2015 Scholastic Art Awards Exhibit

It’s barely been two years since my senior year of high school, yet it feels like so much longer. Oh high school…the years of awkwardness, bagged lunches, and those dreaded SAT’s. Nonetheless, these are the years that I made the art classroom my second home and decided that I wanted to pursue art in college. These flashbacks started coming back to me after looking at the 2015 Scholastic Art Awards exhibit in the Mahady Gallery. The gallery was filled with pieces of amazing work done by junior high and high school students in the NEPA area.

The Scholastic exhibit is especially fun to look at because each piece has a fresh, youthful perspective behind it done in a sophisticated way. Many students brought contemporary high school issues into their work, such as bullying and stereotyping. But most of all, the artwork blew me away. You could tell each student put a lot of time into their work and deserved the recognition they were given.

There were a few artists whose work really appealed to me (although it was all excellent). I loved Alexa Meyer’s ceramic pieces, especially the animal ones. Alexa attends Honesdale High School. Her sculpture of her teacher was adorable and well crafted. I loved the curly silver hair!

The design work done by Alissa Outwater (Delaware Valley High School) caught my eye because it was so well composed. She has a strong sense of typography and composition that most high school designers don’t develop until the college level.

Lastly, I loved Westen Johnson’s drawings. Westen attends Western Wayne High School. The amount of detail is incredible and pleasing to the eye. The contrast and use of light/dark was spot on and they blew me away!

The 2015 Scholastic Art Awards Exhibit will be up until March 1st in the Mahady Gallery located in the Shields Center for Visual Arts at Marywood University. Excellent job to all of the student artists!