The interior of Maggie Agosto ’26’s dollhouse.
Ethan Liu ’26’s piece featuring acrylic paint splatters over a model of the Boston skyline.
Aeva Cleare ’26 working on her headpiece for the upcoming exhibition “Epilogue.”
The Art 600 class visits instructor in art Renée Silva’s exhibit for inspiration for their upcoming exhibit.
Throughout the year, Art-600 students have been pushing creative boundaries, confronting artistic challenges, and transforming abstract topics into concrete works. Now, their labor culminates in a showcase that reveals personal growth and discovered identity.
The exhibition, titled “Epilogue,” features work from students who have devoted the entire academic year to developing independent studio projects. Junko Pinkowski, Instructor in Art and of Art-600, explains that each student’s unique background in medium and skill set leads them to present individualized interpretations of the exhibition’s theme.
“The approach is different [for each Art-600 exhibition and] the concept is different. They come up with their own exhibition title, which this year’s title is called ‘Epilogue.’ Everybody has such a different translation of ‘Epilogue.’ So that itself is really fun to see, how students develop their own work through the word,” said Pinkowski.
Pinkowski continued, “The uniqueness of it is its students coming in from many different courses. So I have artists, I have photographers, I have painters, illustrators, filmmakers, sculptors, and ceramicists. We have a really wide range of students with different skills, but they are all independently extremely creative…The uniqueness is the skill sets that people have, and they’re great creative thinkers. They would take the given theme or even my little suggestion, and they have the ability to take it to the next level, which is probably one of the most exciting parts for me teaching this course.”
For Aeva Cleare ’26, “Epilogue” inspired her to root their work in her heritage and culture. Cleare spent the first day of the project cutting newspaper into scaled shapes to visualize the structure before moving into cardboard construction across the Winter term.
“[My piece] is a cardboard headpiece with papier-mâché, and I’ve painted it and I’m currently rhinestoning part of it. I’ll be adding other ornamental stuff, like feathers and strings and beads. It’s all supposed to be a headpiece from my country’s celebratory fest, like a carnival. It happens the day after Christmas. It’s called Junkanoo, [and it’s] a whole lot of fun and it’s part of my culture, so I really wanted to integrate that…And then as for my other piece, I tried to emulate a rising sun. it’s part of the Bahamian National Anthem, and I also think it fits the theme of epilogue really well,” said Cleare.
Photographer and filmmaker Ethan Liu ’26 has spent more than two years documenting strangers in Boston’s Back Bay during Saturday trips for jazz rehearsals at the New England Conservatory. His exhibition piece transforms the ongoing practice into a three-dimensional map of the same route he takes, placing photographs at the exact spot where they were taken.
“I think this project made me put meaning to what I was doing through art. Putting an end, perhaps, to something that has been constant in my life, putting some sort of artificial barrier to that makes me able to categorize and understand what it was. For street photography, this project is a way of me putting a cover on what has happened in the past years, and I’m able to look back, understand things that have happened, why they’ve happened, and how that’s shaped me over the years,” said Liu.
For River Borroel ’26, the exhibition became an opportunity for introspection through sequential art. Their series of comics explores death, transition, and reflection on their time at Andover, along with a custom shelf that ties into the epilogue theme.
“This piece is both a bit of myself and also an invitation for others to look at themselves as well. Every time I do more introspective work, that’s the goal that I try and go for is to get other people to maybe start thinking about the ways that they interact with themselves and the ways that they understand their being… I would maybe like to encourage other people to think about that themselves, just because I think it is providing me with a lot of perspective about how I spend my time and how I’ve begun to value different things as I’ve gotten older,” said Borroel.
Working at this scale across an entire year has also pushed students to confront the less visible parts of the art process, from long stretches of revision to technical work and moments of stalled progress. Cleare reflected on what the process has taught her about pacing and self-discipline.
“Art is a lot of trial and error. I’ve had to redo a lot of things in the process. Something I should probably take more care to do in the future is properly researching. There are people who have done what I’m doing in the past, and surely there’s advice somewhere on the internet, and a lot of the time I just dive straight into the project. Which means, of course, along the way I’ll make mistakes and have to end up redoing them. So I’ve learned to have a little bit more patience with myself on that sort of thing and not just give up on a project, and actually finish the thing,” said Cleare.
