Image: Academy Art Museum, Easton
The Academy Art Museum in Easton has extended ‘The New Colossus: 2026 Teen Council Exhibition’ through Sunday, August 16, giving visitors an additional week to see the student-curated project. The museum said in a recent email that the exhibition is part of its Teen Council program and remains on view in the Spitaleri & Calvert Galleries. Admission is free.
According to the museum, ‘The New Colossus’ is the culminating exhibition of the 2026 Teen Council program. Eleven high school students from Maryland’s Mid-Shore region met weekly from January through May to study the museum’s permanent collection and collaboratively shape the show. The project is built around questions the students posed during that process, including who belongs, who is represented, and what freedom looks like now.
The exhibition takes its title from Emma Lazarus’s 1883 poem ‘The New Colossus,’ later installed at the base of the Statue of Liberty. The museum frames that poem as a meditation on welcome rather than conquest, and says the Teen Council members are considering that promise nearly 150 years later. Their work explores identity, belonging, inheritance and hope, while placing the museum’s collection under the perspective of the next generation.
The museum says the students selected artworks, designed the gallery layout and wrote original labels combining art-historical insight with personal reflection. In the exhibition text, the museum emphasizes that the project does not try to resolve the tension between aspiration and reality; instead, it creates space for dialogue, disagreement and possibility. The exhibition is timed to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
A caption on the exhibition page identifies one work included in the display as Beth Van Hoesen’s ‘Checks,’ an etching and printer’s inks on paper from 1962–63. The museum’s page also notes that the exhibition was made possible by a grant from the Montague Family.
The Teen Council show is one of two exhibitions the museum has recently highlighted as approaching their final weeks. In the same email, the museum also directed visitors to Lisa Elmaleh: ‘Promised Land/Tierra Prometida,’ which closes August 9. That project, shown in the museum’s Selections Gallery, is separate from ‘The New Colossus’ and is presented in dialogue with ‘Under the Mexican Sky: A Revolution in Modern Photography.’
‘The New Colossus: 2026 Teen Council Exhibition’ is on view June 2 through August 16, 2026, at the Academy Art Museum, 106 South Street, Easton, Maryland.
