Top: Artist and senior Kemaya Richardson-Francis presents her capstone project to her peers in the visual arts department. Bottom: Students look at Richardson-Francis’ work, which explores childhood and memory. Lucy Gellman Photos.
The little girl is watching something on the table, wide-eyed and curious as the world swirls into being around her. Beneath her hands, a blush-colored table cuts through the frame; red yarn wraps around one forearm in a bright zigzag. Her small mouth hangs open in a dainty O, tongue visible between her parted lips.The words Forever As A — rise softly from the canvas, stitched onto its surface in red yarn. Where they cut off, a spool of yarn hangs suspended, as if it still has so much more to say.
Kemaya Richardson-Francis’ Forever As A Memory is part of a revamped capstone program at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School, where the visual arts department is working to rebuild and reframe the senior research projects one painting, sculpture, photograph and video at a time. Tuesday afternoon, 28 seniors unveiled their work in the school’s art gallery, which sits at the corner of College and Crown Streets in the heart of downtown New Haven.
For several students, the process has been revelatory, challenging them to gather new information, learn about artists and visual movements that have come before them, and clearly communicate their practice and technique for the first time in their young careers. Faculty members in the department, who have been pushing for the change, include chair and sculptor Ryan Minezzi, painters Erin Michaud and Zach Chernak, photographer Chris Randall, and videographer Isaiah Providence.
Michaud and student Isabel Aviles with her paintings In Her Hands and Slowly Ticking.
“We’re trying to have high expectations and prepare students to enter the real world,” said Minezzi, who started at Co-Op in the fall of 2023 and credited Michaud with the momentum behind a new capstone curriculum. “In the end, students are proud of their work, and they should be. They worked really hard. They brought it—we were really impressed.”
“They’re researching artists and telling a story,” Michaud added. “It’s less about final products and more about the journey to get there.”
In large part, that shift is owing to Minezzi and Michaud, who have both arrived at the school within the last three academic years. Last year—Michaud’s first at Co-Op, but 25th in the New Haven Public Schools district—the two started talking about an overhaul of the capstone program, which had been running on autopilot.
Michaud envisioned a curriculum that centered not only student artmaking—proof of which already covers the school’s hallways, ramps, second floor landing and library—but also research, storyboarding, guiding questions, and final presentations, as well as a formal gallery opening. As teachers built out the idea, they enlisted the help of professional artists and grad students at the Yale School of Art, marking an inaugural partnership.
It’s one that Minezzi hopes will continue, he said: it’s been “really nice” to grow a circle of support around the students.
Angie Hernandez: “The stories are overwhelming. It is mind-numbing to see how often this happens and how often it’s not talked about.”
Tuesday, friends, family and professional artists all buzzed through the gallery, stopping to look closely at all make and manner of artwork Just outside the gallery, Michaud’s vision of an opening came to life with the rise and fall of conversation, a table laden with snacks and sparkling cider as an orchestra of string students played nearby.
Inside the gallery, the works spoke for themselves. Along one wall, senior Angie Hernandez pulled viewers in with her multimedia installation, a black-and-white collage of magazine covers with four paintings hanging across its surface. In front of them, Hernandez had placed her ceramic “children,” a suite of four fragmented, urn-sized bodies splattered with red paint and pellet-sized red filling. A sprig of green erupted from one’s neck, fanning out where the head would otherwise be.
For Hernandez, the project has been gestating for the better part of two years, since she picked up a copy of Jeanette McCurdy’s 2022 “I’m Glad My Mom Died” and devoured the entirety during school hours. At home, her parents objected to the book: her mom didn’t particularly like the title and thought that the subject matter was too dark for her daughter to be reading. But Hernandez loved it; McCurdy’s story completely changed how she thought about celebrity and exploitation.
“I grew up watching actors and thinking, ‘Oh, their lives must be wonderful,’” she recalled. Then she read the book, and it completely turned her perspective on its head. She realized that behind the scenes, actors—especially young women—were just as vulnerable and susceptible to suffering and exploitation as those far away from the spotlight.
Hernandez presents her research to an audience of peers and teachers on Tuesday afternoon.
Her sophomore year, it inspired several papers, on everything from exploitation at the hands of parent-managers to substance use disorder and coerced nudity. The more she read and wrote, the more “I realized I wasn’t done exploring this topic,” she said.
So when she started working on her capstone project, something clicked. She combed over memoirs, biographies and documentaries on Brooke Sheilds, Paris Hilton, Brittany Spears and Judy Garland. She studied the lives and careers of artists May Van Krough, Shinataro Ohata, and Willy Verginer. She poured herself into recent history, looking at how popular media fetishized these young women, who adults often failed to protect when they needed it most.
“The process was overwhelming,” she said. It was painful for her, for instance, to learn that Sheilds’ mother had pushed her to pose nude for Playboy when she was just 10 years old. When she was designing a collage element for the project, she figured out a way to reference the cover while not showing Sheilds’ exposed, pre-pubescent body and exploiting her anew in the process. “The stories are overwhelming. It is mind-numbing to see how often this happens and how often it’s not talked about.”
Along the way, she said, it was sometimes so heavy that she needed to take breaks, or step away from the pieces. “I journaled a lot,” she said. She also realized that her art could be a form of activism. While “I did not feel like there was much I could do” in the beginning, the project became her own way of speaking truth to power, and engaging other students in a conversation around how vulnerable these young celebrities may be.
Top: Work by Michael St. Arnault, whose project Wiped Out focused on wildlife and the natural world. Bottom: Senior Isaiah Pernell, who was inspired by his love of music. “It was always by my side,” he said of choosing the topic to pursue for his capstone presentation.
