Middle School Artists Sketch Their Way Back To In Person

Ezra Green and Tierra Alston. Lucy Gellman Photos.

A group of masked eighth graders scurries through the hallways of their middle school, in search of a weathered treasure map. Viewers get the backstory in bits: the school risks bankruptcy, these students know there’s buried treasure, and only they can save it. As they walk, there’s a flashback: the same students are baby-faced sixth graders, smiling as they move in slow, grayscale motion. The clock has jumped back to February 2020, and for a moment it feels like a dream.

That video mashup became part of “As Far As The Eye Can See,” the first in-person exhibition at Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School (BRAMS) in three years. Last Wednesday, arts and video classes rotated in and out of the gymnasium-auditorium, transforming it into a multimedia art gallery. On Friday night, students and their families were able to attend an in-person exhibition opening for the first time since spring 2019.

“It feels great to be back,” said eighth grader Aaliyah Howlett, who is studying visual arts under teacher Kendra Boshea. "The best part is finding what kind of art you like to do. Depending on what the project is, you can let your emotions out.”

Top: Eighth grader Aaliyah Howlett. Bottom: Some of the collages by eighth graders studying with Henriques. 

The exhibition was over three years in the making. When schools shuttered in March 2020, BRAMS assembled small kits with artmaking supplies that students could pick up from the Kimberly Avenue building and use in their homes. It marked a hard pivot from classroom learning: now-eighth grader Demiyah Anthony remembered dipping markers in water in the absence of watercolor palettes. iPhones replaced DSLR and film cameras, as students photographed objects in their homes, yards, and neighborhoods. The school’s darkroom remained quiet as a tomb.

As students returned to the building last year, the school mounted exhibitions entirely through its website. Then this spring, in-person gathering felt possible, said Arts Coordinator Sylvia Petriccione. Teachers, students, and staff worked together to transform the space for opening night, until multimedia work covered almost every corner of the room. The only thing missing—which nobody seemed to notice last week—was a refreshment table stacked with juice boxes and sweet and savory treats. 

Inside, the exhibition unfolded across the room. Ceramic mugs and papier-mâché  slices of rainbow cake and cherry pie à la Wayne Thiebaud waited eagerly for viewers to come in. Abstract drawings and anime-like figures dotted the room. Closest to the bleachers, portraits of Rosa Parks, Serena Williams and Martin Luther King, Jr. looked out at viewers in vivid color, their faces each quilted into 12 perfect squares. In one, Williams’ headband changed colors from orange to pink to blue, the work of multiple hands assembling the image. Her eyebrows arched, as if watching for an incoming ball. On her left shoulder, one student had added a flourish in red and brown crayon. On her right, strips of green and purple turned her sleeve into a cacophony of color.

Like many works in the show, the collages tell a story of collaboration after intense isolation. In February of this year artist Ana Henriques stepped in as a substitute art teacher, and designed the collage project as part of eighth graders’ work on pop-art-esque depictions of giants in Black history. Beside the collages, two dozen musicians, artists, and Civil Rights icons exploded in technicolor. Ruby Bridges, depicted in a halo of yellow and orange light, glowed from the center. Splashy, hard-edged and grayscale depictions of Colin Kapernick, Muhammad Ali and Bessie Coleman waited for viewers on the other side of the display wall.

Other works highlighted a return to the classroom—and to site-specific practice—in real time. Back in the darkroom this year, Boshea’s students did a number of experiments based on the German photographer Thomas Ruff, whose photographs include abstract, bending shapes rendered in luminous bands of color. At BRAMS, students started with construction paper collages, developed them as ghostly images, and then colored them in by hand.

Aaliyah pointed to hers, two soft, yolk-like splotches of pink that became gray, black, and teal the further they ran out onto the paper. On their right side, a spectral band of white climbed to the same height, rounded at the end like an enormous worm. It looked as if it might begin to speak to the blobs as its creator looked on.

Top: Jamar Bailey, who is in the eighth grade. Bottom: The "Behind The Mask" series. 

Across the room, the same students’ digital photographs of plant life at the school came alive. Green tendrils with delicate white buds, clusters of red salvia, and trumpet-like orange blossoms crowded a display wall, drawing students close to point out which image they had taken. Beside them, still lives with huge yellow sunflowers peeked out, an homage to Vincent Van Gogh bursting into bloom. 

Tierra Alston, who switched from theater to visual arts in sixth grade, said the project gave her a chance to appreciate the flowers, insects and small animals just outside her classroom window. As she spoke, her classmate Ezra Green ran over to join the interview. Ezra, an aspiring architect who has “been making art my whole life,” said that he enjoyed the project—and the return to some sort of normalcy in the classroom.

