum, Pratt Institute, and summer design camp at Cooper Hewitt Museum.

This past summer she worked as a Teen Intern through the Children’s Museum of the Arts, in Manhattan and on Governors Island. At CMA she participated in a fence design project in collaboration with Smorgasburg and Architecture Plus Information (A+I). During the project she was taught the Rhino 3-D modeling program plug-in, Grasshopper, to generate patterns that were then woven into a fence at the installation located at Smorg Square, on 76 Varick Street at Canal Street.

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Martine Arranz This is My Happy Place (2018) Relief prints on kozo paper ARTIST STATEMENT Home is free, This is My Happy Place.

The second I open up the door, I am free from the daily stress.

I am instantly relaxed.

Home is a colorful mess,

everywhere I look is a new color.

Fashion is my tone,

dressing up is my pride.

I strut my stuff with the clothes

and best makeup I’ve gotten over time.

This is My Happy Place, this is my home.

My dress, This is My Happy Place, is printed on kozo paper using plants I harvested

from my garden, and shaped into fashion to expressed my love for home where I find comfort.

ARTIST BIO

Martine Arranz is a native Brooklynite who comes from a family of artists. She currently is a 10th grade student at LaGuardia High School in the Visual Arts program. Since

elementary school, she has been taking Saturday classes at the Brooklyn Museum, Pratt Institute, and the Cooper Hewitt Museum day camp, DesignPrep. Since 2010, she has been a teaching assistant for the artist PD Packard, teaching workshops on Japanese Decorative Papermaking, Chinese Brush Painting and the Ukrainian egg decorating

method called Pysanky in NYC public schools and in Philadelphia. This past summer, Martine worked as a Teen Intern for the Children’s Museum of the Arts, in Manhattan

where she assisted the teaching artists on week-long camps during their Summer Art Colony on Governors Island.

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Jason Bacalla Solace (2018)

Digital color photographs on Kodak Endura matte paper ARTIST STATEMENT This portrait series, titled Solace, intends to give the subject added character which is expressed through the place they feel most comfortable. The three-by-three grid

arrangement on the wall allows me to display a sort of organized clutter seen in the

series as a whole. It gives it a sense of collectivity but does not deprive each portrait’s

individuality. I aim to showcase the uniqueness of each person through their expression and stance in their environment. I draw inspiration from Annie Leibovitz for her unique poses and Brandon Stanton for his storytelling through images in his Humans of New

York series. I try to re-define my portraits by combining the styles of my influences and by bringing the background into focus, which in turn defines the person’s identity and personality.

ARTIST BIO Jason Bacalla is a native New Yorker raised in Queens and is currently a sophomore at

Townsend Harris High School, which focuses on the Humanities. He has been interested in the arts since middle school, and was titled Art Director for the school newspaper. He

has since picked up digital photography as first a hobby, but now a passion. He chooses to define the subject of his photos through their surroundings, but he continues to

explore different styles and methods of capturing the moments left by the world. Aside

from this, he busies himself with an array of extracurricular activities such as playing the trumpet for eight years, the piano for four years, practicing mixed martial arts for eight

years, and sports like track and field and tennis. He strives to bring his many worlds into one collective picture that defines his life now.

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Benjamin Ciufo Home (2018) Clay sculptures

ARTIST STATEMENT This piece, named Home, is created by Benjamin Ciufo. This piece was created with the idea of “home” in mind, more specifically encapsulating what the artist’s idea of home is. To Benjamin, he thought of how whenever he comes home, he slowly morphs into

quite a lazy slob, only awakening from his slumber to feed himself or to relieve himself,

just to later indulge in unproductive activities, such as watching YouTube or complaining about how much homework he has and how school doesn’t provide him enough time to do what he wants, as shown in the first shell. The second shell signifies the artist’s

crippling addiction to his phone, and the third shell depicts the artist’s imagination and what’s going on in his mind. The miniature person is the artist’s worries and concerns, overshadowed whenever the artist returns home.

ARTIST BIO Benjamin Ciufo is an artist born in Manhattan, New York. He is 16 years old and currently attending Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts. He has been drawing ever since his childhood, and aspires to pursue an artistic career in the

future. He hopes that one day he can support himself from his own creative endeavors.

His art style is largely influenced by childhood cartoons such as Adventure Time, Regular Show, and many others. In this exhibition, he took on the role of a sculptor and his work is made up of clay.

