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The Friends of the New Providence Memorial Library are excited to exhibit two young artists of New Providence, who have creatively expressed the life experiences and struggles of their generation.
Come to their artist reception on Thursday, April 9th, in the Conti Family Community Room, connected through the back side entrance of the library, from 5:00 to 6:30pm.
Olivia Dai & Maggie Liu
Olivia Dai & Maggie Liu
The exhibit of these two high school artists reflects their struggles that are unique to their young adult generation today, facing constant pressure to succeed. Social media fuels comparison and unrealistic expectations, while competitive college admissions push many to overload on rigorous classes, maintain high GPAs, and build resumes at an early age. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted relationships and milestones that affected social and emotional development. Despite social media posing as a platform that brings us closer together through connections and likes, it’s physically alienating and has depleted us of what it means to experience genuine, human connection.
Many feel simply exhausted: staying up late to study, scroll, or take in news of a world marked by crisis and uncertainty.
Maggie Liu
Maggie Liu
Maggie’s art expresses her journey to answer the question: "How do we find love (whether for ourselves, others, or life itself) while growing up in a time defined by struggle?"
Each artwork represents a small microcosm of experience: moments of frustration, isolation, pressure, and reflection that define what it feels like to grow up today. “Midnight Frustration” expresses the academic stress that builds until it feels explosive. “Covid Fear” reflects the loss of control and human connection during isolation. “Doom Scrolling” captures the suffocating cycle of phone addiction. “Hidden Truth” reveals the quiet exhaustion carried into each new day. Maggie processed her own experiences and recognized that these struggles are not faced alone, but shared across an entire generation.
Through creating this body of work, she realized that love exists in persistence, in survival, in the support of family and community, and in the act of continuing to create, despite uncertainty. She said, "It is this love and the struggle for love that unite us and give us hope."
Maggie Liu is a student at New Providence High School who is pursuing a Business degree with a minor in Art. She co-founded Net Love, a non-profit run by students dedicated to recycling tennis balls, and then founded Greencycle Crafts, which inspires the reuse of used tennis balls in conjunction with arts and crafts to help raise awareness for the need to protect our environment. Maggie is also a Graphical Artist for Curious Science Writers. Maggie Liu has been accepted into Tufts 5-year combination degree program next year, while she continue work as an artist (through the BFA degree with Boston Museum of Fine Arts) on top of a regular Tufts BS/BA degree.
Olivia Dai
Olivia Dai
Olivia named her exhibit, “Perceive Me,” to express how art can be used as a medium for exploration. She strives to blend fantasy, realism, and surrealism with dynamic, storytelling compositions. “Homunculus,” is inspired by Kim Jung Gi, using space and form to create a humanoid machine. Haruki Murakami’s influence can be seen in her video, “The Mysterious Hallway in My House,” where she emulates his method of storytelling to create an open-ended experience. Miles Johnston inspired her use of atmosphere and distorted subjects to create artworks with metaphorical meanings. “Nurture” features a muted color palette, strong light sources, and a quiet atmosphere. In “Normalcy,” she used a similar lighting scheme to create tension, representing imposter syndrome.
Homunculus
Normalcy
Artist's Block
Olivia often uses contrast to capture conceptual complexity in her pieces. In “War Paint,” war paint is typically painted on faces to symbolize strength before battle. However, the war paint in her piece shows an aftermath of war, and the paint, or scars, that are left behind. These scars can be both damaging and healing. On the right side, she experiments with imprinting feathers onto the wax to represent fragility and beauty. On the left side, she explores texture. She tries to emulate the violence in war by attacking the wax surface with clay carving tools and mixing in various foreign materials such as acrylic paint, salt, and Liquin.
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