What does collective change look, feel, and sound like?

This is the question high school students are leveraging creative mediums to answer in WMCAT’s Teen Arts + Tech Program. The tuition-free, afterschool experience not only provides professional instruction, supplies, and equipment; it also gives teens the space to build creative confidence and elevate their voice.

Students across the program’s visual arts and digital media studios are creating projects that showcase their unique artistic perspectives on what collective change looks, sounds, and feels like: recording music, using photos to compare past and present, making memes, producing a short film, designing clothing and jewelry that contrast peace and war, and more.

See what teen artists had to share during the creative process below, and explore teens’ finished pieces at wmcat.org/change.

What do you like about expressing yourself through art?

“You get to show stuff and not just talk about it. You can visually tell a story.”

Jude DeWit, Video Production

“I love that [an artistic expression] can be taken many different ways. There’s not like one firm meaning to a piece. I mean, there’s the artist’s intention, but the viewer can take it in a different way, and I think that’s really interesting.”

Lulu Nygaard-Tap, Fashion Design

What are you hoping to express through your collective change piece?

“People online say they really want collective change, but it’s like they don’t want to do anything about it . . . they go on with their day. So that’s what I wanted to capture with my project.”

Tyies Kemp, Digital Illustration

“I wanted to show my perspective being transgender . . . With photography, I thought that one way I could express that would be taking an older photo versus a new one. I wanted to just recreate that as what I am now, how different I am, and what’s changed.”

Reese Winbigler (left), Photography