Wrapping around the walls of the Dartmouth Cultural Center, 11 AP art students spent the morning of Wednesday, March 12 carefully arranging their artwork in preparation for the center’s annual Dartmouth High School AP Student Exhibition.

For many of the students, including junior Rowan Desautels, this exhibition will be the first time the young artists display their artwork in public.

“I’m really excited about it,” Desautels said. “I’m also really nervous — I’m fairly new to the whole art process.”

Desautels said that while she’s “typically a pencil artist” who uses charcoal, she chose to experiment with different mediums, predominantly using watercolors, acrylics and textured materials to create the artwork she put on display.

Senior Michael Burke, a digital artist who took part in the center’s student exhibition last year and has had his artwork showcased in Gallery X, said the opportunity to show his work in the Cultural Center is “really cool,” adding he likes that he gets to share his art with his family and the people he cares about.

Catherine McFee, who teaches the AP art class, said having the students show their art to the public is “great for their self-esteem, even though some of them get shy and embarrassed.”

She added that it’s important for her students to show their work when they’re “young, aspiring artists.”

The art exhibit is not just an opportunity for students to display their art, but it is also an avenue for them to share a message.

The pencil drawings, paintings, jewelry, digital art and photographs featured in the student exhibit were inspired by subjects such as phobias, feelings of alienation, identity, legacy and death.

Desautels said her presentation focuses on how beauty standards and censorship have been used as a method to control women throughout history, including one piece that’s centered around the witch trials in Europe.

She explained she often uses imagery in her work, such as hidden symbols of the goddess Aphrodite to convey her message.

“You want people to look at your pieces and think about [it] and have questions and then try to come up with their interpretations of those,” Desautels said.

Burke said he focused his project on “breaking down myself.”

“I want to look into feelings, like shame and desire, and I’m expressing how I feel living in a patriarchal society and how my experience growing up has changed my gender expression and how I experience sexuality,” he said.

Burke added that he looks for ways to portray the themes in his artwork symbolically, drawing on research into history or incorporating something a viewer could recognize or understand to “evoke understanding of what you’re trying to convey.”

“Everything means something,” he said.

Jill Law, the center’s gallery director, said she thinks it’s important the students have an opportunity to “expose their work,” adding that it gives them an opportunity to see what it’s like to be in an art gallery and provides a “sense of empowerment.”

“You can see that they’re totally into it,” she said. “They handle their work [and] they’re really proud.”

All of the students’ artwork goes on sale, and while most of the pieces are often bought by family members. Law said there’s “maybe one or two pieces each year that are sold to somebody who comes along.”

The open reception will be held on Saturday, March 15 from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m., with the students’ artwork on display from March 15 through March 29. The gallery is open Thursday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.