Spotlight on Artist Prince Abrahams

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 Prismacolor on wood work made by Prince Abrahams from Beverly Hills High School in Beverly Hills, CA.

Here’s Prince’s statement on the work:

"Creatively speaking, I am most fascinated by the fundamentals. In my art, these fundamentals are light, shadow, and contours. In my daily life, it's religion. Growing up gay and also Christian, I was always at an internal war between myself and God.

My main goal with my portfolio was to translate my dysphoria for religion into physical manifestations; the natural with the unnatural. I did this by taking religious insignias and merging them with conceptualized forms, with a result that could be defined as sacrilegious.

My process followed a basic plan. It started with my research for religious symbols, from the upside-down cross to the Jainism swastika. These symbols inspired the forms they would later envelop. My main influence on the way was to depict forms as fabrics, as they elicited the basic fundamentals of light, shadow, and contour. Although its form is constant, the fabric can be visually analyzed in many ways. I channeled these influences, into every piece in my portfolio, to create forms that jumped out at the viewer and also answered my inquiry question: How can I use the human form to depict the corrupt construct of religion?"

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

Student statements are lightly edited for clarity.