A Universe of Self Experience

Curated in collaboration with the Youth Board of Artists, this year’s teen exhibition brings together work by young artists from Teen Programs, teaching artists, exhibiting, and residency artists. The exhibition’s title refers to the caring reminder Chicago teens text to check that their friends arrived home safely and alludes to “making it” as creatives of many types. Works in the exhibition explore themes of collective safety, movement of people throughout the city and world, diasporic identities, boundaries crossed either physically or metaphorically, and coming of age on the South Side of the city.

New paintings, drawings, photography, prints, and multimedia works demonstrate the intense study by young adult artists participating in Hyde Park Art Center’s Teen programs. Under the guidance of professional artists, nearly twenty teens develop their creative voices over the course of 15 weeks. These young artists chose to address the challenges in articulating perplexed thoughts, feelings, and emotions into individual works of art.

Image credit: Stevia Ndoe, Patriotic Sufferance, 2020.

New paintings, drawings, photography, prints, and collages demonstrate the intense study by teens participating in Hyde Park Art Center’s in-house arts mentorship programs: ArtShop, Writer’s Block, and Youth Art Board.