AP Art of the Week
Spotlight on Artist Annie Xia
Welcome to The Elective’s digital art museum, dedicated to the incredible work of AP Arts students. This week we feature a color pencil work made by Annie Xia from Booker T. Washington Magnet High School in Montgomery, Alabama.
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 a color pencil work made by Annie Xia from Booker T. Washington Magnet High School in Montgomery, Alabama.
Here’s Annie’s statement on the work:
“This work, titled ‘The Fool,’ is an 18 x 12 inch colored pencil piece inspired by the complex themes of tarot cards. During the making of my AP portfolio, I wanted to explore storytelling through drawings. This piece, in particular, is about naivety or blissful ignorance. It shows a girl whose eyes were covered, and even not knowing who had covered her eyes, blindly trusted them with a smile on her face. She is innocent, foolish. I used my classmate as a model so that I would have an original reference.
My goal with this piece, and my portfolio, was to take the preestablished tarot cards theme and images and reinvent them into something that could relate to the modern person. I used my classmates as the subjects as high school students are in essence at the beginning of their journey into adulthood.”
And here are a few more works from Annie’s portfolio:
Student statements are lightly edited for length and clarity.
