Students Shine In Inaugural Eli Whitney Arts Showcase

Top: The now-infamous boxcutter, which memorializes an incident that senior Oscar Mani-Mendieta had a few months ago after forgetting to remove the object from his work pants before heading to school. Bottom:  Jacinda Laroque and Mani-Mendieta. Lucy Gellman Photos. 

In a patch of hallway filled with afternoon light, Oscar Mani-Mendieta stood over a larger-than-life box cutter, a smile teasing at the edges of his mouth. Just beneath it, a mustachioed cactus seemed like it might come alive, toothpicks sticking out of its arms and body as a cowboy hat tipped forward on its emerald green, rounded head. From a program room nearby, strains of Frédéric Chopin escaped through an open door, and wound down the hall.

In its every curve and detail, the box cutter held a long story punctuated with hours of work, and a teen’s nervous, sometimes warm laughter. And Mani-Mendieta was finally ready to tell it.

That scene, story and sound came to Eli Whitney Technical High School for one night only on a recent Thursday, as students and staff celebrated the school’s inaugural end-of-year arts showcase with music, food, poetry and visual art. Presented by the school’s arts and writing faculty, the show became a space for students to show off their talents—and tell their stories through multiple media before the end of the night.

Teachers who worked on the exhibition include visual arts teacher Vincent Criscitelli, music instructor Nicholas Knight, and English teachers Morgan Rossignol, Matthew Crowley, and Ann Gallant. In addition, Criscitelli invited in a number of guest speakers who are working artists in the area, including Candyce “Marsh” John and Anika Stewart. During the year, both John and Stewart worked with students; Thursday, they also exhibited some of their own work as they and school staff praised their young charges.

“This is really cool,” said Rossignol, who encouraged many of her students to write poetry that appeared in the show. “It’s very empowering, very inspiring. It got me back into writing again.”

The band LOSR, composed of Eli Whitney students, plays.

The show, in one iteration or another, has been in the works since November, when Criscitelli and his colleagues started sketching out a rough plan with their students at the center. At the time—and for years beforehand—Eli Whitney wasn’t known for student artmaking: it’s a trade school, where most of its students work outside of school after dismissal for the day.

But when Criscitelli arrived in 2022, he saw quickly how much talent and gusto there was among his students, some of whom took to art immediately. By the end of his first year teaching art, students gravitated toward his classroom as a safe place and second home, and grew their artistic skills when they were there. A year later, Knight arrived, and started building a general music program. The idea to collaborate grew from there.

“We kind of dreamed it up from there,” Criscitelli remembered.

Their hard work, and the dedication of students working alongside them, has paid off. Thursday, art lined the hallways, works tacked up on rolling displays and arranged neatly across tables and presented alongside selections of poetry. One drawing, emblazoned with the image of a planet whose green was fading, read We need ice here, with an arrow pointing to the top of the globe.

Beneath it, against a slate gray background, a brick house stood with two stick figures outside, a thin, long thread of smoke still coming from the chimmney. Not here, read more text with another red arrow. Nearby, a number of canvases featured sea creatures, their fins and flippers moving through a deepening, unadulterated sea of blue. In both cases, perhaps, students had mastered seeing the world as it should be, rather than as it is.

Top: Jacinda Laroque, who has been experimenting with charcoal. Bottom: Nyah Mells. 

Out in the school’s bright hallway, students Mani-Mendieta, Jacinda Laroque and Nyah Mells—two seniors and a junior, respectively—credited Criscitelli with helping them stay motivated through their final years of high school. Like many of their peers, they have jobs outside of school—Mani-Mendieta works full-time as a control machinist for Hobson & Motzer, and Laroque is an inspector at Moon Cutters—and credit art class with helping them stay present during school hours.

“I’ve always been an artist type,” said Mells, who is currently most excited about digital work. That started, she said with a smile, when she was two or three, sketching Disney princesses. She’s stuck with it as a form of stress relief and release ever since. “I can express myself and be free without someone judging me.”

