Buffalo, NY – The Albright-Knox Art Gallery is proud to present Exposition, the 2017 AK Teens: Future Curators exhibition. Each year, this program enables local students to organize an exhibition of artwork created by their peers. This year, nineteen students from the Western New York area came together to create a show that focuses on how one creates a narrative through a variety of perspectives and media. Exposition will span two spaces, both the Albright-Knox Art Gallery’s Clifton Hall Link and the Buffalo Center for Arts and Technology (BCAT). It will include fifty-seven works chosen from nearly six hundred entries, submitted by high-school artists from nineteen different schools. The AK Teens: Future Curators program is made possible by the generous support of KeyBank.

Exposition is an exploration of visual storytelling. Each work in the exhibition contains or implies a narrative, perhaps prompting a memory, eliciting an emotion, or sending the viewer on a quest to untangle it. As Future Curator Ann Wang explains, “Each piece tells a story on its own, but also by interacting with other pieces.”

AK Teens: Future Curators is a program designed to expose local high school juniors and seniors to various museum-related fields in order to learn how museums operate. Over the duration of the program, students learn the many different components of mounting an exhibition. They meet with Albright-Knox staff members from all areas of museum operations with the ultimate goal of organizing an exhibition composed of artwork by local high school students. This program also gives young artists the opportunity to exhibit their artwork before they enter college.

The 2017 Future Curators team consists of nineteen students in grades eleven and twelve: Jayne Appelbaum (Nichols School), Roelissa Bedgood (Niagara Falls High School), WanXiang Chen (Niagara Falls High School), Olivia Colby (Kenmore East High School), Catherine Colpoys (Nardin Academy), Jose Cordovez (Charter High School for Applied Technologies), Khin Khin Htike (Sacred Heart Academy), Peter Keil (Canisius High School), Mikayla Kempski (Frontier High School), Julie Klein (Grand Island Senior High School), Jacquelyn Leicht (Cheektowaga Central High School), Forest Lovullo (PS 156 Frederick Law Olmsted), Caroline Magavern (Nichols School), Matthew Murray (Saint Joseph’s Collegiate Institute), Taylor Patterson (Lancaster High School), Gabrielle Russo (Sweet Home High School), Mari Salada (Lewiston-Porter High School), India Seychew (City Honors School), and Ann Wang (Williamsville East High School).

Beginning in January 2017, this creative team of young aspiring art professionals has been learning what goes on behind the scenes at the Albright-Knox. The Future Curators program allows students to use the museum’s collection and current exhibitions to begin thinking about art from the mindset of a curator.

Exposition will be on view in the Albright-Knox’s Clifton Hall Link from Friday, April 21, to Sunday, May 14, 2017, and in the gallery space at the Buffalo Center for Arts and Technology (located at 1221 Main Street in Buffalo) from Friday, April 7, to Thursday, April 27, 2017. Exhibition celebrations will be held on Thursday, April 20, at the Albright-Knox, and Thursday, April 27, at BCAT.

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