Queens University student Bree Stallings doesn't just want to make a good grade for her senior thesis — she wants to make an impact. Her project, an exhibit titled Modern Poverty: An Introspective Art Show, will raise money for art-community schools and an AIDS orphanage in Khayelitsha, a suburb of Cape Town, South Africa. Stallings' emotions were rattled after visiting the country on a school trip. She saw children living in harsh conditions and witnessed the mass effects of AIDS. The experience led her to ponder the plight of the poor and to create her "Foreclosed But Not Forever" series — a body of work about her own struggles as a child growing up with a family that lived from paycheck to paycheck in a foreclosed home. Bree also asked other local artists — including Nico Amortegui and Jerry Lee Kirk — to contribute pieces which address their own struggles, failures and successes in relation to poverty. Amortegui's "El Sicario" addresses young people in Colombia who work for the mafia as a means of economic survival. Sounds like "A" material to us.
— Anita Overcash