con·ti·nu·i·ty noun 1) The state or quality of being continuous. 2) An uninterrupted succession or flow; a coherent whole.

Continuity, a student-curated exhibition of over 45 artists, opens at NURTUREart Gallery at 910 Grand Street in Williamsburg on June 20th. Featured artists are from the Juan Morel Campos Secondary School community and include students, parents, teachers, staff and NURTUREart teaching artists who have worked with students from the school.

Juan Morel Campos is a New York City Department of Education school located in Williamsburg with students from grades 6 through 12. With the help of NURTUREart, they have brought together an utterly original continuity of over 45 artists for a unique student curated exhibition. Students, staff, teachers, parents and NURTUREart registry artists have contributed their diverse talents to this boundary-bending event. The community as a whole has merged to create this exhibition, creating a continuous flow of art across multiple generations.

A group of five students created this exhibition through NURTUREart’s Education Outreach Curatorial Program. The program, designed by NURTUREart board member Eliot Lable and art teacher Emily Shu, creates opportunities for students to work with supervising curators to create art exhibitions. For this exhibition, senior students Jonathan Vasquez and Janice Soto and juniors Christina Pena, Kevin Reynoso, and Joshua Velez performed the tasks of creating a professional exhibition, from selecting the work to installation, all under the supervisory eye of professional curator and mentor Larry Walczak.

Aniki Kings, Pages, 2008Through the unique education program offered by NURTUREart, practicing artists come to the school to talk about what they do, help students with their art and hold various workshops. In addition, students visit artist studios after school on Wednesday afternoons. The artists’ contributions to this exhibition are examples of the time, hard work, expertise, and talent they have put into bringing art into the school community.

Examples of the talent involved and collaborative energy it generates are easy to find. As part of the NURTUREart Outreach Program Anki King (left, above), a visual artist based in Long Island City, hosted studio visits and worked on studio projects with students. One of the students from the program is Gisel Mateo (left, below) who created her painting, First Flight, with Anki’s assistance. She stated that following Anki’s advice was a bit tricky at first, but it was a fun experience. “It was difficult because she told me to just fill my paintbrush with paGisele Mateo, First Flight, 2008int and just swipe only three time and then pick another color. It was really, really hard, but after a while I kind of got used to it. Actually, it came out really, really nice.” Compared with King’s Pages, Mateo’s brushwork clearly reflects the fruitful results of this encounter.

Another example of newly uncovered talent comes from Edgar Negron, a father of two students at Campos. His pop-star Supergirl is proof that talent is blossoming everywhere in the school community, and of the benefits of finding new ways to access artists in a range of varied communities. His work, and that of nearly fifty others associated with the Campos project, reminds us of the unique power of art to bring together diversity and yet also rediscover continuity.