High School has always been the most transformative period of maturation and the most influential in the unfolding of one's own identity. As young adults, we are caught in a period of conflicting perspectives, when the requirements of the adult world move into the foreground, coming up against the frustrations of dependency. When the first instances of love, jealousy, and passion flood the senses and the heart. When peer stressors, like alienation, romantic breakups, or bullying are experienced. When our capacity to endure the dangers of risk and experimentation are first put to the test. When the future is unknown but teaming with possibility. 

The 25 works in Rainbow High touch on all of these subjects in a variety of different conceptual and formal approaches. Artists like Jeremy Jaspers and Jennifer Sullivan tenderly observe this age from the tradition of portraiture with a mix of apprehensiveness and melancholy, while artists like Andrew Artman, Catherine Haggarty and Nora Riggs touch on the emerging adult's reliance on social status and perceptions of belonging. Emotional intensities are also subjects of consideration, like the ecstasy of one's first love, as in Susan Carr's sculpture Being Rainbows, or in John Duff's artwork, Gaboosh, where righteous outrage is directed at the society at large. Social withdrawal via video games, fantasy, or experimentation with drugs and alcohol are regarded with both pathos and humor.

The experiences we encounter from childhood to the independence of adulthood can be negative, while others are advantageous, bolstering -- friendships and impressions that create lifelong meaning and value. Rainbow High aims to distill the exuberance, obsessions, amorousness and anxieties felt during adolescence in a way that only art can do.