Southern Exposure is pleased to present Reach Out, Protect Your Time, an exhibition from our Artists in Education program exploring the magic of shared time and the ways in which art can preserve, expand, and transform a singular moment into something lasting. Guided by teaching artists Erina Alejo, Mario Pires Cordeiro, and Sun Park, alongside Artists in Education Manager Simon Tran, participants created an expansive body of work spanning painting, sculpture, tarot decks, textiles, and imagined creatures.

Developed through Southern Exposure's Mission Voices Summer Program, the exhibition is the culmination of an intensive month-long residency in which local teenagers transformed the gallery into a collaborative studio, experimenting across disciplines while building community through creative practice. Each summer, the program offers young artists the rare opportunity to work freely within Southern Exposure's exhibition space, creating an environment where experimentation, dialogue, and collective learning flourish.

This year's exhibition reflects the ideas that emerged most powerfully throughout the program: growth, self-care, memory, and nostalgia. Together, these works consider time not simply as something that passes, but as a resource to be nurtured, shared, and reclaimed. Through deeply personal and imaginative projects, the artists ask how moments spent making, reflecting, and caring for one another can generate lasting forms of connection.

Reach Out, Protect Your Time celebrates the creativity, curiosity, and resilience of a new generation of artists while highlighting the importance of spaces that encourage youth to imagine new futures together.