Sarah A. Cox My Life Recorded in Non-Fiction, 1997 Byran High School, Byran, OH

From May 13 through June 5, 1999, The Equitable Gallery will present an exhibition that celebrates the creative excellence of America’s young people throughout this century.

Andy Warhol, Truman Capote, Richard Avedon, Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Pearlstein, Sylvia Plath and Bernard Malamud are among the exceptionally gifted artists and writers who received Scholastic Art & Writing Awards as secondary school students and whose student and mature work appears in Hands & Minds. Featuring original work from the 1920s through the 1990s, the exhibition juxtaposes powerful historical and contemporary examples of student art and writing with archival photographs, video, sound, and interactive exhibits.

The exhibition is a project of the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, Inc., and is presented with the support of the National Endowment for the Arts, Scholastic Inc., the M.R. Robinson Fund, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Binney & Smith, and Kimberly-Clark Corporation. The Equitable Gallery is sponsored by The Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States, a member of the Global AXA Group.

Leslie Boamah The Execution of My Dad, 1997 Albert Einstein High School, Silver Spring, MD.

Hands & Minds: The Art and Writing of Young People in 20^th Century America will unfold as a field of elegant impressionistic spaces, moving the viewer through a resonant interplay of idea, images, voices and interactive forms. The exhibition is curated around five major “sites” representing particular (and often unacknowledged) attributes of youthful creativity, themes of particular interest to young people:

“Excellence,” the extraordinary art and writing of young Americans and the role played by The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards in cultivating this excellence;

“Coping and Growing,” the role of art and writing in arts education programs to help young people survive difficult political and personal situations;

“Values and Community,” the arts as a vehicle for expressing and tackling political, social and community-based issues;

“Identity and the Self,” art and writing as an important means for young people to deal with the emotional trials, tribulations, and triumphs of adolescence; and

“Logic and Ideas,” arts education as a force for improving young people’s cognitive and intellectual skills and for making them better students.

“The exhibition pays tribute to the diverse and extraordinary talents of America’s art and writing students,” said Maurice Berger, the exhibition’s curator and Senior Fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School for Social Research. “The results of this exhibition are nothing less than magnificent. Limitless possibilities of hope and greatness echo through every piece in this show.”

Hands & Minds affirms the importance of nurturing creative expression—both inside and outside the classroom. It explores the many dimensions of young people’s cultural expression in the 20^th century, among them the importance of rewarding and educating our nation’s students in the arts, the broader role of creativity in the lives of young people, the aesthetic and social importance of their art and writing, the need to further the cause of arts education, and the role of teachers and arts programs in shaping young people’s creative talents and visual and verbal literacy.

The Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, created in 1994 to administer The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, reaches 99 percent of America’s schools and gives more than $170,000 to secondary school students across the country each year. Students in grades 7 to 12 from all fifty states submit more than a quarter million works of art and writing annually for the Awards. The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards are the largest recognition program for American youth, and have been granted continuously since 1923. Many alumni of the Awards have gone on to distinguished careers in the visual and literary arts, are represented in museums across the country, and have been honored by such distinguished awards as the Pulitzer Prize, the Newbery Medal, and others.

The Equitable Gallery presents works from all fields of the visual arts, including exhibitions originating outside of New York that would not otherwise have a presence in the city, as well as works from New York collections that would benefit from preservation and public presentation. The Equitable Gallery is located in the Atrium lobby of The Equitable Building at 787 Seventh Avenue in New York City. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Saturday, noon to 5 p.m. Admission is free.

Damien Barnette, Untitled (Black Self/White Self), 1998. Sheapard Middle School, Durham, NC.