Best Of Tucson®

Best Yearbook Portraits

Tucson High Magnet School South Wall

For the last few years, Tucson High art students have been making ceramic self-portraits. There is a gallery of them installed—in handmade ceramic frames—on the south wall of the campus. It's a roll call of all the high school archetypes: The jocks are here, as is Miss Perfect; so are the heavy-metal boys and the brooding art girls. But these works of art are better and deeper than that; they're carefully observed, complex self-portraits, each as individual in style as the people they portray. Taken in sum, they're an affecting portrait of adolescence: beautiful, weird, sweet, funny and sad, and they fill us with hope for each of the kids. Great art, if you ask us.