DRHSART Senior Exhibition Series Kicks off Tonight!!

As some of you may already know, the DRHSART program features senior student exhibitions in our gallery hall each month from December until June.  This month, we are highlighting three of our most talented students.  We will be having our openings for this exhibition on both Thursday and Friday of this week from 5pm until 7pm.  Refreshments and music will be provided.

About the Artists:

Joanna Gray is an incredibly technical painter, whose portraits earned her significant scholarship money to attend the 2013 SCAD pre-college summer program.  She is tremendously talented, and attended the CFA for her freshman year before deciding that she would stay at DRHSART.  Her technique is original, and she is absolutely unafraid to invent new ways to use her media. She sees the details that other students simply don’t take the time to notice, and it is that careful attention to detail that sets her and her work apart. I cannot wait to see what career path she takes, and I know that whatever it is she will find tremendous success.

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Jinny Kang is as close as one can get to being a "Renaissance girl".  She excels in all that she does,  and is an instrumental leader in my classroom.  She leads through her unparalleled work ethic, her empathy for her classmates, and her ability to give honest feedback about the work of her peers.  This summer, she was selected to attend the month-long Governor’s program for Visual Art at Radford University, where her artistic confidence was taken to a whole new level.  She has been attending figure drawing classes at the Visual Arts Center, and has also been a part of a portfolio development program in Washington D.C. each Saturday for the past few months.  Her dedication is simply outstanding, and I couldn’t be more proud of her, not just as an artist, but also as a whole-hearted young adult.

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Alex Turner is, by far, the best photographer our program has ever produced.  I wish we could take credit for his genius, but in all honesty….  we just can’t.  Alex learns what he needs to know by paying attention, asking questions, and digging for the information he wants.  Last summer, Alex attended the pre-college program at the Parsons New School for Design in NYC.  He left Richmond one person, and returned from NYC a completely different person. The new Alex is 100 percent himself, full of creative confidence, and has stepped up as a leader in our program.  

His images are mysterious, technical, and explore abstract narratives that required the viewers to fill in the blanks.  Nothing Alex creates will ever spoon-feed his audience.  His work invites the viewers to do some work of their own, and that is exactly why his images are so engaging.  I have very high expectations for him in this year's Scholastic Art Competition, and I am confident that he will receive plenty of scholarship offers to some of our nations top-ranked art schools.