 Emma Wang performs at Sound Off! in a self-made dress. Photo credit: MoPOP and @sulu.tzn. By Anya Shukla Listening to Emma Wang perform her original songs at MoPOP’s Sky Church, one might think her jazzy, bright voice comes from the mouth of a 25-year-old, not a girl who’s still in high school. Although she’s been singing for most of her life, Wang’s polished sound has only started opening doors for her this year.
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By Dilinna Ugochukwu “Art is a way to show your voice,” Sofia Antonia Vazquez states. “It’s important that people of different races with different perspectives and cultures get their voices heard through art.” Through her artwork—which can transition from surreal depictions of drowning to realistic drawings against racial inequality—Vazquez shares her passions and ideas with the world.
By Dilinna Ugochukwu With eye-catching color contrasts and intricate detailing, Patteera Sudsok’s work is beautiful, brilliant, and focused on character design. They first started posting their art online in 2016 when they were in middle school, and have since grown a following on social media. When Sudsok first started posting, they were inspired by their love of cartoons. They like to draw fanart inspired by some of their favorite animated shows like “Adventure Time,” “Steven Universe,” “Attack on Titan,” and “Jujutsu Kaisen”; as well as the work of other online artists—with similarly cartoon-esque styles—like Gunzbie and CutiiCosmo. Sudsok’s work employs saturated colors, and can accurately be described as bright and eye-catching. Additionally, perhaps because of their love of animated shows, Sudsok is drawn towards creating character art over environments or backgrounds.
 Who would suspect that behind this smiling face lies the mind of a horror writer? (Photo credit: Mariama Diallo.) By Anya Shukla “When I woke up, the first thing I noticed was that I wasn’t in my house. I was in a cold and dark forest. I did not know how or when I got here.” With this eerie first paragraph, Mariama Diallo begins a short piece for class. Her descriptions of her character’s surroundings—old trees, with wood colored “dark, almost like black”; “leaves that crunched with every movement I made”—draw me into the story. Although only 13 (on the younger side of our teen features), she has a talent for the craft.
 "If you love what you're doing, just keep doing it," says singer/songwriter Yukta Ramanan. (Photo credit: Yukta Ramanan.) By Anya Shukla “I guess all this is part of living out the American Dream,” Yukta Ramanan sings, her voice sliding smoothly between notes as she riffs. “It’s not what it seems.” These lyrics come from Ramanan’s most recent song, titled on YouTube as “I wrote a song about Black Lives Matter.” Released in 2020, the piece raised awareness for the BLM movement last summer.
By Aaron Zhang As a biracial person, Chase Sterling (ze/hir) wants to use hir art to talk about hir identity. But noting hir privilege due to hir light skin, “I’m not sure if I should tell these stories,” ze said. “I think that’s the biggest barrier—my mind.”
By Aaron Zhang “Whenever I owned a color pencil set, there were always ten different shades of colors for white people, but there would only be two browns or one black,” Sameera Parveen recalled. She has faced other racial inequities in daily life—racist comments on YouTube and art videos depicting only white people—but this color pencil observation hurt her the most. “I had to find my own way to mix all the purples, blues, and greens to make the brown or black.”
 Paris Buren, Hermona Hadush, and Kalid Alobaidi, co-founders of POC3. By Aaron Zhang In class, “there’s this pressure to not say anything that could upset white people,” Kalid Alobaidi, co-founder of POC3, said. “If I started going off on a rant about something, I feel as though they might twist it and think, ‘Kalid’s being irrational.’"
By Aaron Zhang “I would describe myself usually as a person of words,” Mehek Gosalia said. This may seem counterintuitive, considering how she incorporates STEM in art—in our conversation, she made coding analogies to describe her work. However, she explained that she uses technological and artistic mediums to explore non-verbal communication.
By Aaron Zhang Michael Johnson explores different emotions through his vibrant doodle art pieces. In his piece about 2020, “CANCELLED,” he layers drawings of an Amazon package, a BLM hashtag, him graduating, a hornet nearly blending into the background, and one of his signature characters giving a thumbs-up to the viewer. He shows a range of colors and directions depicting the nuances, both happy and sad, of the year.
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