Luminous Lore
CUE Teen Collective
May 20th - 26th, 2021
Tues-Sat, 12-6pm
Location:
CUE Art Foundation
137 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001
Please see our visitor safety guidelines
CUE Art Foundation is proud to announce the fourth annual CUE Teen Collective final exhibition. Luminous Lore will investigate the themes of folklore and myth, and features work by 10 artists from the 2020-21 cohort. The exhibition includes work by Gabriella Ayzidor, Lily Crewdson, Adriana Gonzalez, Cion Kang, Meher Kapoor, Joyce Lin, Luca Montana, Roshani Shrestha, Nikita Singh, and Isabella Youssef. This exhibition showcases the efforts of the CUE Teen Collective and marks the conclusion of their time in the collective over the 2020-21 term.
CUE Teen Collective (CTC) is a free, year-long after-school program for high school students who are passionate about visual culture and interested in exploring careers in the fine arts. Through the program, students investigate various aspects of the contemporary art world, develop and refine their artmaking and critical thinking skills, and conceptualize and create artwork for a final group exhibition presented at CUE’s gallery space.
The show is curated by CTC Lead Educator Amanda Adams-Louis and features work by:
Gabriella Ayzidor is a 15-year-old girl currently living in Brooklyn, New York. She attends Leon M. Goldstein High School where she maintains perfect grades and plays volleyball. Her hobbies include reading books (especially the classics), playing Chopin pieces on the piano, and writing for her online readers. Her favorite paintings are Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez and Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix, while her favorite classical piece is Liebesleid by Fritz Kreisler. Gabriella’s dream career is to become a famous author.
Lily Crewdson is a 16-year-old student born in New York City. Currently, she is in the 10th grade at Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn. She mostly paints but likes to explore using different types of mediums. She has a passion for psychology and often portrays human emotions in her paintings. She loves to journal and make sketches that eventually inspire larger pieces of art. Poetry has always been something that she enjoys and she often includes her own writing in portraits made with oil pastel. She also loves to read and takes inspiration from books.
Adriana Gonzalez was born in Queens, New York. She is currently a 15-year-old student attending LaGuardia High School. Adriana uses different mediums to try to broaden her skills and experiment with what she likes best. In Bridgeview's exhibition in Virginia, she was a part of a small trip with other artists drawing the scenery of a different environment. She enjoys participating in the CUE Teen Collective because of the artistic environment and creative license to select the media and/or materials that represent her vision for her artwork. This allows her to experiment and, importantly, have fun with her art process.
Cion Kang was born in Queens, New York. Currently, she is in her junior year at Queens High School for the Sciences at York College while attending the CUE Teen Collective. She likes to paint and enjoys observing nature. She wants to become a webtoon artist, a graphic designer, or a physicist in the future. At an event that supported the Unification and Peace of Korea, her artwork was placed second, which depicted a dove descending onto a field of roses of Sharon, symbolizing eternal prosperity. Cion also helped create images for her church's podcast, in addition to designing a logo for a business.
Meher Kapoor is a creative 16-year-old who likes to pass her time in various ways. She was born in New York, where she has lived all her life. She is currently an architectural sophomore at the High School for Construction Trades, Engineering and Architecture, where she is enrolled in AP classes. Meher has participated in a variety of different sports like wrestling, tennis, swimming, and more. Meher has always found an interest in art; however, she had not started to truly draw until she was in the seventh grade. Meher occasionally uses different kinds of mediums, but prefers graphite. She aims to major in architecture in college and get both an architecture and real estate license.
Joyce Lin is a teen artist born in New York City. She is a junior attending Francis Lewis High School. She likes to use watercolor, colored pencils, and pens to create imaginative and meaningful artworks about people and current events. In middle school, her charcoal drawing was a P.S. Art finalist. She is currently enrolled in honors and AP classes. Due to her interest in Chinese novels, Japanese manga, and Korean webtoons, she aims to become fluent in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. She also likes to write stories, particularly fantasy. In the future, Joyce plans to explore various art mediums. She aspires to create fun and fantastical paintings as well as artworks that bring awareness to social issues.
Luca Montana is a junior at the NYC iSchool in New York City. She is a 17-year-old student with a passion for painting and photography. Her art focuses on color and contrast and often incorporates multiple mediums. Luca’s love of the arts was sparked by visiting museums with her mother when she was younger.
Isabella Youssef was born in 2004 and was raised in Queens, New York. She is a junior who currently attends the Scholars Academy in Rockaway Beach. Her concepts are often inspired by movies, comics, music, literature, and personal identity. She brings her visions to life by incorporating alcohol-based markers, colored pencils, glitter pens, and on rare occasions, watercolor, into her drawings. Her artwork was previously featured at her school’s art gallery in 2019 and 2020. Art never really appealed to Isabella as nothing more than a hobby and school subject. It wasn’t until she was forced to quarantine during the pandemic that Isabella started to experiment with her talents. Some of her aspirations are to become a history teacher, successful writer, and illustrator of her own novels.
Roshani Shrestha is a 16-year-old artist who is a junior at Stuyvesant High School. He lives in Queens, New York. Roshani’s diverse identity, having a mother from Mexico and a father from Nepal, as well as being a bisexual, non-binary transgender male, has influenced the types of art that he makes. He hopes to promote diversity and inclusivity in his work to create social change. Roshani works with various different mediums, including but not limited to pencils, pens, pastels, acrylics, and watercolors. He has completed three AP and one honors course and is taking three AP and two honors courses currently. Roshani hopes to pursue a career that combines computer science and visual arts, two subjects he is deeply passionate about.
Nikita Singh is fifteen years old and was born in Queens, New York, but lived in Guyana for the first three years of her childhood. She currently attends Queens High School for the Sciences at York College. As a child, she always had a fondness for drawing, which developed into a passion for art. She works in various mediums but specifically selected acrylic paints for the artwork displayed in this exhibition. Nikita is inspired by anything the world has to offer, from magazines to beautiful scenery. The CUE Art Foundation allowed her to expand her knowledge of art; it also led to her first art show. Nikita dreams of pursuing a career as a professional painter and aspires to have her work displayed at a museum.
About CUE Teen Collective
CUE Teen Collective (CTC) is a free, year-long after-school program for high school students who are passionate about visual culture and interested in exploring careers in the fine arts. Through the program, students investigate various aspects of the contemporary art world, develop and refine their artmaking and critical thinking skills, and conceptualize and create artwork for a final group exhibition presented at CUE’s gallery space. CTC offers behind-the-scenes access to the New York art world, demystifying career paths in the arts while inspiring students to develop their own personal artistic voices. The program consists of talks with artists and curators, trips to gallery and museum shows, visits to art fairs, hands-on studio sessions, and more. Participants have the opportunity to learn from working arts professionals and build sustainable and rewarding careers of their own in the arts.
Participants form a community with their peers over the course of the academic year, sharing their work with each other and exchanging meaningful feedback on artistic concepts, techniques, and processes as they work together to develop and refine their artistic practices. At the culmination of the program, students present original artwork as part of a group show, for which they collectively decide upon the theme and content. Students also learn how to communicate their work through the development of visual and written materials for the final exhibition, including curatorial statements, artist statements, and artist biographies. Through this process, students learn how to envision, produce, install, and communicate an art exhibition in the same manner as working artists, organizations, and galleries all over the world.
For more information about the CUE Teen Collective see here and learn how to apply.
Artwork Images
Installation Images
