Poly Prep visual art students Leila Ross ’26, Jack Ferreira ’27 and Ryan Liu ’29 were chosen to have their artwork showcased in the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) ‘Imagined Futures’ exhibit this spring. Their artwork will be on display from March 7, 2026 to April 26, 2026. “It’s great to practice getting your work out into the world beyond our school communities. It gives students the opportunity to think about their work in a new context,” said Charles and Valerie Diker Chair of Visual Arts Laura Coppola.
The MoMa is an institution that is dedicated to presenting a rich collection of contemporary art to New York City. MoMa’s Teens-in-Residence is the group behind the ‘Imagined Futures’ exhibit. Student-artists throughout New York City were presented with the prompt “What kind of futures do you imagine?” The competition garnered over 200 responses and MoMa’s Teens-in-Residence selected the winning artworks and curated the exhibition.
Coppola initially heard about the competition via email from the museum. “It must have been some time in the fall, I just received an email with a call for submissions to this teen art show…I posted the information on all of my Google Classrooms, shared it with other of visual arts faculty who shared it with their students, and then we had a number of students tell us that they were interested,” said Coppola. After information about this opportunity was disseminated by Coppola, interested visual arts students began crafting their submissions or pulling from their portfolio. “Given that I already had made the pieces, It was something not too hard to submit to. I think the MoMa, being from New York City, is such an iconic museum. I thought it would be really cool if I won,” said Ross.
Ross later received an email telling her that she won for her submission ‘Reaching In, Reaching Out,’ a piece that she originally made for her ceramics class and recontextualized to fit the theme of the exhibit. For Ross, the creative process began in the classroom. The hands motif Ross originally brainstormed made it to her final artwork. “It was basically two pots with two hands. I put pots together and one hand was coming out and the other was gripping onto the other one. I talked about how you can reach in for your identity and reach out and project that on other people,” she explained.
Ferreira also repurposed an in-class assignment as his submission to the MoMa. Ferreira, who learned about the competition from his photography class, won for his photo essay ‘Monolith of Bethlehem Steel.’ “I had recently done a shoot on Bethlehem Steel, which is this steel factory that went bankrupt and shut down…and when I heard about this opportunity, I decided it was a good idea to submit my stuff because it fit the theme of an imagined future,” said Ferreira. “I thought it would be fitting to represent this industry as one towering structure. My main point was even though Bethlem went bankrupt and the factory is no longer in use it still stands there and is towering…the town is kind of defined by the factory that was once there,” he added.
Liu, however, created an entirely new piece for his submission as opposed to repurposing an old one.“The prompt basically asked us to imagine a future and I was imagining what my room could look like in 100, 200 years,” he said. Liu’s drawing ‘My New Dog’ is his interpretation of a futuristic adolescent bedroom. “It’s basically about this dog in a futuristic setting in space and you can see the world behind it. It’s supposedly in the room of a little boy: you can also see trophies, rockets, [and] toys,” said Liu.
So what’s next for these artists and student-artists within all of Poly? “I’ve developed this interest and I’ve been on the lookout for more places to submit my stuff, because I enjoy the process,” said Ferreira. He went on to say that he hopes students have this opportunity and more in the future.
“There are so many different ways to be involved and so introducing students to cultural institutions in the world of arts, beyond art making in a school studio is really important. So absolutely, we’ll continue to foster those connections and I hope that it sparked something in them that they want to pursue.” said Coppola.