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Katrina Dydzuhn feelings from behind the lens (2018)

Digital color manipulated photographs on matte photo paper ARTIST STATEMENT Art to me is about color and emotion. The two are often interrelated. I wanted to explore that relationship. Different colors mean different things to different people. Different

colors mean different things to the same person, when given different circumstances.

I feel passionately about everything. I’m passionately happy, passionately sad,

passionately angry. When I fall in and out of love, I do so passionately. I get attached

easily, which, to the hindrance of my emotional stability, I often do to the wrong people.

In this series, I showcase those who were, or are, my home. These people are those who have meant the world to me at one point or another. Some are still my universe. Some,

are universes I’m trying to forget. How can you tell the difference? The colors will tell you which.

ARTIST BIO Katrina Dydzuhn is a photographer in New York City. Born and raised in Rockaway

Beach, she relates to the ocean deeply and often wonders if she’s actually a fish. A

sophomore at Townsend Harris studying the humanities, she uses photography as

an escape from the stress school brings. She specifically likes portraits, but also really

enjoys shooting cityscapes. Alongside CUE, she’s currently the photography editor for

the school’s newspaper, member of her school’s wrestling team, as well as the lead set designer for the school’s two plays.

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Miriam Entin-Bell Portal (2018)

Acrylic on canvas and sound recording ARTIST STATEMENT For the past seven years, I have been attending an all-girls sleepaway camp in Vermont

that fosters female empowerment and a love for the outdoors. As part of the leadership program they offer, the camp sends small groups of girls across the world to open

their hearts and minds to other peoples and places. Through this program, I stayed on the Navajo Nation, in Arizona, for two weeks with a group of five girls and two

incredibly open, honest, and kind middle-aged Navajo women. They taught us about

their culture and their history. They introduced us to their grandmothers, their spouses, their children. They opened up their hearts and their homes. In the afternoons, we

would get into their car and they would turn off the highway onto tiny dirt roads and

drive and drive through the desert until we reached beautiful canyons, or mountains of

boulders, or incredible rock formations. There was unfathomable beauty in these rocks: untouched by tourists, impossible to find online, often covered in ancient glyphs. At

each stop, they would tell us the story of the Navajo people who had lived, hunted, or

traded here long ago. Hearing their stories of stolen land, abuse, and displacement, my heart swelled in appreciation and amazement at the resilience of these women, their

people, these rocks, and this land. Land that belonged to someone, land that has been stolen, land that has been abused, land that has been returned, and land that never really belonged to anyone. Thinking about all of these ancient rocks on even more

ancient land, I suddenly felt more at home in myself and the world than I ever have

before. I live in a tiny apartment squeezed into chaotic, beautiful, and busy Brooklyn.

The desert is something completely different. This circular painting strives to emulate that extreme clarity and wonder that I was filled with looking at all of these rocks and

canyons and the respect the Navajo women had for their land. The desert that reached out from these rocks and stretched on as far as I could see was wonderful; it ran into

itself in an ocean of yellow and red and pink and brilliant orange, just as the waves of

rocks I painted run into each other. In my poems, I strive to add my own voice into the

rocks as this trip was filled with the voices of other women narrating the rocks. This trip was one of being grounded and oriented in yourself and the land you are on. These

poems and this painting are meant to be a “portal� into the grounding and clarity that the desert and this trip provided me.

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ARTIST BIO Miriam Entin-Bell was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, moved to New York City when she was two, and is currently a junior at Bard High School Early College, Queens. She attended an arts-focused middle school, has taken classes at Pratt College, and paints and writes poetry on her roof in Brooklyn, New York. She considers New England and all mountains everywhere to be her home and strives to create art that emulates the clarity, tranquility, and depth of thought that these spaces create for her. She has been writing a poem every day in 2018 and wants to explore the intersection between painting and poetry. Her future will undoubtedly be filled with painting outside, poems written late at night, notebooks filled with sketches, and art in all forms that send thoughtful and profound messages

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Gio Fabre MTV, welcome to my crib (2018) Snapchat collage photo prints

ARTIST STATEMENT Social media and Snapchat is a collective experience - it is almost a home for some.

