Amber Tyler, 17, wondered how she could push her own creativity as she studied a photograph of renowned British artist Jenny Saville.
The Dunbar High School student was tasked with distorting the image of Saville’s face with chalk pastels to create a self-portrait distinctly different from the photo.
Without too much thought, Amber began painting with a bright green pastel to contrast with traditional human skin colors, she said. She then mixed shades of pink and orange into the hair and added vibrant blue in the eyes and on the mouth for emphasis.
The end result? A large-scale portrait that now hangs inside the Historic Stop Six school’s library for all students to see.
“It makes me proud that other people can see what I’ve done,” Amber said.
Amber’s portrait doesn’t hang alone. It shines beside other unique portraits in shades of yellow, red and brown created by classmates through a collaborative effort with the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.
Since 2018, Dunbar has partnered with the museum for the Modern Collaborative Studies, a program that helps students gain a deeper understanding of exhibitions, selected works and artists.
Participating teens take four trips to the Modern throughout the school year where they work with Jesse Morgan Barnett, the museum’s assistant curator of education, for workshops and exhibition tours.
“Each visit is designed to assist students in gaining confidence in thinking about modern and contemporary art and foster a lifelong relationship with the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth,” Barnett said via email.
The partnership was developed by longtime curator of education Terri Thornton, who died at 66 in 2024.
Dunbar students recently visited the Modern in mid-January to create the portraits while learning about the paintings featured in the “Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting” exhibition, which was on view through Jan. 18.
Saville is known for her large-scale oil paintings that illustrate various human emotions.
Senior Antoinette Nichols, 17, said the workshop allowed her to free her mind and practice a more abstract art style she wasn’t familiar with.
“My dad was very happy that I got out my comfort zone, because he’s never seen me do this type of stuff,” she said.
Most students who participate in the Modern’s program had never previously visited the Fort Worth museum, Dunbar art teacher William West said.
Edwin Dominguez, 18, was nervous the first time he visited the Modern this fall. He didn’t know if he would feel comfortable, he said. Once inside, Edwin said he was blown away by the “gorgeous” art pieces as well as the museum itself.
Antoinette worried people at the museum would talk badly about how she expressed herself, but the teen received support for her creativity, she said.
The Modern partnership has been nothing but positive over the seven years he’s worked at Dunbar, West said. The program takes students out of the campus setting and puts them in an entirely different environment, he said.
“It takes them out of their normal comfort zone and lets them explore and expand their artistic sensibilities,” West said. “And of course, the inspiration of the art in the museum, you can’t measure that.”
Seeing their works hang in the school’s library is an unreal moment, the teens said. The students will take their art home once the school year ends.
“I’ve never had an art piece just hang at school or anything like that before,” Edwin said. “To be honest, it makes me happy because someone else could see that artwork and have some type of feeling on it as well.”
Amber felt different emotions jumping from the canvas as she looked at each of the portraits. One of the best parts of the program is learning how each of her classmates’ creative minds work, she said.
“Not a single portrait is exactly the same,” she said. “They may have a similarity, maybe two, but it’s always different. Everybody is just unique.”
David Moreno is the arts and culture reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at david.moreno@fortworthreport.org or @davidmreports.
The Fort Worth Report’s arts and culture coverage is supported in part by the Meta Alice Keith Bratten Foundation and the Virginia Hobbs Charitable Trust. At the Report, news decisions are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policy here.
This article first appeared on Fort Worth Report and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
