By Chase Karacostas
Sitting at home over the summer looking for something to do, senior Lauren Dube turned to a new medium, cut paper, to create “La festival de papel.” This artwork, along with five of her peers’ works, claimed six spots at the Dallas Museum of Art’s (DMA) Young Masters Exhibit.
The Young Masters Competition gives high school students a chance to display their art at the DMA. This year, 525 works were submitted and 49 were chosen to be displayed at the exhibit. Among those were artwork by seniors Allison Sharp, Lauren Dube, Nahian Afsari, and Victoria Gonzalez and juniors Kathy Vedalez and Sofia Conde.
Allison Sharp’s piece, “Abusive Injustice,” was part of a project to create an inspiring work that represented a social inequity in the world today.
“I chose women who are abused and I decided to do a portrait of a woman in a distressed state,” Sharp said. “I have been hearing a lot about what’s going on in places like Africa and it’s just some really terrible things. Art definitely in this time is trying to make a statement about what’s going on, how people are feeling, how the artist is feeling and I just wanted to represent that in my art.”
After 2 1/2 weeks of preparation and construction, Sharp said she was ready for her work to do well, but knew that there was a chance she wouldn’t make it.
“I definitely feel like there were so many great artists who entered this competition – you never know how amazing some artists are outside of your world,” Sharp said. “I’ve never won a competition before and just winning something as amazing as that competition was just really impressive to myself.”
Anyone who is currently taking an AP art class could compete and the art submitted were allowed to be from this year or last year, giving the artists a chance to visit past works and enter them.
“I did [“The Unknown”] for Reflections a couple weeks before,” Vidales said. “The whole theme was to let your imagination take flight. So, I did an astronaut and then the ocean underneath because it’s mysterious. We don’t know many things about it and we go under there almost every day.”
Afsari, another artist, attempted to emulate a style she found on Instagram, but after several tries, she said she still wasn’t happy with how it was turning out, so she turned back to her own style of abstract with a focus on the universal theme of the environment.
“I created animals from my imagination and real life animals and put them into the work and kind of blended it within the portrait,” Afsari said. “It was a symbol of the symbiotic relationship between man and nature. If you looked at the portrait you can’t really tell where the man is and where the animals are, you have to look in really carefully and then maybe you could see the man and the animals.”
Art magnet teacher Sonia Krusleski said she had never had one of her own pieces featured in a famous museum, so she appreciates the opportunity and puts a large emphasis on her students to have unique artwork.
“I’m very rigorous about craftsmanship, technical skills and professionalism,” Krusleski said. “They don’t want to see the same thing from every kid. If you look at the work you’ll notice they’re not all the same kind of work. They want to see the diversity. In fact, they did mention that the diversity of what the students entered was really exceptional.”
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