Nearly everyone uses it, whether by posting, watching other people’s snaps, both, or

even just having an account. Those who may call it home would be the people who put

their lives on it *cough* likeDjKhaled *cough*. The choice to use Snapchat, as opposed to other social media platforms, was a decision made in light of the vast number of

tools available to create on Snapchat along with its cultural significance. The process of creating this work was a vital proponent to the integrity of the piece. Using something as common —and what we might call “mundane”— as Snapchat to create the work speaks to the ability of the audience to identify with the work.

When making the work I thought of it as a reflection of myself and my thoughts printed in a two-dimensional form.

Home can be interpreted in whatever way one wants to interpret it; whether it be in the things you use, the space around your body, or the space in your mind.

ARTIST BIO Gio Fabre was born and raised in Brooklyn and attends Manhattan Hunter Science

High School. She has exhibited work in a number of spaces, like the Studio Museum in Harlem, the New Museum, NYU Steinhardt, and most recently Smack Mellon.

As part of New York’s vibrant youth with experience in the professional art world, Gio

delivers authentic messages through a personal lens time and time again: putting out semi-crude, humorous, and honest work each and every time.

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Gia Gambrell A Better Time (2018)

Oil, mixed media, and wire on canvas ARTIST STATEMENT When I hear the word home, I don’t think of a specific place but of happy memories

from when I was little. The nostalgia I get from remembering my favorite foods, things my parents and family used to do with me, and all the wonder of being a child brings a warm feeling over me and I can’t help but smile. That warm, bright feeling of being 5 years old and running around without a care in the world? That’s what I’m trying to replicate with this series, titled A Better Time. When you’re little, the world is big and

bright and every day is full of something new. By using bright colors, mixed media, and imaginative views of everyday experiences, I aim to allow the viewer to see through the eyes of a kid and bring back some fun memories of their own.

ARTIST BIO Born in 2001 on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Gia Gambrell is a native New

Yorker. She has always been interested in art because it gives her a fun and creative

way to express herself through a number of mediums. In middle school, Gia made the

decision to work on her art skills by tracing images online, drawing with her friends, and attending summer programs such as the Summer Arts Institute to build up a portfolio that would eventually land her a spot in LaGuardia High School. Usually Gia enjoys

drawing in a realistic, semi-realistic, or cartoonish style, but recently realistic painting

has caught her eye. She primarily works in portraiture, although there are occasional

pieces that include political and/or social commentary. Most of her work is just art made for creative expression and personal fun. Gia is a rising senior at LaGuardia High School with a concentration in visual arts. After high school Gia hopes to attend art school and study animation as well as pursue a career in animation or communication design.

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Nina (Al) Gatta Untitled (2018) Acrylic on canvas

ARTIST STATEMENT There is a feeling you can only experience at the end of spring and first bits of summer, at dusk when the sun hasn’t quite set and the air is comfortably warm and the cicadas are just starting to hum in the trees. The feeling you get after a long day of being out, and finally hopping off the bus just in time to catch a glimpse of the clouds towering over the city. That feeling is very much a threedimensional experience that requires a two-dimensional trap to preserve it.

I abstract landscapes to capture the full experience. The sights can be captured in any old painting, but for an image to show the feeling of a moment, of a place, is a different sort of creation. I believe that painting shouldn’t be about whether or not you have replicated the sights exactly, but instead about if you replicated the feeling exactly. My pieces for this show are about replicating the feeling of my home. My home is Queens. Long Island. New York State as a whole.

Wherever your home may be, remember that home is not where you live.

Home is not where you grew up. Home is where you feel at peace. Where you can let go.

ARTIST BIO Nina (Al) is a 16-year-old native New Yorker who is currently attending Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts. She currently lives in Queens with her parents and three brothers. Nina is hoping to pursue a career in illustration after high school and plans on attending college to help achieve that goal. She became interested in art at the end of middle school, and since then has experimented with ink, gouache, and stone carving.

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Petvy Li Emotional Boxes (2018)

Acrylic on cardboard, drawing, mixed media ARTIST STATEMENT “Happiness depends upon ourselves.” As I was looking at inspirational quotes online, I came upon this one by Aristotle and decided I wanted to create a piece that involves the idea of happiness. I am also fascinated by human emotions and I frequently wonder why people feel the way they do. To me, emotions are like water because it’s easy for a person to change their mood just like it’s easy to change the flavor of water. If one adds sugar to water, it makes it sweeter. but if one adds tea leaves, it makes it bitter. Similarly, a person can change a smiling face to a frowning face easily.

