Five Hotchkiss artists, including four recent graduates, were selected for the Bruce Museum’s 13^th annual iCreate exhibit, which serves as an outlet for emerging young artists in the tristate area.

Each year the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, CT spotlights fine art from high school students throughout New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut. The 2021 virtual exhibit features 46 artworks selected from more than 620 submissions from 46 high schools. 

The works represent diverse mediums and explore different themes ranging from critiques of traditional social constructs to playful portraits, statements regarding fond memories, race, identity, nature, and animal welfare. View the complete exhibit here.

Junsik Ryan Eom  ’21 placed third in the competition for his work, The Leap, an acrylic piece painted on skateboard decks.

Eom writes, “A skater must risk to progress. Beneath every landing of tricks, there are uncountable fails and injuries. Though only the successful, clean landing awes the crowd, the effort and courage during the practice is what they should truly value. By realistically painting Tony Hawk, a skateboard superstar, on the skateboards, I have experienced the similar process of learning skateboard tricks. I started from a sketch and painted over and over to represent Tony Hawk as perfectly as I possibly could.”

Other Hotchkiss artists whose work was selected for the exhibit included:

Yuka Masamura ’21

Movement of Nature (Ink, Micron pen)

Masamura’s piece is part of a series of plant form studies documented in Micron pen from observation. “The drawing is in combination with loose, expressive washes, and gestural mark-making in blue ink. This piece combines imagery about weather, time, and place. It is also about the idea that our environment is threatened and our memory of flora and fauna may be fleeting and temporary,” she writes.

Ryan Alexandre McArthur ‘22

Untitled, Colored pencil

This colored pencil drawing considers the isolation, destruction, and death caused by war. The hellish colors of the sky bleed into the empty ruined landscape.

Nicole Morikawa ‘21

Desmond, Alcohol ink on mylar

Desmond is a narrative portrait meant to depict the conflict Desmond expressed to conform to the social expectations of how to act around individuals of the opposite gender as a heterosexual male versus enjoying the company of people regardless of how they identify,” the artist writes.

Desmond  was also recently selected to be featured in the September issue of Phi Delta Kappa’s (PDK) education journal Kappan. PDK is a professional education association and offers insights on K-12 education policy, research, curriculum, and professional development

Olya Sukonrat ’21

Metamorphosis III, Digital Media, Procreate

The third and final iteration of Sukonrat’s Metamorphosis series illustrates everyday people through Hazel Rose Markus’s idea of “The Culture Cycle,” a psychological theory which states that humans and their surroundings affect each other in a cyclic manner.

Hotchkiss congratulates these talented young artists for their passion and creativity.