A glimpse into the vast harms of social media and tech on youth well-being, told through the voice of youth themselves.
This past year, our art campaign has served as an advocacy tool and a platform for the voice of youth everywhere. Each piece offers a window into the very real toll that social media and technology take on young people’s well-being.
Together, the works capture a generational zeitgeist created to spark reflection, open conversation, and move people to action. Our hope is that parents, educators, social workers, community leaders, lawmakers, tech executives, and activists will be moved by these powerful depictions of life in the digital age, and that the conversation won’t stop at the gallery wall.
In February, these pieces were displayed in the United States Senate. They went on to be exhibited for a month at a gallery in Tennessee. The exhibit continues to travel, bringing this conversation, and its impact, to new communities.
I have always struggled with not noticing how much time passes while I am on my phone, especially before bed. When night time hits, it seems like everything gets harder to deal with. Stress, comparison, anxiety, sadness, etc. The darkness in the painting not only shows how late I have stayed up, but also the darkness surrounding phones in general. It can pull you in and it becomes addictive, it’s a cycle that I have struggled with since my first iPod touch about 10 years ago.
This drawing shows how powerful social media and technology can be in controlling people’s lives. It features a wooden mannequin being controlled like a puppet, with strings attached to a large hand reaching out from a cracked phone screen. The cracked screen represents how social media is breaking through the barriers between the digital world and real life. The hand symbolizes how our phones and social media platforms can take control of our thoughts, emotions, and actions without us even realizing it. The mannequin represents people who have become trapped or influenced by what they see online. Its lifeless, puppet-like body suggests how individuals can lose a sense of independence or identity as they’re pulled by the invisible strings of likes, trends, and constant scrolling. The dark shading and dramatic contrast in the artwork give it a serious, almost haunting feeling, showing that this control isn’t always obvious but still has a strong grip on people’s lives. Overall, this piece sends a clear message about how social media can manipulate and influence our behavior. It encourages viewers to step back and think about who’s really in control — us, or the technology we use every day
Kid with pornhub logo in the reflection of ther eyes. Their eyes are being pried open by hands.
Boy attached by puppet strings hovering over a phone
This piece symbolizes the amount of information we consume per day through social media as well as the amount of time spent on our phones. It can almost feel like you are drowning and sinking looking for a lifeline to pull you out.
My phone addiction has been heavy on my heart! The thing it always affects the most is my time apart from the word of God! Jesus is always waiting for us to call on him and time and time again I call on my phone instead! (Ha! Phone pun!) so I really tried to just show how close the Lord is and how many times I don’t choose him!
This piece shows a young girl crying behind a text thread.
A phone gives people something to hide behind. People say things they would never say in person. I did this artwork to show the hateful things people say on the internet and the effect it has on the person reading it. This is more common than people realize.
This piece encapsulates the time lost to social media and its negative rewiring of the brain as we are conditioned to chase dopamine rush after rush. As the apps fall to the lower half of the hourglass, they turn into ash, depicting time consumed like a fire which leaves nothing reparable in its path.
This painting symbolizes the, not only mental, but physical abuse that is caused by the bullying, harassment, and comparison through online and social media. This paining also has a strong meaning of sexual abuse that can take place through the multitude of social media platforms.
Social media appears to connect every body, but in reality it is isolating ourselves from truly connecting. Negatively affecting mental health, especially among teens and young adults.
The effects of social medias negative side on a human
My art piece is supposed to represent partly of my own experience and what I’ve seen through my friends who have social Media. I grew up without social media, but I know the addiction of having a phone at all. My piece shows how while I’m on my phone I feel locked in a box of my anxiety and stress, and the chain represents the feeling of being stuck and attached.
Depicts how your phone can debilitate you.
TikTok is harmful and I hear from my friends and other youth on how they stay up till 5am scrolling and it’s becoming a daily routine.
My piece is a representation of how social media algorithms, digital marketing, and certain types of online applications are wired to suck you in, keep you invested, and turn scrolling and screen time into a real addiction that we don’t even know we’re hung up on. By using psychology and monitoring our whereabouts online, these algorithms watch our every move and feed us content that we’re more likely to interact with. It turns into a cycle, and by the time we realize we’re addicted… it feels like it’s too late. There’s an unsettling mystery of who creates these algorithms and how much they know about us… what they would do to keep making that profit resulting from our endless scrolling.
AI has infiltrated almost every part of human life. Without realizing it, we look to AI to help us with everything. It has subliminally crept in until it has us in its chokehold where we cannot escape.
This is about our over reliance on technology and looking to the giver of our problems as the answer to them.
The painting represents how people say cruel things to hurt others
This piece is about how social media isolates people, and with 5.66 billion people on earth using social media, this creates a devastating phenomenon on our planet.
This piece is made to represent phone addiction. The empty background is meant to depict the void and emptiness addiction carves into one’s life while it’s textured to look industrial to show the technological part. The main subject looks oblivious even though they’re chained down to show how most with phone addiction don’t perceive their problem as bad. The armchair is red in order to stand out because it catches attention and is often used in notifications for that purpose. This represents how people are drawn into their phone addiction by apps and their creators.
Our lives go by so quickly and I want to be doing something meaningful with that time. Scrolling through social media wastes a lot of that time, and it feels like I can’t prevent myself from doing it.
