This past spring Carl Licence became an artist. He’s a computer programmer and information analyst who’s been taking photographs since high school, and he began studying in the Museum School’s Continuing Education program last fall. But it was a few months ago, while he was enrolled in an advanced black-and-white photography class, that “the light just went on for me,” he says. “Now there are so many techniques I want to explore and test, so many things I want to try.”

Next up: his first art show. Licence will be featured in “ceX²,” the second annual Continuing Education exhibition, which opens Thursday, June 19, in the Museum School’s Grossman Gallery. The juried show includes 65 works—drawing, metals, photography, animation, painting, and sculpture—by nearly 50 artists who were enrolled in Continuing Education studio art courses during the past academic year.

One of them is Nira Chorev (Diploma ’76, Fifth Year Certificate ’77), who for decades has gone back and forth—literally, between her native Boston and her home in Ramat-Hasharon, Israel , and figuratively, between her art and a career in graphic design. Six months ago, she took a leave of absence from her job in Israel and returned to the Museum School and to painting and drawing fulltime. “Boston is a good influence on my art,” she says. “Here I don’t sit in front of a computer all day.”

Unlike Licence, Chorev has exhibited her artwork extensively, in both Israel and the United States. In “ceX²” she will show a painting, but usually finds pastels more satisfying, “like painting and drawing together at the same time,” she says. “I like the color, the depth, working layer by layer. They are a bigger challenge because they can so easily smudge and disappear.”

What is in no danger of disappearing is Chorev’s and Licence’s drive to make art. Chorev recently completed a mixed-media intensive—class all day every day for a week—at the Museum School. “To work on art from 9 to 6 is good for me,” she says. Licence’s day job limits his photography to nights and weekends, but he doesn’t mind his dual identity. “I originally planned to go to art school, but I decided I didn’t want to be a starving artist and I got a business degree instead,” he says. Photography is now his method of “getting away from what I do all day,” he says. “It’s my outlet.”

“ceX²” was on view through July 2.