elice Cleveland

Director of Learning and Engagement

As a teenager growing up in a place without an art museum, let alone a contemporary art museum, I think often of how I didn’t even know that my current job existed. I soaked up everything I could from my drawing and painting class but most of my high school days were spent in Debate, at my part-time barista job, volunteering in summer and afterschool programs, and shuttling around my younger brothers.

As the Director of Learning and Engagement at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH), one of the most important goals I have for the Teen Council is introducing them to unforeseen possibilities and to learning about new pathways that exist to be creative in the world. I try to make sure they are connected to the staff at the Museum— the Graphic Designer, the Preparator, Communications Team, Senior Curator, Program Manager, and the Executive Director, to name a few. We connect the Teen Council with other arts organizations across the city—making sure they know of the resources that exist and building their network. Just this year we got to meet several MFAH Core Residents (Bryan Castro, Saúl Hernández-Vargas, Yifan Jiang, Jagdeep Raina, and Valentin Diaconov), Alexis Pye at Lawndale Art Center, a visit to Art League Houston, the Drawing Institute at the The Menil Collection, the Sicardi Ayers Bacino Art Gallery, and a walking tour of Freedmen’s Town by my colleague Charonda Johnson.

The opportunity to work with these 13 Teen Council members and 25 artists to create the exhibition, Where Do We Go From Here? was a wild ride. I got to witness the students discuss their options and make decisions collectively with the highest level of respect and collaboration. They started out the school year with the monumental task of creating an exhibition in less than six months. They were not daunted by this task and dove right in. They were reflecting on this moment in time, recalling that the last Teen Council-curated exhibition, Turn In, Tune In, Tap Out, was planned fully online in the height of the pandemic. This current group has met in-person but knows that they are still processing the past several years and the long term impact it will have on them. They worked together to choose a series of questions that they would invite artists to respond to: What have you grown away from? What are you growing towards? How have you been born anew? Once the call for submissions was open, the artwork started rolling in. The group then reviewed each submission and they were in surprising alignment with the work that resonated and best answered the questions they posed.

Several themes rose to the surface out of this idea of growth—there are reflections on childhood like in Brandon Sun’s photographs and Ava Finch’s work Days of Yore Transfigured Crimson (2022). There are artists who have created work based on their cultural identity including Lina Wu’s painting Growth (2022) while planted like a cabbage expresses the feeling of being stuck under cultural pressure, or the young figure in Aileen Zhang’s Color Theory (2022) who has experienced racism and is trying to cancel out their identity through painting their arm purple, the opposite of yellow. Beau

Beaudette’s short film A Required Answer (2022) is a window into someone choosing how to share their gender identity and Sophia Reinhardt’s Large Spike (Bound Bodies) (2022) that has created an object that represents their queer identity to take up space in the gallery. There are also several works in the exhibition where the artist is faced with bodily changes and health challenges like in Jackie Neumann’s The Search For the Phantom Limb (2022) made in response to their cholecystectomy and Zei Carrasco’s Reflection and Duality (2022) that is a response to their recent brain surgery.

As someone who is far beyond my own teenage years, the question of Where Do We Go From Here? still resonates. I hope you will spend time with this work and reflect on your own growth and future. As I know in my own work in a creative field that both the artists in this exhibition and Teen Council members are my future colleagues and peers.