Young Artists Snare The Spotlight At Area Museums

Growing up, Meghan MacFarlane did not consider herself to be artistic. She said her talent stopped at stick figures.

But when she took a basic art class in ninth grade, she unleashed a skill and passion she never knew she had.

Now in her senior year at Southampton High School, the 17-year-old—along with hundreds of other students from local schools in grades nine through 12—will have her work hanging in one of the most renowned galleries on the East End: the Parrish Art Museum.

On Saturday, January 28, “High School Exhibition” will open at the Southampton museum.

And that same day, one town over, the 20th annual “Student Art Festival Part I,” featuring work from local prekindergartners through eighth-graders, will kick off at Guild Hall in East Hampton.

“Part of our mission is to embrace all works from the East End and all East End artists,” Guild Hall Interim Assistant Curator and Registrar Elizabeth Faulhaber said during a telephone interview last week. “These are the young artists, up and coming. We definitely try to show the work off that our youth here on the East End is making.”

Guild Hall is filling up two galleries with artwork, from watercolors and pencil drawings to sculpture and mixed media, Ms. Faulhaber said. At that museum, there will be a piggy bank collection, and the Montauk School has made a paper-mâché replica of one of the stone heads from Easter Island, Ms. Faulhaber said.

“I hear it’s 7 feet tall,” she said. “That should be interesting.”

The Parrish Art Museum’s gallery will feature work from older students covering nearly all media—even video. Director of Education Cara Conklin-Wingfield asked teachers to submit portraiture, more than anything else, so that it would work well with the selections from the museum’s permanent collection that are currently on view, originally displayed as part of “American Portraits: Treasures from the Parrish Art Museum,” she explained during a telephone interview last week.

One of Ms. MacFarlane’s pieces will fit right into the Parrish collection. The left side of her two-part oil pastel self portrait is the Southampton student at age 8. The right side of the piece is her at present day.

“I decided to do myself as 8 years old because I was very innocent then,” Ms. MacFarlane said during a telephone interview last week. “I wanted to do that and then show myself now.”

Her second submission is a charcoal drawing of a seated skeleton playing the piano, she explained.

“I take it as a compliment, really, to have my pieces in the Parrish,” the young artist said.

When younger students see their work hanging up in Guild Hall, their faces light up, Ms. Faulhaber said, adding that she knows what the feeling is like. During her own days in seventh and eighth grade at East Hampton Middle School, she had work in the Guild Hall galleries herself.

“We’ve been doing it for a long, long time—since I was in school,” Ms. Faulhaber reported. “I used to look forward to the ‘Student Art Festival’ coming up, and now I work at Guild Hall. Pretty funny. It all comes around.”

Both organizers emphasized that their shows are not just for students, their parents and extended family. The exhibits are instead a taste of the fresh, new talent bubbling up on the East End, Ms. Conklin-Wingfield said.

“I always find it really interesting that we have a lot of visitors that don’t necessarily have any connection to the show by a child or grandchild,” she said of the people who come to see the student artwork exhibit at the Parrish. “They really, really enjoy seeing how creative and expressive young people are. They don’t get featured enough.”

The 20th annual “Student Art Festival Part I,” with work by students in prekindergarten through eighth grade, opens at Guild Hall in East Hampton on Saturday, January 28, with a reception from 2 to 4 p.m. “High School Exhibition” opens the same day at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, with a reception planned starting at 5 p.m. Admission is free for both shows. For more information on Guild Hall, call 324-0806, ext. 19 or visit guildhall.org. For more information on the Parrish, call 283-2118, ext. 21 or visit parrishart.org. Both shows will remain on view through Sunday, February 26.