“The art room is a place where you can just go,” Laroque chimed in, walking over to a display where one of her pieces, a giant, ornately detailed spider, hung frozen on a display. In part, that comes to her naturally: her mom is a painter and henna artist, and has always encouraged her to immerse herself in the arts. This year, “I found my love with charcoal. It’s really easy to mold. I don’t have to do too much to get different shades.”

Mani-Mendieta, meanwhile, explained that artmaking has become a place for him to both experiment and let off steam in a safe, supportive environment. His freshman year at the school, “I wasn’t really into art,” he said. Then he met Criscitelli, who encouraged him to make a drawing to scale. Something clicked.

Senior Yarieliz Morales painted flowers based on the hibiscus blooms she saw while with her older sister, Zashi, in Puerto Rico. 

Now, it’s also a way for him to process things. A few months ago, he accidentally brought a box cutter to school, unaware that it was still in the pocket of his work pants from the night before. While it was a misunderstanding—Mani-Mendieta gets off of his manufacturing job around midnight, and goes to bed shortly afterwards—it earned him a three-day detention.

He’s still a little salty about it, he said. Every day, Mani-Mendieta wakes up at 6:30 a.m. to get to school on time. While he’s there, he works through class and study hall to get all of his homework done, so he doesn’t have to do it in the wee hours of the morning. When school lets out in the afternoon, he heads to his job at Hobson & Motzer, which dovetails with the school’s approach to work-based learning.

He’s there until midnight—almost always using his trusty box cutter for the work—and then he comes home and crashes.

So when Criscitelli proposed a 3D project in his class after the boxcutter incident, “it was kind of perfect timing,” Mani-Mendieta said. “With me, it’s really hard to stick with an idea,” but he knew that he wanted to see the piece through. The cactus below it, the product of "slapping some clay together,” was more petite, informal, but just as eye-catching.

Anika Stewart (top) and Amber Cohens (bottom) were two of four professional artists with work on display, there in part to remind students of what they can be if they stick with the arts. 

Back inside the program room, festooned with global flags and poetry that faced a table of charcuterie and crudite, students and families filled a few rows of seats, cheering on classmates as they sang and played in a music program Knight had curated for the evening. From Leo Valdez’ sensitive take on Chopin—accompanied by Knight, who is a jack of all trades, on the piano—acts had unfolded into original music, covers of songs, and a multi-part student band that is part of a growing arts curriculum.

Valdez, a senior at the school who studies the violin at Music Haven, said he was grateful for the opportunity to perform at his school, in the first showcase of its kind. As a student at Music Haven, he’s used to performing on stage and in public. “It’s natural to me,” he said. “I feel great.”

As he played, the violin floated up from the front of the room, drifting over a small audience that had gathered in the rows of chairs. A sense of calm settled over the room, Valdez playing the piece as if he knew it inside out.

“I think it’s really cool for our students,” said Knight, who commutes each day from Manchester, and is working on building a drumline at the school next year. Since arriving at Eli Whitney three years ago—“I totally lucked out” with the position, he said—he’s been able to start a small music program with guitars and keyboard.

Candyce "Marsh" John, who helped organize the show and talked to students, and teacher Vincent Criscitelli, who has been at the school since 2022. 

Around the room, student work sparkled, as if ready to sing along. On a display, Camila Nahuatlato Meza’s “Love Without Hate” pointed to the enduring, sometimes invisible and needed presence of love. Another, titled “Over The Line” by an anonymous poet, tried to put words to that feeling of being suspended in that liminal space, with lines like: What have I been waiting for all along? and This time something is different. A few yards away, a pencil-and-marker face scowled under a crown of orange, spiky hair.

Back out in the hallway, Stewart and John soaked it all in, walking towards a makeshift gallery that they, with artists Amber Cohens and Jesse Wolf, created with easels and canvases just for the night. John, who fell in love with the arts through both graffiti and her classes at Hyde Leadership School, said she was thrilled to see students get their moment in the spotlight.

“I thought it would be really cool if we allowed them to showcase their work,” John said. “It’s been pretty cool to see. I feel that I was able to inspire, and that’s my goal. Everyone should be recognized.”