The piece that I created, Emotional Boxes, depicts some of the emotions that a person feels through life. The seven emotions that I decided to show are love, happiness, envy, greed, loneliness, doubt, and fear. In order to show these emotions, I created a character called Wing to document her growth from a baby to a teenager. In the beginning, Wing experiences love and happiness from family and friends around her.

As she grows up, she realizes that life isn’t just fun and games. She becomes envious of other people, either for their riches, appearance, or talents, and desires more superficial things to make herself feel “full,” but she can never get enough. She can have all the tangible products in the world, but her intangible part, her heart, is empty because of loneliness. As she matures into a teenager, another obstacle she has to face is the battle between herself and her parents. Her goals in life are different from what her parents set for her, so she doubts herself and wonders if she should do what she wants or follow her parents’ footsteps. Deep down, she fears that she will disappoint her parents and that her dreams will fail her. However, I don’t want Wing to stay in the dark forever, so I sent in her younger self to remind her of the innocence, carefreeness, and happiness she felt when she was young before learning the harsh reality of life. I decided to end my piece with a music box playing “Always With Me,” because that song made me feel better when I was feeling down about myself, so I hope that the viewers will also feel better after listening to it.

It was an arduous process making this work, especially the cardboard boxes. The reason why I used cardboard is because of its abundance. People usually throw away cardboard boxes after unpacking what’s inside, and I think it’s a shame that they don’t see the beauty in cardboard. Therefore, I wanted to show that anything can become beautiful if a person puts some effort into it, and this ties back to my message of being 48

happy by finding the good in things around oneself. The big cardboard boxes I made represent a person and the emotions one “houses” inside oneself, in which I showed by drawings. From the idiom “stop and smell the roses” meaning to enjoy the beauty of life, I used flowers as a theme for the decorations of the box so each painted flower correlates to the emotions of each box. It wasn’t easy making this piece, but after the arduous journey, I’m left with a beautiful work. Likewise, life isn’t easy but if you learn to enjoy the good with the bad and to let go of certain things, you will find the beauty in life because “happiness depends upon ourselves.”

ARTIST BIO Petvy Li is an artist that likes experimenting with different kinds of art styles and mediums. She lived in Guangzhou, China for four years so some of her works contain Asian elements. As an introvert, she likes expressing her ideas through art, mostly concerning philosophical ideas. In her free time, she enjoys drawing cartoon and anime while listening to music. As an artist, she hopes to influence and inspire people.

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Mezi La Fille En Bleu (The Girl in Blue) (2018)

Watercolor and colored pencil on Grana Fina cold pressed 100% cotton watercolor paper ARTIST STATEMENT La Fille en Bleu is the manifestation of what my definition of home has come to be at this exact moment. The fluidity of her body in both parts represent how one’s meaning of the word home changes with factors such as age and experience, and displays how my own definition is ever changing with time. Her skin color is blue because she is calm and at peace, but it’s also blue because she is sad. Sad to leave home, sad to be home, sad to have a home and sad to be homeless. Sad in every sense of the word. Her tranquility is symbolized by her sleep, and her true self, is never revealed because her eyes, the windows to the soul, are never shown. La Fille en Bleu is in some sense me, but also an ambiguous definition for all, representing how indefinite home can be and mean. I struggled a lot when thinking of a way to represent home, so I decided to portray that struggle along with some definite meanings to create a blend of the two making the subject of my artwork both me and everybody else.

ARTIST BIO My name is Ashley Mezi and I am an eleventh grader attending The Scholars’ Academy to graduate in 2019. My focus is in fine arts, though my range in medium is broad. I was born in Far Rockaway in August of 2001 and have lived in South Ozone Park, Queens since.

My interest in art started due to my father’s previous occupation as a wood sculptor and my older sister’s interest in art during her high school years. What I love most about art was its ability to make time fly as I was completely immersed in what I was doing.

I love to learn and expand my skill and knowledge as much as possible. I developed my skills mainly through observation, repeated practice, and the holy grail that is the 52

internet, having no formal education in art until the sixth grade. I have participated in art programs outside of school, one being the Summer Arts Institute held yearly at Frank Sinatra High School in Astoria, NY. I enjoy making art because it expresses what cannot be said in words, or what I do not have the courage to say. Words and sentences are only the tip of the iceberg of communication, and art shows that. In my years of art-making I have found that I am particularly good at observation and still lives, being a people-watcher by nature. I intend to pursue a career in art, making that the focal point of my upcoming college years.

