Spotlight on Artist Andrea Campos

Welcome to The Elective’s digital art museum, dedicated to the incredible work of AP Arts students. Each week we highlight a work or series created in one of the AP Arts concentrations—AP 2-D Art and Design, 3-D Art and Design, and AP Drawing (the AP Program also offers Art History and Music Theory)—as well as a statement from the artist (and, occasionally, their teacher).

From the first cave paintings to contemporary breakthroughs in virtually reality, art, in all its forms, has been a crucial way for people to process, make sense of, comment on, and grapple with the world around them. In 2020, there is a lot to process and grapple with—and AP Art students have risen to the challenge. The work many of them submitted in their final portfolios is explicitly of the moment, from commentary on the covid-19 pandemic to the celebration of people of color to the nature of heroism in perilous times.

The work is often challenging and provocative but always insightful, inspiring, and expansive.

This week we feature an acrylic-on-cardstock work made by Andrea Campos from Folsom High School in Folsom, CA.

Here’s Andrea’s statement on the work:

"My portfolio depicts my psychological growth. We communicate through hints one must piece together more often than we do through clear confessions. And in my experience, the subtle and unspoken truths are more rewarding.

This inspired me. I constructed narratives about what stirred in me the most through hints: flat, simplified representations of myself and other things, bubbles of speech, text tangential to my pieces’ messages, and color. I told my audience what I was feeling without ever letting them know what happened. What happened is not the important part. What is important is that the red, green, and black invoke discomfort, which is what time made me feel. It is that the white scrawl in the midst of churning black abstract brushwork reading "I've been trying" implies a struggle to keep a relationship. The speech bubble 10 times larger than the figure it was born from feels ambitious, and the contours of girls sprouting from the glowing gradient of hues are enticing.

The tools I used in this body of work, including paints and modeling paste, allowed me to give my viewers their own—the tools to understand who I am, and how I got here."

Here are a few more pieces from Andrea’s portfolio:

Student statements are lightly edited for clarity.