This year’s Teen Museum Studies team chose St. Louis-based multimedia artist Yowshien Kuo from twenty-one competitive exhibition proposals. Kuo was selected for his skillfully rendered paintings that reveal additional meanings the longer one looks. Kuo uses art to explore identity and culture against expectations of what it means to be American. Kuo’s mission is to empower marginalized communities and highlight the troubles they face in their day-to-day lives through the visual language of Americana and the use of allegory. Kuo’s main protagonist, a cowboy persona, is a symbolic representation the artist created to embody his struggle to fit within American culture.