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Mumtahina Nabila Home in a Bookcase (2018) Multi-media installation ARTIST STATEMENT Home in a Bookcase is an interactive installation containing books from Nabila’s home.

Like a bookstore, where you can peek into the books, the viewer is encouraged to pick up the books on the two middle shelves. We ask you treat the books with respect and put them back in their place. All the books have a post-it inside of the cover that talks

about the artist’s relationship to the book. In this installation, Nabila wanted to look into the thinly veiled ideas that are expressed of one’s identity through the languages in

their home. The artist explored the identities that make up her home using books from her home as a medium. Nabila reveals herself through the careful collection of books

that includes novels she loves, Bangla books that belong to her or her mother, journals from childhood, textbooks, and her Qur’an. Two of the books,

(Bangladesh)

and New York, are chapbooks that Nabila has made to explore the language difference and show the people from her childhood in Bangladesh and her home now. Home in a

Bookcase is the idea that a home is not just a geographic place or a moment in time, it is a collection of things that shape who you are.

ARTIST BIO Born on 08/01/01 in Jessore, Bangladesh, Mumtahina Nabila is a working artist. At the age of nine, she moved to Elmhurst, Queens, and she now lives in Manhattan with her

parents and two older brothers. Currently, she is a junior at Frank Sinatra High School of the Arts. She works with illustration and poetry, mostly using watercolor, markers, and pens. Nabila also makes zines and paints in her spare time. Nabila has participated in exhibitions at Socrates Sculpture Park, Cooper Union, and Frank Sinatra High School of the Arts. During the 2017-2018 school year, she participated in the Cooper Union Saturday program for Sound Comp and found a hobby in editing video as well as

sound/music. Recently, Nabila has received awards for two commissioned pieces for the Neuberger Berman Library Project. In this exhibition, she assisted in curating and co-

wrote the exhibition statement. In the summer of 2018, Nabila is attending the Cooper Union Summer Intensive on a scholarship.

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Crystal Robertson Headspace (2018)

Watercolor on paper, acrylic on canvas, and mixed-media collage ARTIST STATEMENT Home can be anywhere, but it can also be a feeling, elusive and unfathomable, almost

impossible to describe. I tried to capture these feelings of comfort within my art. At first, you may hate your house, but it would do you well to find some form of home. It could

be a place with an energy that makes us feel comfortable in our environment, that tailors to our personal taste and desires. In my first painting (Spaces) I depict scenery that gives me a sense of feeling at home.

Home could be yourself, in your own body and personal space. Our headspace should be comfortable, and we should be at home within ourselves. My second

painting (headspace) is a representation of that, as it represents a relaxed individual

that is deeply entrenched in their ideas and feelings. The embellished forehead area emphasizes their brain as the control area of such thoughts and emotions. It’s their primary home in which they exist.

Or you could also feel at one with the earth and people around you, knowing we are all intertwined, our common ground being this planet. Things that may seem to have no

connection are all forced to interact with each other, whether for a positive or negative outcome. I chose to represent this with a collage in my last piece (all is one) because you can take pictures from different places and make them work together as one.

ARTIST BIO Crystal is a 16-year-old New Yorker who resides in Brooklyn and is currently

homeschooled. She enjoys art and hopes to include art in her career path. She became interested in art around 8th grade. Her interest was originally peaked by her love

of anime, such as Fullmetal Alchemist and Hunter x Hunter. Eventually, she began

to expand into realistic drawing and painting, and developed an appreciation for

different artists and interdisciplinary art styles. Her desire to improve her skill moved

her to sign up for teen art programs such as the CUE Teen Collective and the Cooper

Union Saturday programs. Art will always be a part of her life, and she looks forward to expanding her skill set as well as experimenting with different styles and mediums.

