District News

Student art wins top prizes in annual Dan Vesey exhibit

A watercolor winter landscape and a ceramic mask that blends Native American and Mayan cultures have won top honors in the 2009 Dan Vesey Art Exhibit.

More than 100 students, teachers, family members, and friends filled the Karshner Museum on March 26 for the annual Dan Vesey artist reception and awards program.

The event recognized 95 student artists in kindergarten through grade 12 whose work was selected to hang in the gallery from a pool of more than 250 entries. This year’s gallery featured student work from 10 elementary schools, three junior highs, and three high schools.

In addition to announcing the judges’ top pick in the two-dimensional and three-dimensional categories, the evening reception revealed the winners of the Superintendent’s Choice and Juror’s Choice awards, as well as 18 honorable mentions.

Top winners received cash awards between $25 and $100 from co-sponsor Valley Arts United, and each student artist received a certificate of recognition. Artwork is judged based on creativity and originality, as well as overall quality, said Walker High School teacher Lynda Belt, who helped organize the event.

The Dan Vesey Art Show and awards are presented each year in honor of the late Dan Vesey, a local artist who taught art in the district for 30 years. Belt shared about Vesey and then added that the exhibit also is in memory of Rogers High School art teacher Debbie Munson, who died in fall 2007.

Three-dimensional art

The first place winner in the three-dimensional art category is Geovanni Moreno, a senior at Rogers High School and a first-year art student in Cindy Tate’s ceramics class.

His winning ceramic mask is the result of a class assignment in which students were asked to create a ceramic mask, shoe, or hat.

Moreno researched masks both in books and on the Internet before finding an image that sparked his interest. He then altered the design to make it original. The end result is a mask that is reflective of both Native American and Mayan cultures, he said, and celebrates his family’s cultural background. “I like how it mixes the Native American influence found in Washington state with my Mexican heritage,” he said.

Two-dimensional art

Colin Gorenstein, a senior at Rogers High School, is this year’s two-dimensional art winner. His work stemmed from an assignment in Sue Cole’s Painting 1 class to produce a landscape.

“I found the inspiration for my piece by looking at photography pieces online and thought this was appropriate considering the assignment was given during the winter,” Gorenstein said. He altered the scene to make it his own creation, picking up his paintbrush without even a sketch in hand. “I just started painting, and it came to me as I went,” he said.

Gorenstein used a starter set of watercolors to paint all but the speckled snow and applied heavy pigment to make the colors denser than found in traditional watercolor paintings.

Superintendent’s Choice

Joey Householder, a senior at Rogers High School, is the winner of this year’s Superintendent’s Choice award.

This is the second top honor this year for Householder, whose kinetic metal sculpture has also been selected as one of two student art pieces to be displayed in the Arts Downtown outdoor art exhibit.

His sculpture of a dog sniffing a daffodil is made from old car engine parts, including valve springs, valve lifters, rocker arms, timing gears, spark plugs, and engine chain. The tail moves, and the dog itself rotates on a swivel base.

The art was scheduled to be installed last month just outside of the downtown school district administrative offices and will remain there through early next April. More information about Householder and his winning project, including photos, will be in the June issue of Connections.

Juror’s Choice
For the first time this year, Rogers High School ceramics students entered a collection of mugs made as part of the state’s new Classroom-Based Performance Assessment for the arts.

The assessment, much like the Washington Assessment of Student Learning, measures a student’s understanding of a subject.

This year’s assignment was to create a ceramic mug in the shape of a zoo animal that is both functional and decorative. The mug handle needed to be inclusive of the animal’s overall shape, and the finished product needed to include sculptural relief and two or more decorative textures.

More than one dozen colorful mugs of zebras, monkeys, bears, and elephants filled a glass display case at the entrance to this year’s Dan Vesey show. Two in particular won judges’ hearts in the Juror’s Choice category.

Rogers High School students Chelsie Custard and Kelsi Blalock, both students in Cindy Tate’s ceramics class, received the special award.

Custard won for her pink and white striped flamingo mug, in which the animal’s head wound around the handle. Blalock received commendation for her mug of a giraffe with a long neck that circled around the brown and white spotted mug and extended down the handle.

See the complete list of winners and honorable mentions (pdf, 8kb).