On View: 2nd Annual Youth Art Showcase
March 13 - April 19, 2026
Curatorial Statement: The second annual ARTE NOIR Youth Art Showcase exhibition: Empowering Creativity features artwork by young African and African American artists, ages 8-18, who are embarking on a path to redefine the role of young people in the Pacific Northwest.
The Central District and surrounding area are fertile ground for inspiring youth in the fine arts as a viable path to cultivating ownership, business, critical thinking, and a creative voice in their community. ARTE NOIR celebrates the creative achievements of select youth who have been learning and creating expressive compositions as extensions of academic learning, personal hobbies, or as novice professional explorations of imagination, cultural narratives, and lived experience.
ARTE NOIR is fully invested in shaping, guiding, and exploring exhibitions that offer youth a space that affirms that they are welcomed, integral, and necessary in the design of our collective Black Future. ARTE NOIR’s Youth Art Showcase empowers participants to explore an open platform of themes related to resilience, Blackness, uniqueness, culture, legacy, and mental health through painting, drawing, puppet design, show design, and digital illustration. Each composition and visual expression reveals its ideas of a future, and ism, creating a youthful form of Afro-Futurism.
The Youth Arts Showcase is about giving young people real agency to shape a personal, cultural, and professional path in the fine arts industry, not just offering them an experience to be creative, but an opportunity to encourage, empower, and celebrate before achieving the manifestations of how far they can grow.
ART GALLERY
Meet the Artists
BIO
My name is Ilyas, and I am 8 years old. When I grow up, I want to be a professional basketball player. Basketball makes me feel happy and strong. I love practicing, shooting hoops, and pretending I’m in a big game. When my class was asked to make an artwork of an important Black person, I chose Michael Jordan right away. I didn’t even have to think about it. He is my favorite basketball player ever. He worked really hard and became one of the best players in the world. That makes me feel like I can do it too if I keep practicing and never give up. Michael Jordan is important because he showed that you can be great if you believe in yourself. I look up to him and hope I can be like him one day.
BIO
Isha is a 16-year-old Seattle native and a student at Highline Big Picture, a school that emphasizes personalized, interest-based learning. Since 2024, she has been an intern at ARTE NOIR, where she continues to develop her creative practice. Isha enjoys painting, digital illustration, animation, and traditional art. She hopes to pursue a career as a film director and dreams of traveling throughout Europe.
BIO
Braxton is a 9-year-old artist from Seattle whose work explores family, growth, and change through symbolic storytelling. Working in watercolor, he uses animals, color, and movement to reflect lived experience, imagination, and emotional understanding. Outside of painting, you can find Braxton swimming, playing drums, and on the soccer field. He loves animals and lives with a dog, a snake, and a turtle.
BIO
Artist Statement:
I come from a family of storytellers. My grandmother was an archivist who wrote a book documenting my family’s lineage so our name could never be forgotten. My mother is a poet who taught me that words could hold infinity. I grew up surrounded by memory keepers, and I’ve learned to hold a brush in the same way they held the pen–with historical competence, with care, with purpose, and with love.
My practice transgresses medium–I move between painting, digital collage, photography, filmmaking, and installation. I’ve never been satisfied by just sticking to just one. Each piece begins with something personal–a family photo, a found object, my lived experience–and grows into something that grasps both my life and the world around me simultaneously. My work often returns to the same questions: What does it mean to rebuild in a world built to forget you? What does it mean to be truly seen when your image has been systematically distorted? What does it mean to look for beauty in places that are intertwined with pain?
The Black body holds generations of faith, struggle, and glory. Across my work, I try to create a space where the extraordinary features of seemingly ordinary people—my people—are rendered intimately legible. I reject a fatalistic reading of our history: my pieces relay an optimism in Black potential. I make work that documents, heals, and redefines how Black life is remembered, forever building on the foundation my family laid for me.
BIO
Tristyn Johnson
BIO
My name is Kingston Kirkland. I am in the 3rd Grade at Renton Redeemer Christian School. I love God, Hip Hop, Track, math, spelling, drawing, my figurine superheroes, the black ones, Black Panther, and the Anime ones, fruit and vegetables, BBQ, '90s R&B, rap music, having fun with my family, making cookies, movies, science, having fun, being creative, and being BLACK!
BIO
My name is Norah Kirkland, I am in the 6th Grade at Renton Redeemer Christian School. I love basketball, cooking, shoe art design, creativity, music, having fun with my family, making cookies, movies, being crafty, science, and hip hop.
BIO
My name is Elysia; I'm 12 years old, and am in sixth grade. One of my favorite animals is a Spanish moon moth. I like baking and swimming, but my main hobby is art.
BIO
Adib Thomas is many things. He is a writer, an artist, a basketball player, and more recently, the creator of the oil pastel series Unification Nation and Disrespect. Adib also loves fashion, and he often spends his time outside or on adventures. Almost every part of his personal life is planned out in specific ways so that the outcome is beautifully unexpected. This is the way that Adib is hoping and expecting to live his life - Unexpectedly. Creating art is now a big step in Adib’s expectedly unexpected turns of events.
BIO
Jade Wiles is an 8th-grade student at Jane Addams Middle School. She enjoys expressing her creativity through art, especially sketching, which is her favorite art medium. Outside of the art room, Jade likes to play soccer and stay active with her team. Through both sports and art, she shows dedication, imagination, and a strong sense of passion for what she loves.
BIO
Jalen Wiles is a 5th grade student at Hazel Wolf School who likes to show his creativity through art and sketching. He gets ideas from things he does at school and outside of school, like practicing aikido. Aikido helps him use patience, focus, and balance when he makes art. His favorite kind of art is pencil sketching on thick paper because he enjoys adding details, shading, and texture to make his drawings come to life. This project is Jalen’s first time working with clay, and he is excited to try something new and learn more skills as an artist.