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Angelica Ruano Brillas (2018)

Acrylic on canvas ARTIST STATEMENT The two paintings in my series Brillas fall under the idea of “home.” When you think

of the word home, a lot of places can come to mind, but it can also be categorized as a feeling you get where you just feel “right at home.” This series is what objects and

memories give me that feeling. I developed the works in my series while listening to the same song, “Brillas,” by Leon Larregui. This song influenced my series because it gives me a feeling of tranquility, like the feeling of home would give. The titles of the two

paintings are parts of lyrics from that same song. The flower background is a highlight

in both paintings to sort of tie them together; the color in the flowers are also meant to

show the mood the painting is supposed to give off. “Abrazo de Luna” was painted with reference to a photograph of a cat named Tanya from the cat shelter, Ollie’s Place, that I volunteer at. The color in this painting is dull, but the pink undertone of the white fur

gives off a sweet feeling. Cats make me feel a sweet nurturing way and give me a sense of safety, which is why its English translation is roughly “hug from the moon,” because

the moon is like a blanket of soft overlooking. “Juntos Entre Pestanas” combines designs from The Yellow Submarine cover from The Beatles. When I was younger The Beatles

had a huge part in my continuance in pursuing the art field. It really showed me all that art could be, so I decided to include this. The Beatles gave me a shelter of sorts from

obstacles I faced throughout childhood and gave me happiness. The bright and pastel colors used in this painting convey love, joy and carelessness as well.

ARTIST BIO Angelica Maria Ruano was born in the Bronx, New York in 2001, then her family moved to Leesburg, Virginia where she lived in almost a surreal forest land for 7 years. Once she moved back to New York she started to show an interest in creating art. It really

peaked in her middle school art classes, where her teacher encouraged her to pursue drawing and painting. Ever since she was young she was interested in nature and it

greatly influences her artwork. Angelica’s lifelong interest in nature started from living in a log cabin up on a hill, where every time you looked out the window you could

spot a doe and her fawn, or catch some dragonflies in the field. The tranquility and

beauty of nature inspires her because of the raw awe it gives off. Currently, she attends 64

Academy of Medical Technology as an early graduate, skipping junior year straight

into senior year. In the fall of 2018, she will be starting her freshman year at the College of Environmental Science and Forestry affiliated with Syracuse University as a wildlife

biology major. In her spare time she volunteers at a cat shelter named Ollie’s Place on East 9th street. Angelica’s future ambitions are to combine her research in her career

as a wildlife biologist with her artistic practice. Sketching and painting are her primary mediums and main focus, because the tactile nature of both artistic processes and

the traditional feel of making pieces give her a sense of peace. Some of Angelica’s

achievements include an award in Mock Trial, having honors classes in English and U.S. History, and recieving merit based scholarships.

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Sophia Schupp Meine Kleine... (2018)

Watercolor and archival ink pen on watercolor paper ARTIST STATEMENT As I started my drawings about my home, I realized that my interest was not in the

space, but in the objects inside of my home that hold great significance to me. The

title, Meine Kleine… means “my little…” in German, and refers to my heritage (and is a

term of endearment my mother calls me). I’ve created these paintings using watercolor, my favorite medium because I can mix many colors and create thin translucent appearances.

The tulip candle holder and ceramic angel were given to me by my grandmother, who

purchased angels at flea markets for good luck. The tulip is from Amsterdam. I chose the rooster jug for my mother. It was made in the 1920s in Czechoslovakia and was bought

at an antique store in Bohemia. The nutcracker, which my grandmother purchased when she was a teenager in Germany, was always used by my mother at Christmastime. The cacti are my most prized possessions. I grew these from seeds, which is very difficult.

The streetcar was chosen for my brother; he loves everything transportation, and this

reminds him of growing up in Europe. The blue and white jar is of Italian cherries, and was chosen for my father because he has loved cherries, travelling and Italy. The pink pear box was handmade in Oaxaca, Mexico, a place I visited and fell in love with. The

stuffed cat -- Kitty -- is definitely my favorite item. I have had Kitty forever. I simply cannot remember a time without her. My decision to paint objects rather than space is perhaps because I have moved many times. My attachment is not specific to one physical home, but rather to the objects that have been with me in all of my homes.

ARTIST BIO Sophia Schupp is a German-American artist. Born in Vienna, Austria and having lived in Germany and the Netherlands, she moved to Brooklyn in 2010, where she lives

with her parents and twin brother, Matthias. Sophia, 15, is a sophomore at Bard High

School Early College Queens. Sophia is from a family of artists: her mother is a Graphic Designer and her grandmother is a painter. She has been producing art since she was

a toddler and was exposed to museums, galleries and architecture at an early age. On

weekends, she is always visiting MoMA, the MET and galleries in Chelsea and Brooklyn.

She is inspired by David Hockney, Sol Lewitt, Mickalene Thomas and Amy Sherald.