“It’s good to be back,” he said. “It’s good to see my art on display, to see how good I did.” 

Demiyah Anthony and Aaliyah Howlett, who were partners on the "Behind The Mask" project. 

Many of BRAMS’ young artists have also acknowledged the sheer weight and change of the last two years. In Boshea’s eighth grade art class, pairs of students photographed each other for “Behind The Mask,” a portrait project dedicated to the pandemic. In each work, a student looks out at the camera, their eyes doing all the talking as a crisp mask covers their nose and mouth. Then the frame swings open to reveal a second portrait in color. Eighth graders, pictured without their masks, reveal the second part of who have become through their years of mask wearing. 

For students like Aaliyah, who grew up nearby in the city’s Hill neighborhood, “Behind The Mask” marked a chance to honor a middle school experience that has been anything but normal. When students went online two years ago, she and her peers thought the pandemic would just be a few weeks. When remote classes stretched into months, “it was chaotic,” she said. She struggled with the limited art supplies and lost interest in her classes, sometimes sleeping through school.

“I wanted to participate, but sometimes I just didn’t,” she said.

Top: Demiyah Anthony and Aaliyah Howlett, who were partners on the "Behind The Mask" project. Bottom: Kendra Boshea. "It's never the same," she said of the exhibition. 

While BRAMS offered the option to return in person last year, she remained online through the beginning of eighth grade. Now that she’s back, she’s more engaged in classes. Her grades are up. She can feel herself jumping back into discussions and projects. She’s also struggled to get used to a new normal, in which she and her friends, peers, and teachers communicate differently.

“You can’t see their facial expressions, so it’s hard to understand what they’re feeling,” she said. In her “Behind The Mask,” photograph, she looks squarely at the viewer, her chin resting on her hands. The words It’s hard to understand what people are saying/Behind the Mask float around her face. Inside the frame, a second portrait reads I still don’t understand.

That’s also true for students like Demiyah, who said she’s now more comfortable with her mask than without it. When BRAMS went online two years ago, she willed herself to keep going to classes from her bedroom. She learned to take photographs with her iPhone, scrambling to find good lighting in her home. She worked with the supplies that the school had given her. 

“It was a learning process for everybody,” she said. “It was kind of confusing.”

Two years later, she designed the poster for the exhibition, a plump pink-and-orange speckled mushroom with an eye peeking out from its cap. Two days before Friday’s opening, she beamed at a grove of glistening, anthropomorphized mushrooms from sixth grade art students that matched the image. She watched as Aaliyah lifted her “Behind The Mask” photograph from the bunch, and swung it open.

I’m perfectly happy/Behind the mask, the first portrait read. Demiyah looked directly out of the frame, and at the viewer.

Ugh … I was happier before, said the second one.

In Search Of Buried Treasure

Students Marcello Simeoli and Kevin Teniza with video instructor Matt Kelsey. 

In the library nearby, students Krista Kujo, Kevin Teniza, and Marcello Simeoli huddled around a laptop, preparing to debut an 18-minute odyssey of a film. Two years ago, video students were working on a black-and-white movie about pirates when the pandemic hit New Haven, sending them home. In cuts from that project, students push through thick, sticky layers of cobweb, jog maskless down stairs and hallways, and pore over a weathered map in search of buried treasure. As they sat on computers at the school, the clips remained a sort of 2020 time capsule.

“We never got to finish it,” Kevin said. When he and his peers came back last fall, students weren’t sure they wanted to return to the old video. Some of their classmates had left the school; others were new to BRAMS. Slowly, he said, momentum built around a class-wide effort. They wove together a plot in which the school faced a buyout from a large corporation, and only a financial miracle could save it. From the school’s front doors, a plucky group of students emerged, ready to rescue the building to which they owed their education.

Eighth graders Kevin Teniza, Krista Kujo and Marcello Simeoli. 

They took it as a moment to not just complete the story, but to pull teachers, administrators, and peers into the filmmaking process. They constructed their own props and costumes, using the school’s labyrinthine hallways and dark stairwells as a horror-tinged academic setting. After a subplot with photographs of missing students, they deemed it ready for primetime. On the auditorium’s stage, rows of chairs sat facing a screen, waiting for opening night. Ultimately, “it was fun,” Kevin said.

Krista pulled up another short film, and suddenly the faces of her classmates filled the screen in brilliant, saturated color. Music thrummed beneath them as they looked right into the camera, laughed and smiled. Some remained reserved; others invited friends and classmates into the frame, embracing them. Behind the lens, Krista caught it all in crisp focus.

“We made it this far,” a voice read, reciting text that Kevin had written. “We deserve this. I deserve this.”