Congratulations goes out to Tonawanda High School senior Lucy Dietrich for being accepted to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery's "AK Teens: Future Curators 2021" exhibition!
Lucy's watercolor and ink artwork, "Skolstrejk för Klimatet," was selected for the exhibition. The exhibition was on view simultaneously, in two separate venues in Buffalo. Those two venues were the Buffalo Center for Arts and Technology and the Western New York Book Arts Center. Artwork was also posted on the Albright-Knox website.
According to the Albright-Knox website, this year's theme for the Future Curators exhibition was The Presence of Absence. Despite living in a seemingly connected world, with access to video calls, texting, and social media, many often feel an ocean apart from others, the world, and even themselves. Just as silence can be deafening, The Presence of Absence makes us realize how important these things are. This exhibition represents the expression of human emotion at a time when isolation is mandatory. Using misplaced objects, fractured pieces, and lost figures, the artists in the exhibition draw attention to this feeling of disjointedness. Throughout The Presence of Absence, the works display a progression of physical, social, and emotional isolation. Communicating the hardship of disconnection has led to the pursuit of reconnection and repair. Can we reunite with the parts that have gone missing, making us whole again?