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Sophia enjoys simple paintings -- one subject with simple backgrounds -- and has been working in the style of flat but detailed works. She loves drawing from observation; it forces her to look at, interpret and represent the details of mundane objects.

Her favorite mediums are micron pens, markers, watercolor and acrylic paint. She

adores embroidery and sews her designs on her clothing. She has attended open

studios and workshops for many years at, for example, Children’s Museum of Art, Art

Workshop Experience and Battery Park City Portfolio Class. She will attend FIT classes this summer.

Sophia is a Student Government leader in her school and an honor roll student. She is

dedicated to politics, having been to and organized many protests, rallies and marches, including a school-wide walkout for gun control. She received an award from NY City

Council for her action against gun violence. Sophia has not decided on a career path.

However, it will surely combine creativity, design, helping others and communicating with people.

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David Winner Sterling Guardian (2018)

Pen, ink, and watercolor on paper and canvas ARTIST STATEMENT Home is the theme of the exhibition that we have decided to put on, and I decided to

create works that show various ideas exploring my feelings about the significance of my home, and make me comfortable in my own skin. I have been drawing fantasy art for as long as I can remember, and it is something that an essential part of my creative being.

From the beautiful art of the trading card game Magic: The Gathering, to the immersion of video games like Skyrim, I have grown up with knights, dragons, and fireballs spinning in my head.

The three works in the show, Sanctum, Vestige, and Bastion, all show different aspects

that the idea of home can represent to me. The first work, Sanctum, is a representation of the rest and relaxation I can get from being at home, for after a long day it is nice

to just sleep. To tie my love of fantasy in there, I of course had to have a knight in the middle resting from a hard-fought battle or long day of riding. I chose a knight as

opposed to some other fantasy trope because I can resonate with the tradition of honor that is associated with knights. I am of Welsh and German heritage, so it is fitting to depict a knight in shining armor, an idea which originates from Europe.

My second piece, Vestige, shows the same knight figure featured in Sanctum, on a

crumbling tower getting attacked by hands. At first, this may appear to be contrary, and

the last thing you would think of is home. However, the tower represents my home, with me being the knight, and the hands being the demons of society. I often am looking

on social media feeling a need to defend myself, or am seeing the news and viewing

images of the geo-political chaos in the world that makes the bubble of serenity that is my home seem smaller and smaller.

For my last piece, Bastion, I wanted to show how I feel when I am at my house, or

anywhere where I am comfortable, and I am in my own groove. This can be anything

from making art to playing games. It is a feeling or mood where I can relax in my own contentment, and not worry about anything else. In this piece, the recurring knight

is in a powerful stance, arms outstretched with a flaming yet invincible fortress off his

back, representing how my house is something that is of value and something I can feel proud of.

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The depictions are close to my heart and something to keep my mind off of the

existential questions of life. This exhibition gives me an opportunity to create art that has a different meaning than most of my other works, yet similar in follow through.

ARTIST BIO

David Sterling is a junior art major at LaGuardia High School. Born and raised in New

York City, David lives in the East Village, with his older brother and parents. David was

introduced to the visual arts at home by his mom. She currently works as an art teacher and on an international environment and photography book series called This is

Ours. Her influence started on David at a young age, taking him to her studio for long days of projects. David works through pencil, pen and ink, and watercolor to illustrate figures from fantasy and sci-fi realms. David aspires to major in graphic design at RIT,

Northeastern, or American University. David has taken a variety of AP, non-AP, art and

academic courses at LaGuardia HS. He has had his artwork in the Semi-annual art show each year he has attended LaGuardia, and placed second, twice, for the LaGuardia HS poster contests. He enjoys fantasy audiobooks and cool foggy days.

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Ellen Toeroek On Top of the World (2018) Acrylic on canvas

ARTIST STATEMENT Ellen Toeroek’s On Top of the World is a representation of what has contributed to her

definition of what the feeling of home is. She achieved this with the help of the subjects

her artwork portrays. For instance, in one piece she painted herself accompanied by her

close friend. They stand close to one another, leaning their shoulders together. This is an expression of how she has found a home among her friends. She can feel emotionally

close to them, symbolized in the painting by the deep blue background, a significantly

emotional color. Her friends are her family not related by blood, and they make her feel on top of the world. A different version of home is expressed in her second painting as

she illustrated herself and her parents, arms around one another, all leaning in together

as she was in the previous artwork with her friend. She is showing how her relatives have become an important part of her life and make her feel on top of the world as well. In

her final painting, the culmination of her work, she paints the river walkway that she has

passed by so many times in her youth. The gate and railing cast a shadow, the lights get smaller in the distance, the water darkens behind the rough waves, but she is above it all. She is viewing from a distance this place which helped define her childhood and

her home. She walked along this pathway with family and friends and now she is able

to reflect on her past, just as the city she grew up in reflects on the water, from a more developed viewpoint on home and the world.

