At the far end of the gallery a tightly unified collection of works by tenth graders at CSI International High School on Staten Island conveys a clear theme. The central element of every piece is a silhouette of the artist, surrounded by images describing his or her journeys and migrations, both past and present.
Wingsome Cheung, 16, surrounded her silhouette with arrows and maps depicting her migration from Hong Kong to New York, but focuses on places she has never been. “My art is about a journey, the places I still want to go,” she said.
Classmate Darlene Akanmu, 15, adds to her portrait a “staircase of life,” illustrating the major events of her life. Though she was born in New York City and has never moved beyond its borders, the steps on the staircase read like a series of migrations that go farther than one ought to travel in only the first 15 years of life: “birth,” “aunt died,” “mother died,” “move in with dad,” “graduation,” “new church.”
Other collections include a series of photographs by Flushing International High School students depicting “life on the 7 train.” The ordinary quality to the moments the students chose to capture is telling – workers loading and unloading cardboard boxes, crowds coming and going under the elevated tracks, the rooftops of buildings below as seen from the train windows.
Vivia Thompson, 13, whose "pedagogy of photography" class at Bronx Green Middle School created the hanging window panel displays, described how learning to express individual identities and hearing each others' stories led to an interesting conclusion: “We’re all different people who have really different backgrounds but we can all relate to one another.”
