In her years as an artist in South Lake Tahoe, Shelley Zentner has learned to find beauty amid pain and struggle. After the Caldor Fire of 2021 blazed across Echo Summit and came within a breath of her own home, Zentner created an acclaimed series of charcoal drawings and paintings that captured both sadness and eerie beauty. In “Two Suns,” the sun and its reflection on the Truckee River glow through charred trees and smoky air.
“I was surrounded by devastation, but there was also beautiful light and life coming through the trees,” she recalled. “When you see the possibility of finding beauty in dark times, that’s important as well. It allows for hope.”
Zentner has now taken that insight and applied it in a very different way. In a new exhibition at Untethered Tahoe, a shared workspace in Zephyr Cove, she has combined her own work with art created by students and teachers at South Tahoe Middle and High Schools.
Entitled “Drawn Out,” the exhibition was based on a question that Zentner asked the students: “What Do You Care About?”
Though the students initially responded with silence and blank stares, many of them produced polished art that is at turns beautiful, heart-breaking, witty and sometimes disturbing.
“I didn’t know how any of my ideas were going to land, and I was amazed by what some of the kids came up with,” Zentner says. “In stark contrast to the artful rhetoric of adults in power, these images tell the story of how young people haven’t yet lost the confidence to use their creativity to honestly express how they feel.”
“All Eyes On You,” by Georgia Rodriguez, consists of a violin covered in brightly colored eyes. The idea, Rodriguez told Zentner, was to convey anxiety due to feeling the need to please people. In “Missing Piece,” Melody Amanda painted what looks like a puzzle that shows a woman on a couch – but with a disconnected piece off the corner in which a girl sits on the floor in a fetal pose. In “She/Her,” Anwen Davies painted pronouns in an attempt to convey the feelings of transgender youth.
“I wanted to give them permission to express their feelings with whatever means they could, to be as honest and scary as needed. And they were. They all took care to make their work aesthetically pleasing, and they took their work to completion.”
Zentner’s own work includes some of her Caldor Fire charcoal drawings and paintings as well as more recent projects. The artist will be donating 25% of her sales to STMS & STHS Art departments and to the International Rescue Committee. Peace Love Tahoe organized the event. The student paintings will be up for auction, with part of the proceeds going to their school art departments and charities selected by each artist.
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June 02, 2024 at 08:00PM
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Seasoned artist teams up with South Lake Tahoe students in new exhibit - Tahoe Daily Tribune
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