I made this piece while thinking about how far away from ourselves we’ve drifted. I deleted social media at a young age, but the feeling never really went away — because it turns out it wasn’t just about platforms. It was about something deeper that has shifted how we see, how we pay attention, and how we live inside our own bodies. The eye in this piece is also a clock. Time keeps moving, whether we’re present for it or not. My attention — our attention — is constantly being pulled outward, fragmented, stretched thin. The DNA running through the center isn’t meant to be literal, but it is intentional. It’s about how this way of living feels encoded into us now, like our patterns of focus and distraction are being rewritten at a biological level. What I keep coming back to is the periphery. The fogginess at the edges of the canvas mirrors how life starts to feel when we’re only half-here. Things blur at the margins. We exist just outside the center of our own experience, watching ourselves live rather than inhabiting it fully. There’s a constant low-grade brain fog — not dramatic, just dull and persistent. The handprints are about disembodiment. They feel like echoes — as if we’re reaching for ourselves but fading as we do. They’re not grounded or solid; they’re slipping away, disappearing into the background. To me, they represent the slow loss of our memory of our own bodies — touch, sensation, presence — as more of life gets mediated through screens. This piece isn’t anti-technology. It’s more of a mourning. A grief for sustained attention, for being fully in our bodies, for feeling time instead of just watching it pass. It’s about what it means to live at the edges of your own life — and the quiet, unsettling feeling of realizing how far from center you’ve become
This painting highlights our obsession with seeing things through a screen rather than the real thing.
This piece shows our fate when when we sacrifice our own lives wasting away in front of a screen.
This piece is about how we outsource our critical thinking to technology, rather than forming our own thoughts and opinions.
This is about getting pulled in and addicted to social media. The octopus-like arms show a deliberate force, leaving people not wanting to get off their phone or go outside.
And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul? Is anything worth more than your soul? This peice shows the disconnect we have with our heart, mind, body, and soul as we seek digital significance.
Light makes living things thrive, artificial light could never suffice.
More and more, kids are seeing, learning and engaging with the world through their screens.
This piece depicts the war-zone of the online landscape today. We all face the same fate as we fall for digital deception and the schemes that keep us too addicted to recognize we are headed towards destruction.
This piece represents the door to the outside closing in on us as we spend more and more time on our screens.
This piece represents my personal impact of the overuse and addiction of social media and the general life of scrolling 24/7. Never having the energy to stay awake and the constant need to go back to scrolling and it being the only thing you wanna do. The painting gives a visual of the impact that never ending cycle has on school life or life outside of scrolling as a whole.
This powerful piece depicts social medias deep waters that suck the life out of its user.
We're constantly being shown evertythign wrong in the world and every solution we should take to fix our lives. It's overwhelming, but it never stops. Once the worries are in our minds, it's hard to get rid of them.
This piece makes the horrifying comparison between two industries that profit off of children.
This piece is a representation of how we are consumed by the internet and technology in our lives, with the person falling into the jaws of the computer.
This piece depicts the strong grip of technology on people & its downward pull to the dark depths of depression & isolation.
I was inspired to paint this to show that social media is coming for our idenities and human beings, which is depicted by the fingerprints. It is far too easy to get sucked into trying to replicate the things we see online rather than discovering who we are and being ourselves.
This is a song addressing the phenomenon of being so priveleged in the United States, yet being deprived of connection and contentment.
This is a piece about how all humans crave purpose and connection, we are just looking for it in the wrong places.
This drawing showcases the lasting damage of cyberbullying.
Overusage of harmful technology can make you feel like you are drowding in dispair. The angle of this painting showcases someone falling farther and farther away from atonomy, freedom, connection and joy.
Inspired by the phenomenon of watching those around you transported into another universe when they open up Instagram. Gone is the sense of time, space, and reality.
We are holding tightly to the very thing that treatens our very lives.
A look into the average mind of a young person would reveal thoughts exploding with digital content. Eventually, there will be an erruption from the overdose from the online world.
This painting tells a story that speaks for itself. We all have been this woman before; overwhelmed be social media, yet returning to it, hoping it wil deliver the connection, contentment, or distraction in promises.
Looking around how everyone lives, its almost like people worship there devices, and their entire lives are submitted to its rule.
This creative piece communicates the path to flourish vs the path to destruction. This artist identifies harmful phone usage as the dictator of where you will go. You will see how on the right side, the phone is trying to "take people" from reality. The two hands show that there is not just one thing that can destroy you, but multiple. AI is depicted here as addicting others to its system, and the fire is a sign of social media's destruction. On the left, the grass depicts 'peace' and 'life'. The stick figures show a scenario where one free person helps another who is still in bondage. The path of healthy technology use is narrow, but once you get through it, it will be a straight path for you to find meaning in life. Without social media, we will have freedom, represented in the butterfly. Also note that the eyes on the top of the peice differ- one is clouded over while the other is full of light.
I chose these apps as they are the most addictive and what I spend most of my time on. This is a representation of me with tears that show pain, distraction, and wasted potential.
This person is so consumed with social media its penetrated her daily life, thoughts, and self image long after she sets the phone down.
When I made this piece I had to take in account the children of today. All they know is technology and I feel it is affecting their every day life. They don’t act or behave in ways that are deemed to be normal. They are glued to false realities and it is affecting not only today, but our future…these kids are the future. As they slip into the virtual reality their grasp on life tends to slip until it’s “Game Over.”
My artwork displays the way I have lived life with and without social media. I have experiences so much more color and energy when i LIVE NI THE MOMENT RATHER THAN through a phone screen.
This is a glimpse of someone internalizing the things they are reading on social media comment section and how it causes him to stress out and overthink.