Nearby, senior Isabel Aviles welcomed passers-by over to her gallery wall, a display of three paintings addressing death and religion across the globe. In the lead up to her project, she said, she found herself thinking about faith traditions through her grandmother, a Puerto Rican matriarch who prays every morning in the family’s living room. As a girl, Aviles grew up listening to those prayers, the words swirling around her head in a cloud of piety.
So when she began research for her capstone, it became an exploration into how different cultures around the world view death. From where she lives in New Haven, she criss-crossed the globe, bringing in references from Día de los Muertos in Mexico and Latin America to the female ghosts and spirits that populate Japanese folklore. Her research took her to 20th-century Mexico City, where she drew inspiration from Frida Kahlo, and to contemporary California, where the artist David Lozeau has gained recognition for his vivid, fantastical depictions of Day of the Dead.
Intrigued by the passage of time—”it is always slipping away,” she said in a surprisingly upbeat, matter-of-fact voice—she also folded in references to Salvador Dalí, including a butter-yellow canvas with a working clock built into it. In that painting, titled Slowly Ticking, a blue clock drips thick, beeswax-colored paint as a gothic, spindly minute hand moves ever forward, on its precipitous march into the future.
“Before I started doing this, I really feared death,” she said, gesturing to an acrylic-on-canvas skull the color of stone, and two kimono-clad hands that gingerly held it out like an offering. “But after doing this [capstone], I realized, it’s inevitable. It’s gonna happen. It’s better to just accept it so you can move on with life.”
Photographer Marianna Garcia, who focused on depicting fighting in a new light.
Across the gallery, other young artists have brought works suffused with life, enamored of the act of existing even and especially when the world is on its head. In Mariana Garcia’s photographs of Muay Thai fighting in Fair Haven, there’s a constant balance of fierce, literally punchy brawn and intense tenderness, a reflection of her own love for the sport and belief that it is often misunderstood as overly violent and isolationist.
“There’s a lot of respect, there’s a lot of emotion [in fighting],” Garcia said Tuesday, as she stood beside several photos with a sublime, sun-drenched kind of natural lighting that felt more painterly than photographic. “It helps me de-stress and it gives me something to better myself.”
When she thought about a capstone project, she added, shining light on fighting just made sense. Two and a half years ago, Garcia started doing Muay Thai at the State Street gym Ronin BJJ as a way to clear her mind, inspired by an older brother who also loved the sport. Documenting it felt natural to her: for years, she’s been that kid clutching a camera at events, whether it was a disposable at summer camp or a phone at school.
Like her peers, she jumped into research, drawing inspiration from photographers including Larry Fink and Neil Leifer. She experimented with framing and subjects and timing, capturing both the ring in action and the hours of training, stretching, wrapping and fight prep meant to protect people from injury (it helps that her teacher, photographer Chris Randall, may be the unofficial documentarian of New Haven, at least in the last two decades). After taking hundreds of shots, she came out with a selection meant to show the grace and care that go into the sport.
“It’s all about community,” she said Tuesday, stepping away from the photographs for just a moment. In an image on the wall behind her, thick sheafs of light fell over a fighter posed against a concrete wall, fists raised and ensconced in their gloves. “People think it’s a lonely sport, and it’s not. Fighting can be beautiful. It’s about the journey that you go through—not just getting in a fight.”
Brianna Squailia.
Around her, peers like Richardson-Francis and Brianna Squailia looked further inward, focused on the work that had gotten them to senior year. For Richardson-Francis, that has looked like a trip down memory lane, thanks largely to a cache of meticulous, well-loved scrapbooks from her childhood that her mother has safeguarded for years.
“In all of them, I’m doing something creative,” Richardson-Francis said, noting that her painting Beginning is meant to pay homage to those early artistic years.
In the work, which is acrylic and oil pastel with red string, a young Kemaya sits over a table covered in white paper, focused entirely on the act of drawing. In her left hand, a blue marker glides across the paper, birthing tiny sapphire tributaries in its wake. She’s clearly been at this for a while: the page is covered in squigglies, with doodles of dogs and flowers at the edges. The primary colors are so deeply embedded in childhood that a viewer can feel the longing and nostalgia in their bones.
“I think I was so focused on remembering my childhood because we’re about to enter the real world,” she said Tuesday as peers and families filled the gallery, and the hum of chatter filled the space. Working with Michaud, she studied artists like William Merritt Chase, Winslow Homer, and Berthe Morisot, drawing particular inspiration from Morisot’s depictions of mothers and their children.
“I want the viewers of my work to look into their own memories and childhoods, to wonder what has changed and what has stayed the same,” she wrote in an accompanying artist’s statement. “Is there a connection to fate? The focus of Forever as a Memory is to look into the past and appreciate the art of staying true to yourself, even from infancy.”
Squailia, meanwhile, focused on her present, in a project that ultimately became as much about her process itself as her own lifelong struggle with perfectionism. Standing in front of her painting Decay, she described working on the capstone, and feeling “like I wanted to tear my skin off.”
In the painting, a figure rips at their sludge-colored skin, head and shoulders thrown back in agony. Beneath their ribcage, their organs are black and rotting, the color of tar. A surreal, blue-green swirl of color fills the background, so thick and aggressive it looks like it is rising off the canvas.
For Squailia, the piece is all about how she navigated the past several months, as research introduced her to painters like Francisco Goya (the artist’s Saturn Eating His Children proved especially influential as she was working). To get through the capstone, she had to identify the anxiety and dread that she was feeling, and then work through it. It’s made her a stronger artist in the process.
“I love art, and I’m trying to enjoy the process of creating,” she said. She used a QR code to pull up her full capstone presentation and scrolled to a piece titled Breathe, in which she tried to let go of her perfectionism and opted for freer, quicker brushstrokes. “This piece was made in that learning period.”