ARTIST BIO Ellen Toeroek is a 17-year-old artist from New York City. She’s currently an 11th grade

visual arts student at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts. She enjoys how she can use art and her creative skills in many different facets of her life, and hopes to continue putting this to use in the future. Ellen enjoys working

with color, and her favorite mediums at the moment are watercolor and acrylic paint,

as well as graphite. She’s inspired by the people and places closest to her, and usually creates portraits and landscapes which reflect this.

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Xuduan You Untitled (2018)

Painting and sculpture ARTIST STATEMENT To me home isn’t really a place, it is more of a feeling that I carry around with me. It is features that were unique to the areas which I am familiar with, such as smell, visual cues, and sounds: the smell of the air in Beijing (which is weirdly sweet); having a backyard for the first time when we lived in Queens; the nice parks and general neatness of downtown, where you can smell the salt in the water; the older and wilder growth in the lawns of the Upper West Side, where you could touch the Hudson (not that anyone would want to).

My artworks connect the idea of home with the physical human body. The figure with the exposed heart, inspired by the cliché, “home is where the heart is,” makes the connection that the human body is a vessel for memory or the consciousness. The idea that, to the consciousness, the physical body is home until we die. The mouth is the body part which we use most often to express our thoughts and show others our consciousness; thus we can express our feelings of home, however sometimes incompletely. Hands are what we see every day, what we use to write, draw, do anything. The action of writing is almost part of our muscle memory. When we first learned of letters and words as children, it added another floor to one’s home—a whole new space to explore. The smoking dragon is a glimpse of what thoughts might be going on in a person’s head.

ARTIST BIO Xuduan You was born Beijing, China, and traveled to New York in 2010. He currently attends Laguardia High School. His artwork is primarily based in 2D black and white graphics. He is currently transitioning to painting and sculpture. Xuduan is part of the teen volunteer program at the Guggenheim, and he has worked at Supermud ceramic and pottery studio. The artist hopes to pursue a career in fine art or design in the future.

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MAJOR PROGRAMMATIC SUPPORT FOR

THE CUE TEEN COLLECTIVE IS PROVIDED BY CAF American Donor Fund, Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

THE 2017-2018 CUE TEEN COLLECTIVE WAS SUPPORTED IN PART BY Janine Abbatecola and Peter Von Lehe Elayna Berean and Daniel Ho Ted and Asya Berger Kenia Coelho Penelope Dannenberg Robert and Milena Decosimo Rise Dimson Robert Finnerty Nancy Floyd Eric Gleason Lynn Gumpert Bo Han John Hatleberg Matt Hennessy Laura and Stephen Holt Blake Horn Susan and Steven Jacobson Russell Jones Russell Julius John S. Kiely Norman Kleeblatt

Vivian Kuan and Loli Wu Corina Larkin and Nigel Dawn Melissa and Steve Lessar Barbara A. and Alred MacAdam John McElroy and Kristin Osterburg Ina Meibach Joesph Milana Gerard Mossé Anne Neely Lucy Oakley Francois Oduard and Reshmi Paul Sooji Park Charlie Porter Lisa Samenfeld Eric Shiner Mark Tannen Michele Tortorelli and Tom Kerns Priscilla and Kurt von Roeschlaub Lilly Wei Casey Weyand Shannon Wu and Joe Kahn

SPECIAL THANKS TO OUR FRIENDS AND COMMUNITY PARTNERS: VOLTA Art Fair, Nancy Floyd, Larry Ossei-Mensah, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

All artwork © the artists, 2018.

Exhibition and artwork photography by Alexandra Jerejian.

Additional photography by Amanda Adams-Louis, Eva Elmore, Sonja John, and Deepti Menon.

Student studio portraits by Nancy Floyd.

Graphic design by Lilly Hern-Fondation and Shona Masarin-Hurst.

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