Archer Gallery’s Art Student Annual 2021 exhibition is a juried show, curated by a group of Clark College art professors. This year’s exhibition will be held entirely virtually, for the second consecutive spring, due to the pandemic.

Almost all of the work featured in this show has been made exclusively in our students’ homes while we’ve spent the last 15 months teaching and learning remotely. I have never been more proud of a group of students.

They have persevered through one of the most challenging and painful years of any of our lifetimes. I am in awe of their creativity, hard work, dedication, and drive - many of them care taking for family members, sharing workspaces with siblings, calling in to lectures in-between shifts at work, and some even dealing with grave sickness, in themselves and in their loved ones. Still - the work has remained poignant, fresh, and complex, exploring new mediums and ideas, conceptually & aesthetically navigating their way through not just compositions but a global pandemic, rampant social injustices, and regional & national political violence and division. If there was ever a time to celebrate the work of a year - the (sometimes literal) fruits of labor - it is now, and it is for our courageous & inspiring Clark College art students.

Image featured: Left: Shannon Guo, A Dialogue of Environmental Protection and the Future, Magazine Collage on Paper, 2021.