At the front of the show is work by a group of teenagers who are known as the Drawing All-Star Fellows. At the opening, they clumped together Breakfast Club-style in the stairwell and explained to me the reputations that each person in their tight-knit group had cultivated: The Clown, not to be confused with The Jester, The Nice One, and The Silent Type. At the risk of sounding like a Boomer, particularly striking to me was the fact that nobody had their phones out and everybody seemed genuinely interested in talking with each other.
Drawing All-Star Fellowship is a two-and-a-half year program for a select group of high school students from across the city. Their work in the first section of the "Drawing Out" show is technically impressive as well as imaginative, often memory-based and invoking family lore. A charcoal piece by Angelique Lamboy recalls a memory of her aunt seeing a ghost of a cowboy in the dark hallway of her childhood home, while a watercolor piece by Avneet Kaur depicts her memories of playing pretend with her cousins reimagined through scenes in "Grey's Anatomy" and "The Sopranos."