Welcome! These exhibits feature works from more than 500 students exploring their authentic selves, student activism, social distancing, and a love of reading.
Each exhibit is interactive, including a step-by-step guide for youth to add their own work. We encourage you to add your voice by signing our guest book and commenting on pieces that inspire you with words of support.
We are honored to empower children and teens with a platform to share their novel ideas.
Art & Lit | Creative Writing: Creating a Brave Space
In our Adolescent Book Group, creative writing becomes a powerful tool for self-expression. Using meaningful and diverse texts as inspiration, students connect what they read to their own lives and experiment with different forms of writing to express their truth. Led by published authors and professional writers, these sessions offer a brave and supportive space for students to explore their identities and share their stories in their own words and styles.
Through creative exercises like Six-Word Memoirs and Blackout Poetry, students are encouraged to reflect, take creative risks, and develop their voice—one poem, sentence, or word at a time.
Art & Lit | Graphic Tales: Stories of Community and Belonging
Step into a world where the magic of storytelling meets the colorful pages of graphic novels! Stories brought to life with illustration and color, bridge the gap in understanding, allowing us all to feel connected.
Young learners explored and took on a role that goes into developing a graphic novel: writer, inker, illustrator, line artist, colorist, editor, and publisher. They also learned about the methods that make up engaging and effective storytelling.
Each person identified their strength, and worked in teams to bring a story to life, culminating in this incredible collection!
Art & Lit | Collectively You Portrait
Authenticity happens when your words, actions, and behaviors consistently match your core identity. That core identity is a collage – or collection – of our experiences, our actions, our values, and our histories. So how do we put our authentic selves out there? We reflect and courageously share.
This year’s project encouraged students to create a portrait that explores the collage of who they are.
Art & Lit | The Future is Us: Listening to our hearts as a catalyst for change
The Future is Us celebrates students who became activists as they connected what they read to the world using the power of art. Students in grades 2-12 at three Title I schools participated in this exhibit that includes: a video tour of their activism banners created using a printmaking technique, a collection of student letters to community leadership, a special statement from local artists who designed the project, a step-by-step tutorial so you can print your own message, and more!
Covid Diaries by QuaranTEENS | Students write in-the-moment history
Right now, people all over the world are hungry for ways to understand what’s happening to them and around them. Additionally, we will someday want to share the stories about living through this time with our children and grandchildren. While unprecedented moments of upheaval produce great fear and immense loss, we can also find inspiring examples of joy and love. These moments teach us about the things we truly value and allow us to develop creative solutions to unforeseen problems using the resources we have available to us.
This left youth around the globe with this question: How can we be in-the-moment historians?
Find their responses in this truly once-in-a-lifetime exhibit, Covid Diaries by QuaranTEENS.
This gallery is made possible with community support and special thanks to:
For information on sponsoring Novel Ideas, contact us at [email protected]