Young Artist Brings Diversity To Her Art

Adriana De La Torre uses her artistic talent to bring awareness to social issues.

De La Torre is a June graduate of the New World School of the Arts High School. Being of Mexican and Japanese descent, she focuses on domestic and social issues facing women of color using soft sculptures and collages.

“I’m not answering any of the problems,” said the 18-year-old. “It’s more like drawing attention to them… I think the biggest problem is complacency.”

De La Torre, who will be attending Cooper Union in New York City this fall to pursue a  degree in art, has received high praise and recognition for her work. This is evident by the Young Arts Award she was given during her senior year of high school.  

The scholarship involved working with some of the most talented and creative minds in the U.S. De La Torre said the program taught her to more deeply analyze the purpose of her art, how it will affect others and why she makes it. Now she strives to make higher quality pieces in a smaller quantity.

After receiving the Young Arts Award, she applied for the Presidential Scholars program which recognizes the academic success of graduating U.S. students, but she didn’t expect much out of it. However, she received the award for her intense dedication to both school and her art. De La Torre received straight A’s, took AP and dual enrollment classes, and spent her lunch hour tutoring other students.

Aside from her artwork, De La Torre also uses visual media as a platform. She’s had two pieces displayed in film competitions, one displayed at a national short film competition hosted by the Perez Art Museum and the other at a Borscht Film Festival in Miami.

The short film displayed at PAMM focused on an ancient form of Japanese dance called butoh. Inspired by her family members, De La Torre morphed the colors and mixed in messages following the theme of mental illness, something she felt she had to shed light on.

De La Torre experimented with butoh in specific because of its quiet and eerie qualities. It portrays an aspect of the human experience that few other art forms can.

Toward the end of her high school career, De La Torre focused much of her art on her Japanese background. She dedicated several pieces of art to her terminally ill grandfather who spent time in a Japanese internment camp in the U.S. during World War II.

“She has been determined to succeed and to give that as a gift back to her grandfather,”  De La Torre’s senior art teacher, Jenny Gifford said. “She even put his name on her Presidential Scholars Award to give him that sort of gift saying thank you for doing what you’ve done with your life to make it possible for me to do what I can with mine.”

Her collages highlight how the Japanese had their freedom in the United States stripped away from them abruptly during World War II. Her purpose was solely to shed light on a rarely talked about subject in American history.

Gifford said while De La Torre is gifted, she remains humble and open to criticism.

“She would take all of [her teachers] suggestions and just synthesize them in her own way and make her own decisions about what she needed to make, but very wisely,” Gifford said.

De La Torre makes sure to give thanks to the city that raised her and she is somewhat ashamed that more successful artists from Miami do not flaunt their heritage.

“We’re definitely making moves as a community,” De La Torre said. “We’re more than just deco drive and cocaine dealers, we are doing stuff out here and it’s really important.”